|
What DevOps disaster recovery tools have saved you during outages?
|
We recently had a major outage that exposed weaknesses in our disaster recovery plan. Looking to learn from others' experiences with DevOps disaster recovery tools.
What tools or services have actually proven their worth during real incidents? I'm particularly interested in automated failover solutions, backup restoration tools, and incident management platforms.
How do you balance the cost of these tools against the risk of downtime? And what's your process for regularly testing your disaster recovery capabilities?
During our last major outage, two DevOps disaster recovery tools proved invaluable: AWS Route 53 for DNS failover and Terraform for infrastructure recreation.
When a whole availability zone went down, Route 53 automatically redirected traffic to healthy zones. Meanwhile, we used Terraform to rebuild affected resources in another zone.
We also use Velero for Kubernetes disaster recovery. We take regular snapshots of entire namespaces and can restore them to a new cluster if needed. Tested this quarterly and it works surprisingly well.
The key is having runbooks that everyone knows how to follow. During an outage is not the time to figure out your recovery process.
We've invested in several DevOps disaster recovery tools over the years. The most valuable has been Datto for physical server backups with instant virtualization. If a server dies, we can boot the backup as a VM in minutes while waiting for hardware replacement.
For cloud, we use AWS Disaster Recovery service which continuously replicates EC2 instances to another region. Expensive, but for our critical systems, it's worth it.
We test our disaster recovery plan twice a year with actual failover exercises. The first time we did it, we discovered so many gaps in our process. Now it's smooth and we have confidence we can handle real disasters.
Our approach to DevOps disaster recovery tools is layered. We have backups (last resort), replication (faster recovery), and high availability (prevents outages).
For backups, we use Veeam. For replication, we use AWS Cross-Region Replication for S3 and RDS read replicas in another region. For high availability, we use multi-AZ deployments.
The cost balance is tricky. We categorize systems as critical, important, and standard. Critical systems get full disaster recovery coverage. Important systems get backups and manual recovery procedures. Standard systems just get backups.
We test backups monthly and full disaster recovery quarterly. The tests are scheduled like real incidents with on-call engineers responding.
|
