Build in resilience
Multi-AZ, backups, restore testing and read replicas, to survive the bad day.
Lessons in this path
- 1 Site Reliability AWS
Add RDS read replicas for read scaling and DR
Read replicas absorb read load and give you a promotion-ready DR target — for read-heavy workloads they pay for themselves in primary-instance right-sizing.
14 min - 2 Site Reliability AWS
Configure cross-region backup copy
Backups in the same region as the workload won't help when the region goes down. Add a cross-region copy rule before disaster forces the conversation.
15 min - 3 Site Reliability AWS
Configure AWS Backup restore testing
An untested backup is a hope. Automate scheduled restores so you find out before the incident whether your backups actually work.
14 min - 4 Site Reliability AWS
Establish AWS Backup Plans
Without a Backup Plan there is no policy — recovery becomes whatever someone hopes is there. Wire up a plan that covers resources by tag.
16 min - 5 Site Reliability AWS
Enable S3 versioning on critical buckets
Without versioning, an overwrite or delete is permanent. Turn it on and pair with a noncurrent-version lifecycle so you don't pay forever.
12 min - 6 Site Reliability AWS
Protect EBS volumes with AWS Backup
EBS volumes not covered by any backup plan or DLM policy have no recovery path. Wire up coverage by tag and verify.
13 min - 7 Site Reliability AWS
Protect EC2 instances with AWS Backup
EC2 instance backups capture the full machine state — find instances with no protection and bring them under a backup plan.
13 min - 8 Site Reliability AWS
Protect S3 buckets with AWS Backup
Versioning alone won't save you from ransomware that deletes versions. Layer AWS Backup or replication on top — and verify recovery.
14 min - 9 Site Reliability AWS
Enable automated backups on RDS
A retention period of 0 disables automated backups entirely — and with them point-in-time recovery, leaving the database one bad query or deploy away from unrecoverable data loss.
12 min - 10 Site Reliability AWS
Extend RDS backup retention
Automated backups are on, but the retention window is too short — corruption or a bad change discovered after the window rolls off is unrecoverable.
11 min - 11 Site Reliability AWS
Enable DynamoDB point-in-time recovery
A bad deploy or a fat-fingered delete can corrupt a DynamoDB table in seconds. PITR lets you rewind to any second in the last 35 days — but it's off by default on every table.
12 min - 12 Site Reliability AWS
Protect DynamoDB tables with AWS Backup
Point-in-time recovery lives with the table and dies with it. Layer AWS Backup on top for isolated, long-term, cross-Region copies — and verify the restore.
12 min - 13 Site Reliability AWS
Protect RDS instances with AWS Backup
Native RDS backups die with the database — bring your RDS instances and Aurora clusters under a centralized AWS Backup plan so they're protected by policy, not per-DB settings.
13 min - 14 Site Reliability AWS
Configure S3 Cross-Region Replication
A single bucket in a single Region is a single point of failure. Replicate critical data to a second Region — and understand the cost before you do.
13 min - 15 Site Reliability AWS
Enable DynamoDB Global Tables
Global Tables give you active-active, multi-Region DynamoDB with seconds-RTO failover and local-latency reads — but you pay for every replicated write and a full copy of the data in every Region, so it's a deliberate choice, not a default.
13 min - 16 Site Reliability AWS
Address stale backup recovery points
A backup plan that runs daily but whose newest recovery point is nine days old isn't protecting you — it's failing quietly. The age of your latest restore point is your real-world RPO.
12 min - 17 Site Reliability AWS
Fix AWS Backup job failures
A backup plan can look configured on paper while its jobs quietly fail every night — leaving a growing recovery gap nobody notices until a restore is needed.
13 min - 18 Site Reliability AWS
Fix cross-region backup copy failures
The local backup succeeded, so the dashboard looks green — but the cross-region copy silently failed, and the off-region DR copy you think you have doesn't exist.
12 min - 19 Site Reliability AWS
Fix restore test failures
A backup job that says "succeeded" only proves bytes were written. A failed restore test is your warning — issued on a Tuesday, not during the disaster — that those bytes may not come back as a running resource.
12 min - 20 Compliance AWS
Deploy across multiple Availability Zones
One capability across databases, caches, load balancers, file systems, search domains and serverless: make sure no single Availability Zone outage can take a production workload down.
14 min - 21 Compliance AWS
Keep software and engines patched
One capability across databases, runtimes, clusters and instances: make sure no workload runs on an unsupported or unpatched version that has stopped receiving security fixes.
14 min - 22 Compliance AWS
Harden load balancers (ALB/NLB/CLB)
One capability across Application and Classic Load Balancers and the Auto Scaling groups behind them: reject malformed HTTP, drain connections cleanly, balance traffic evenly and replace genuinely-broken instances, mostly through single attribute flips.
13 min