Using Elastic Disaster Recovery for recovery and failback

In the event of a disaster, AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery facilitates the recovery of your workloads by launching recovery instances in AWS. Once the disaster has been mitigated, you can also use AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery to perform failback to the original source infrastructure.

Key terminology

The following terms are used throughout the AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery documentation. Understanding the distinction between these terms is important for using the service effectively.

Recovery

The process of launching recovery instances on AWS using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery. This is the action you perform within the Elastic Disaster Recovery Console or API (using start-recovery or Initiate recovery job in the Console). Recovery creates new Amazon EC2 instances from your replicated data.

Recovery drill

A non-disruptive test that launches drill instances to validate your disaster recovery readiness. Drills use the same process as recovery but do not affect your source servers or ongoing replication.

Failover

The act of redirecting production traffic from your primary (source) environment to your recovery instances on AWS. Failover is performed outside of AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, typically using a DNS routing service such as Amazon Route 53 or your organization's traffic management solution.

Failback

The process of returning your workloads from the recovery environment on AWS back to your original source infrastructure after the disaster has been resolved. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery assists with failback by replicating data from recovery instances back to your source servers.

In summary: AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery handles recovery (launching instances) and failback (returning to source). The failover step (redirecting traffic) is performed by you, outside of AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery.

Recovery and Failback overview

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery provides scalable resilience to your existing infrastructure, coupled with low Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). Learn more about how AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS) can meet your team's RPO and RTO.

Understanding recovery

Recovery allows you to orchestrate launch of your workload within AWS EC2 Instances. After initial sync is completed, you are able to customize the configuration of recovery environment in preparation of a business continuity event.

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery allows you to launch Drill and Recovery instances for your source servers in AWS once they are in Continuous Data Protection. While Drill Instances and Recovery Instances are launched similarly, they serve different purposes. During normal operations, we recommend periodically testing your ability to recover using DRS by using Drill Instances.

Understanding failback

Failback allows you to restore your Recovery Instances back to your source infrastructure. Depending on the source infrasture, performing a failback uses differing mechanisms

Source Infrastructure	Failback Mechanism	More Information
On-Premise	Use the Failback Client ISO or the DRS Failback Automation.	On-Premise Failback
AWS - Same Account	Start Reverse Replication on the Protected Recovery Instance.	Same Account Failback
AWS - Cross Account	Start Reverse Replication on the Protected Recovery Instance in Failover Account.	Cross Account Failback
Other Cloud	Configuration varies per provider.	Other Cloud Failback