Achieving data consistency with AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery
By HSI | April 6, 2023
Data consistency is a key element to consider while creating a disaster recovery (DR) plan. This is crucial when defending database programs like Microsoft SQL, Oracle. To prevent database corruption, these database workloads must be returned to a consistent state. Data loss and longer recovery times could occur if this is not done.
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS) is the recommended service for disaster recovery to AWS. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery works from the AWS Management Console and helps recover all applications and databases running on supported Windows and Linux operating system versions. It then runs natively on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) during a DR event or exercise.
How does it work
With minimal downtime, compute resources, and affordable storage costs, AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery service provides power to recover your Linux or Windows servers, either on-premises or AWS itself.
For cloud disaster recovery, a replication agent is installed on the server to be backed up. All the volumes will be backup up as a point in time snapshot volumes in the region you configured for disaster recovery. A lightweight EC2 instance will be in always running state in AWS VPC, coordinating with the system volumes, and replicating the data. Point in time snapshot volumes will be available based on the settings configured according to the mentioned retention period. Servers can be recovered by a failback recovery approach which will use the volumes to create an EC2 instance of your choice of computing power. However, the storage used will always be equal or greater than the one in the server to be backed up.
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery uses Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots to take point-in-time snapshots of the data held within the staging area and provides crash consistent point-in-time recovery options which can be used in the event of a disaster or DR drill.
Architecture Diagram
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery’s Features
- Quickly recover operations after unexpected events such as software issues or datacentre hardware failures
- Help increase resilience and meet compliance requirements using AWS as your recovery site
- Increase application resilience and help meet availability goals for your AWS-based applications, using AWS DRS to recover applications in a different AWS Region
Conclusion
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery is a way to protect database applications, such as MS SQL, Oracle, Using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery helps to recover the workloads from a disaster with consistent data, avoiding database corruption and helping ensure smooth recovery along with minimal downtime.