AWS disaster recovery and backups someone has actually tested.
Deploys that roll back on their own, backups someone has actually restored from, and alarms that fire before a customer writes in. Most outages we have seen were not exotic. They were a missing guardrail nobody had got round to.
A backup nobody has restored from is a hope, not a plan. Reliability work ends with a restore and a rollback done on purpose and timed, so the first time is never during an incident.
Why a backup is not a recovery plan
Most teams have backups. Fewer have restored from one, and fewer still know how long a restore takes or how much data they would lose. That gap stays invisible until the day it matters, which is the worst day to find out.
High availability has the same trap. A Multi-AZ database protects you from one kind of failure. It does nothing for a bad deploy, a deleted table or a leaked credential. A recovery plan starts by naming the failures you care about, then checking one by one that you would survive them, and how quickly. That is most of what reliability engineering on AWS comes down to.
What reliability work covers
The guardrails that turn out to be missing on the day something goes wrong.
Deploys that roll back
The ECS deployment circuit breaker with automatic rollback, health checks that test something real, and a pipeline that stops a bad release before every customer gets it.
Backups by policy
AWS Backup plans covering every database, volume and bucket that matters, with retention chosen on purpose and copies kept in a second region or account.
Restores that have been tested
A documented restore, run for real, with the time it took written down. AWS Backup can run restore tests on a schedule, so the answer stays current.
Recovery targets
A recovery time objective and a recovery point objective agreed with the business, and a design that meets them, from backup and restore up to a warm standby.
High availability
RDS Multi-AZ, services spread across availability zones, and load balancer health checks, so one zone having a bad day is a non-event.
Alarms and incident review
CloudWatch alarms on the signals customers feel, sent somewhere a person will see them, and a short review when something does go wrong.
How a reliability engagement runs
- Scoping call and proposal. We agree what is in scope, then send a written proposal with the deliverables, a fixed price and a delivery date.
- Failure review. We go through the system asking what happens when each part fails, and rate each answer by how likely it is and how much it would hurt.
- Targets. We agree recovery targets with you in hours of downtime and minutes of lost data, not adjectives.
- Build. Guardrails, backup plans and alarms, defined in Terraform so they cannot quietly drift.
- Test. We restore from backup and roll back a deploy on purpose, so the first time is not during an incident.
- Handover. Runbooks, so recovery does not depend on anyone's memory.
What you get
- Failure scenarios ranked by likelihood and damage, each with a risk rating and a fix
- Recovery time and recovery point targets, written down and agreed
- Backups covered by policy, with restores tested and timed
- Deploys that roll back on their own when health checks fail
- Alarms routed to people and tuned so they are not ignored
- Runbooks, so recovery does not rest on one person
Reliable does not have to mean expensive
The expensive way to be reliable is to run two of everything. It is rarely the right place to start. Most systems need a tested backup and a fast, repeatable rebuild far more than they need a second live region. With the environment defined in Terraform, a rebuild is a known procedure rather than a week of guesswork, and that changes what a sensible recovery plan costs.
Backups are also where a cost audit often finds money: third-party products doing what AWS Backup does natively, and years of snapshots nobody has deleted. For data that has to stay in Canada, the second copy can live in the other Canadian region; see AWS security and Canadian data residency.
Who this is for
Teams where deploys are held breath, the restore has never been tested, and one person is the single point of failure. Also teams that have been asked by a customer for their recovery targets and do not have an honest answer yet. B2B SaaS is our home ground. We work with teams in Canada, the United States and Europe, remotely.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a backup strategy and disaster recovery?
A backup strategy decides what is copied, how often and for how long. Disaster recovery decides how you get running again, how long that takes and how much data you can afford to lose. You need both, and the second is the one most often missing.
Do we need a second AWS region for disaster recovery?
Not always. Many systems are well served by backups copied to another region and an environment that can be rebuilt from Terraform. A warm standby in a second region costs more, and makes sense when your recovery targets demand it. We size the plan to the targets, not the other way round.
Is RDS Multi-AZ enough on its own?
It protects against losing an instance or an availability zone, and it fails over automatically. It does not protect against a bad schema change, a deleted table or corrupted data, because those reach the standby too. For those you need backups and point-in-time recovery, tested.
Can our disaster recovery copy stay in Canada?
Yes. AWS has two Canadian regions, Canada (Central) in Montreal and Canada West (Calgary), so the second copy can sit in the other one. More under AWS security and Canadian data residency.
How often should we test restores?
Often enough that the answer is still true. AWS Backup can run restore tests on a schedule, so a restore that stops working shows up as a failed test rather than during an incident. We can set that up for the data that matters most.
How is reliability work priced?
As a fixed-price project, agreed after a scoping call and set out in a written proposal with the deliverables and a delivery date. It can also be part of a fractional AWS engineering retainer.
Related services
Find out before an outage does
Fifteen minutes on a call is enough to tell where your biggest reliability gap is, and whether it needs outside help. If it does not, we will say so.