The Challenge

The customer was running a mission‑critical production database that directly supported their core business application. The key challenges were:

• High business impact in case of database downtime
• No tolerance for data loss
• Single‑region dependency creating disaster recovery risk
• Lack of documented recovery objectives (RPO/RTO)
• Compliance requirement to keep backups outside the primary region

The customer explicitly did not want cross‑region read replicas due to cost and operational complexity, but required cross‑region backup availability.

Discovery

During the discovery phase, DevOps TechLab conducted detailed technical and business discussions to understand:

• Application criticality and peak usage patterns
• Database engine, size, and growth rate
• Existing backup and recovery mechanisms
• Compliance and audit expectations

Key findings:

• Database availability was directly linked to revenue
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) needed to be in minutes
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) needed to be under 1 hour
• Existing setup lacked regional disaster recovery readiness

Discovery

During the discovery phase, DevOps TechLab conducted detailed technical and business discussions to understand:

• Application criticality and peak usage patterns
• Database engine, size, and growth rate
• Existing backup and recovery mechanisms
• Compliance and audit expectations

Key findings:

• Database availability was directly linked to revenue
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) needed to be in minutes
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) needed to be under 1 hour
• Existing setup lacked regional disaster recovery readiness

Operations & Support

Post‑deployment, DevOps TechLab provided operational readiness and support:

• Set up CloudWatch monitoring and alarms for critical metrics
• Validated automatic failover during AZ‑level failure scenarios
• Documented restore procedures from cross‑region backups
• Created runbooks for database recovery and incident response

The database now automatically handles:

• AZ failures with no manual intervention
• Backup creation and lifecycle management
• Secure storage of backups in another AWS region

Optimisation & Advisory

To ensure long‑term efficiency and governance, DevOps TechLab provided continuous optimisation and advisory services:

• Tuned backup retention policies to balance cost and compliance
• Enabled storage autoscaling to handle data growth
• Recommended periodic disaster recovery drills
• Advised tagging strategy for cost allocation and auditing
• Provided guidance aligned with AWS Well‑Architected Framework (Reliability & Security pillars)

Conclusion

This architecture ensures:

• High availability within a region
• Strong disaster recovery across regions
• Zero dependency on read replicas
• Compliance-ready and audit-friendly setup

Suitable for financial systems, gaming platforms, SaaS products, and enterprise workloads.

About DevOps TechLab

DevOps TechLab is an AWS Advanced Partner with over a decade of experience in designing and operating highly available, secure, and disaster-resilient cloud architectures on AWS.

We specialize in:

• Mission-critical database architectures on Amazon RDS
• High availability and disaster recovery design
• Backup, compliance, and audit-ready cloud solutions
• Cost-optimized and well-architected AWS workloads

DevOps TechLab has delivered 100+ AWS and DevOps projects and trained 5,000+ industry professionals, helping organizations across financial services, gaming, SaaS, and enterprise sectors build reliable cloud platforms aligned with AWS best practices.