AWS Disaster Recovery

October 11, 2018

Corey Quinn, writing on Last Week in AWS:

if us-west-2 has an issue, and your plan is to fail over to us-east-1, you should probably be aware that more or less everyone has similar plans. You’ll be in very good, very plentiful company

expect provisioning times to be delayed significantly

Good point from Corey on this aspect of AWS disaster recovery planning. Of course you aren’t the only one with the same problem at the same time. If us-east-1 goes down, you are one of many many trying to failover and spin up new resources in us-west-2.

Basically a Thundering Herd style problem. So I guess the solution is

  • Know you are part of a herd
  • Beat the herd (idle, warm resources)
  • Don’t follow the herd (less popular region)