1. Terraform – Infrastructure Recovery
Maintain all AWS infrastructure as reusable Terraform modules, including VPC, subnets, route tables, NAT Gateway, security groups, IAM roles, EKS, and Load Balancers, so the complete infrastructure can be provisioned consistently in the secondary DR Region when required.
2. Multi-Region AWS Architecture
Maintain a secondary AWS Region for disaster recovery, separate from the primary production Region, to protect the application from a complete AWS Regional failure.
3. EKS Disaster Recovery
Maintain a secondary Amazon EKS cluster in the DR Region with minimal or reduced worker node capacity, and scale the node groups and workloads when a disaster is declared.
4. Kubernetes Application Configuration
Store all Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts, and application deployment configurations in Git so the complete application environment can be recreated consistently in the DR EKS cluster.
5. Argo CD / GitOps Recovery
Keep Argo CD configured and ready in the DR environment so it can synchronize the application configuration from the Git repository and automatically deploy the required microservices to the DR EKS cluster.
6. Amazon ECR Cross-Region Replication
Configure Amazon ECR cross-Region replication so container images pushed to the primary Region are automatically replicated to the DR Region and remain available even if the primary Region becomes unavailable.
7. Database Disaster Recovery
Maintain the primary database in the production Region and a secondary database cluster or replica in the DR Region using an active-passive architecture, where the secondary database remains on standby and can be promoted when the primary Region fails.
8. Database Backup and Recovery
Maintain regular database backups and snapshots and ensure recovery procedures are tested so data can be restored if replication or the primary database environment is unavailable.
9. Application Secrets
Store sensitive information such as database passwords, API keys, and application secrets in AWS Secrets Manager and ensure the required secrets are available and recoverable in the DR Region.
10. IAM and Access Management
Replicate or recreate the required IAM roles, policies, and permissions through Terraform so the applications, CI/CD pipelines, and Kubernetes workloads have the required access after failover.
11. Load Balancer and Application Entry Point
Provision the required Load Balancer, Ingress configuration, security groups, and AWS WAF in the DR Region so the application can securely receive traffic after failover.
12. DNS / Traffic Failover
Configure a DNS or global traffic management strategy so production traffic can be redirected from the primary Region to the DR Region when the primary environment becomes unavailable.
13. Monitoring and Alerting
Configure Datadog or Prometheus/Grafana monitoring for both the primary and DR environments to detect failures and monitor infrastructure health, application performance, API errors, latency, pod health, and database connectivity.
14. Disaster Detection
Use monitoring alerts and health checks to determine whether the issue is an application-level failure, infrastructure failure, Availability Zone failure, or complete AWS Regional failure before initiating DR failover.
15. DR Activation
When a Regional-level disaster is confirmed, activate the DR process by scaling or activating the secondary EKS environment and ensuring all required infrastructure components are operational.
16. Database Failover
Promote or activate the secondary database in the DR Region and validate database availability and application connectivity before starting or redirecting production workloads.
17. Application Deployment
Use Argo CD to synchronize the GitOps repository and deploy the required version of all microservices to the EKS cluster in the DR Region.
18. Application Validation
Validate the recovered environment by checking Kubernetes pod health, readiness status, API health checks, application logs, database connectivity, error rates, and latency.
19. Traffic Failover
After the DR application environment is validated, redirect production traffic to the DR Region and continuously monitor the application for stability.
20. Recovery Confirmation
Confirm that all critical services are running correctly and that the recovered environment meets the defined RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) requirements.
21. Root Cause Analysis
After service recovery, perform a Root Cause Analysis to identify the cause of the disaster, document the incident timeline, identify gaps in the DR process, and implement improvements.
22. Failback
After the primary Region is restored and validated, plan and execute a controlled failback process to synchronize data and applications before moving production traffic back to the primary Region.
Simple DR Flow
Primary Region Failure
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Monitoring Detects Issue
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Confirm Regional Disaster
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Activate / Scale DR EKS
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Database Failover
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Verify ECR Images
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Argo CD Deploys Applications
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Validate Pods and APIs
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Redirect DNS Traffic
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Monitor DR Environment
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Service Restored
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