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In this article, we covered the basics of disaster recovery (DR) and pilot flame architecture using the (AWS) cloud. This post describes the first step towards fault-tolerant architectures as we will explain now.

Functional Architecture of Low Capacity in Standby

A latent functional architecture, while being low capacity, represents a good start in the pursuit of high availability (HA), as it can replace the production infrastructure. Even with the limits resulting from low capacity, functional architecture can support production traffic and provide aid to scaling. You should change the structure of low capacity scaling in order to handle production load.

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“Everything fails, all the time” Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon.

The Cloud Will Fail

Hurricanes, BIOS updates, earthquakes, DNS failures, SSL certificates, storms … these were responsible for the last years cloud outage in cloud services and traditional data center infrastructure. What do they have in common?

Bad luck? Bad practice? Consequences? Maybe, what they teach us is that we need a “Plan B”.  If the core of our business is on the Internet, we need a disaster-proof infrastructure that enables us to stay on track (or recover) within a feasible time defined in our Business Continuity Plan. In this post I will focus on disaster recovery and its various facets. Before getting into the technical side, let me review some basics.

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The cloud enables great agility and can reduce costs if used right. But does it also manage risk? In fact, the cloud contains the same traditional hosting risks as well as specific related risks to your production environment running on the cloud. With IaaS dynamic environment you pay only for what you use enabling alignment with actual real-time demand. The cloud instance is a temporary resource that is created from a gold master image automatically and on demand. This basic cloud automation capability makes traditional patching redundant and fast provisioning extremely easy. It is an important consideration that changes some basic security deployment perceptions when moving from traditional infrastructure to the cloud.

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Understanding the ‘shared responsibility model’ is one of the most important keys for getting to the cloud and staying there.  Successful ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS) cloud adoption cases can be likened to a stool with three legs -

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Amazon’s AWS  VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) is like a canvas. It lets you define private networks, the way they interact with each other, routing, and security. Now, it even lets you terminate VPN connections from your main corporate network out-of-the-box and, best of all, it doesn’t cost you anything to use it.

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The greatest incentive to move to the cloud is to reduce cost. Organizations invest a lot to that end, but that investment is for not if your cloud isn’t protected. Most often, these mistakes are attributable to either a misinterpreted security policy or cluttered, nearly illegible security rules.

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Time To Know provides a breakthrough solution for today’s one-to-one computing classrooms.

The company utilizes a hybrid cloud infrastructure that combines AWS with a ‘co-location’ data center near its corporate offices. Time To Know initially adopted AWS with the aim of cutting costs. Having adopted the cloud after its processes were already in place, however, has left much room for improvement.

The ease of acquiring AWS instances sprawled the company’s footprint by 40%. It was clear they were spending too much money but not how that could be remedied.

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The cloud definitely marks a new era. Not only can we manage our resources in a flexible way and with no capital investment, but we can also enjoy the state-of-the-art infrastructure of large cloud providers, like AWS cloud. Specifically, when we use EC2 to compute endless resources, we know that in terms of the durability of our virtual servers, power supply, and storage, we can trust AWS to have the best of the best.

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In case of a disaster we would like to make sure that our applications are still up and running, while taking advantage of our failover hosting/cloud provider. The Disaster Recovery (DR) architecture is driven by the criticality of applications and data. The decision regarding what to back up and deploy eventually translates into ongoing costs that can be extremely significant. Every IT organization has its own high level policy guidelines. These policies are eventually translated into the policy deployed for each of the different applications the enterprise runs. The CIO and its team need to make sure they define both the high level policies and the actual budget that can be spent for DR matters.

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The policies for Disaster Recovery (DR) in an enterprise are driven by the criticality of applications and data. As the public cloud has gained in credibility, more and more IT teams are taking advantage of the failover public cloud provider as a way of addressing DR and ensuring business continuity.

On the following presentation Lahav Savir, architect and CEO of Emind Systems, gives an introduction to Disaster Recovery and presents his insights based on Emind’s best practices.

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