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Disaster recovery

Disaster recovery is a critical component of your organization's overall business continuity planning. Effective disaster recovery strategies help you maintain operations during catastrophic failures, protect against data loss, and ensure rapid recovery when incidents occur.

Your disaster recovery plan should address both Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). RPO defines how much data loss is acceptable, while RTO defines how quickly you need to restore service. These objectives should align with your business requirements and regulatory compliance needs.

Implementing robust disaster recovery requires understanding state management, implementing immutable infrastructure, and establishing automated backup procedures that ensure data protection and rapid recovery capabilities.

Implement state and change management

Effective disaster recovery starts with proper state and change management that ensures your infrastructure and application state can be accurately restored after a disaster. This includes tracking configuration changes, application state, and data consistency across your distributed systems.

Use infrastructure as code tools like Terraform to manage your infrastructure state declaratively. This approach ensures that your infrastructure can be recreated consistently across different environments and provides version control for configuration changes.

Implement state replication and synchronization across multiple data centers to ensure that critical state information is available even if one location becomes unavailable. This redundancy helps you maintain data consistency and reduces the risk of data loss during disasters.

Configure your HashiCorp tools to maintain state across distributed deployments. Consul provides service discovery and configuration management, while Vault ensures secrets and sensitive data are replicated across clusters for disaster recovery.

Deploy immutable infrastructure

Implement immutable infrastructure patterns that enable quick and replicable deployment during disaster recovery scenarios. Immutable infrastructure treats servers and containers as disposable resources that can be quickly replaced rather than modified in place.

Use container orchestration platforms like Nomad to manage immutable deployments across multiple data centers. This approach ensures that your applications can be quickly redeployed to healthy infrastructure when disasters occur.

Implement automated deployment pipelines that can recreate your entire infrastructure stack from code and configuration. These pipelines should be tested regularly to ensure they can execute disaster recovery procedures quickly and reliably.

Configure your infrastructure to use standardized images and configurations that can be deployed consistently across different environments. This standardization reduces deployment time and ensures that recovered systems behave identically to the original infrastructure.

Establish automated backup procedures

Implement automated backup procedures that store critical data on mounted or external storage rather than local or ephemeral storage. These backups should be encrypted, regularly tested, and stored in geographically distributed locations.

Configure automated backups for all critical data, including application databases, configuration files, and infrastructure state. These backups should be performed frequently enough to meet your RPO requirements and stored in locations that are protected from the same disasters that could affect your primary systems.

Test your backup and restore procedures regularly to ensure they work correctly and can meet your RTO requirements. These tests should include full system recovery scenarios and validate that recovered systems function correctly.

Use HashiCorp tools to automate backup procedures for your infrastructure components. Terraform can automate infrastructure backups, while Vault provides automated backup capabilities for secrets and sensitive data.

Next steps

In this section of Design resilient systems, you learned about implementing disaster recovery strategies, including state and change management, immutable infrastructure deployment, and automated backup procedures. Disaster recovery is part of the Design resilient systems pillar.

Refer to the following documents to learn more about disaster recovery and resilient systems:

If you are interested in learning more about disaster recovery and state management, you can check out the following resources:

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