Expert
The disaster recovery drill
An online pharmacy runs in Montréal, with a standby region in Virginia and DNS failover. The regulator wants proof that it works: at 15:00 the drill switches Montréal off for three hours. Prescriptions keep coming in, and not a single one may be lost.
Targets: a recovery time of a few minutes and a recovery point of zero. The database is backed up every five minutes. The Virginia fleet scales out on its own, but each new server needs five minutes to warm up.
What your design must achieve
- Availability ≥ 99.6 %
- Lost writes = 0
- Latency p99 < 300 ms
- Monthly bill < 8,000 $ bonus