RPO and RTO

The Recovery Point Objective is how much data you can afford to lose, the Recovery Time Objective how long you can be down. A five-minute RPO rules out daily backups as the only protection.

Where it shows up in real systems

  • Inter-region link

    Carries replication and service traffic between regions. Synchronous replication over it adds the full round-trip time to every write; asynchronous replication risks losing the last seconds on failover.

    In production: AWS Transit Gateway, VPC peering, Azure Global VNet Peering

  • Backups and snapshots

    Replication protects against hardware failure, not against a bad deploy that deletes data: the deletion is replicated too. Only backups bring yesterday back, and a backup you never restored is a hope, not a plan.

    In production: AWS Backup, RDS automated backups, Velero, pgBackRest, Azure Backup

See it break, then fix it

Build an architecture, send it a day of traffic and outages, and learn why it holds or fails. Free to start.

Open the learning path Open the sandbox