Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller use cases - Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller

Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller use cases

During a failure, you can use routing control and zonal shift to quickly move ensure traffic to restore availability for your application.

The routing control feature in Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller is designed for enterprises that have applications with extremely high availability requirements, such as a less than five minute recovery time objective (RTO) or a greater than 99.99% availability requirement. Typical applications include national payment authentication systems, real-time payment processing, or stock trading workloads that can have a broad financial impact if they go down. These applications might be required to protect against even partial failures, such as a millisecond increase in latency or a 5% error rate.

An enterprise use case for Route 53 ARC zonal shift is to manage multi-Availability Zone recovery, to protect against common application failures, such as a bad deployment in a single Availability Zone. With zonal autoshift, AWS moves traffic away from an AZ for a resource when AWS determines that there is a potential issue in the AZ that could adversely affect customer applications. Another enterprise use case, for routing control, is cross-Region recovery, where an organization wants to be able to recover from a large-scale event, such as a natural disaster, and oversee the recovery centrally.

To summarize, Route 53 ARC provides the following benefits:

  • With no initial setup, you can use zonal shifts to mitigate partial application failures by quickly move a load balancer's traffic away from an Availability Zone, to reliably recover from an issue, temporarily. This gives you time to investigate, while your application continues to run in the other Availability Zones.

  • After you configure a practice run and enable zonal autoshift, to have AWS shift traffic away traffic, on your behalf. AWS starts an autoshift when internal telemetry indicates that there is an Availability Zone impairment that could potentially impact customers. AWS stops shifting traffic when an AZ has recovered. You don't need to decide when to shift traffic out of an AZ; AWS uses its internal signals to decide when to take mitigation action. While AWS is investigating and resolving the AZ impairment, your application continues to run in the other Availability Zones in the Region.

  • If you've set up routing control, you can respond to partial failure states by using Route 53 ARC in ways that your automated recovery systems might not be able to. For example, after you've set up routing control in Route 53 ARC, you can then configure an Amazon CloudWatch alarm or Amazon Route 53 health check to respond to a millisecond increase in latency or a 5% increase in error rates by rerouting traffic using Route 53 ARC routing controls.

  • You can use readiness checks to track, on an ongoing basis, changes to capacity and configuration across replicas to help make sure that you're prepared and scaled to handle failovers.

  • You can receive recommendations for how to improve your existing architecture's recoverability, to create a more reliable application design.