When people ask us how Arpio stacks up against AWS’s Elastic Disaster Recovery Service (DRS), we like to tell them that it’s not a competition, but a collaboration.
DRS offers real-time data replication for EC2 instances, while Arpio takes care of the rest of your EC2 workload – networking, security, access management, and more. Arpio can also provide a single solution to manage disaster recovery for all your cloud native resources across AWS workloads and accounts.
Used together, DRS and Arpio allow you to unlock real-time Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and extremely low Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), and protect your business from catastrophic downtime due to natural disasters, technical failures, as well as accidental or malicious human actions. Read on to learn more about how DRS and Arpio make a dynamic combination that covers all of your AWS disaster recovery needs.
Integrated Infrastructure and Data Recovery
DRS is a block-level replication DR solution for physical and virtual workloads. DRS can replicate data stored on EC2 instances to a disaster recovery environment in real-time, so that no data is lost in the event of a failover. However, the DR of an entire workload requires more than just the ability to recover the data. During an outage, the entire cloud environment must be recreated in the recovery environment in order to bring applications back online. This is where Arpio comes in.
Arpio offers comprehensive disaster recovery orchestration across all of the essential core services in AWS by leveraging the cloud-native backup, replication, and recovery mechanisms required for the data and infrastructure of each service. With Arpio, you can recover your entire infrastructure and data quickly alongside the EC2 instances being replicated by DRS. All it takes is the click of a button in the Arpio console to launch your recovery.
Let’s look at how it works:
Arpio’s recovery capabilities include several critical components to a speedy recovery. At the network level, Arpio replicates the full configuration of your Amazon VPC, ensuring that subnets, routing, gateways, endpoints, and elastic IPs are replicated identically to their primary environment configuration. By default, Arpio will replicate the private IP address space within these elements so that the recovery environment is an exact replica of the primary environment. If you need to use alternate IP addresses in the recovery environment, that can be configured.
Arpio also replicates critical resources at the security and access management level. Resources such as network access control lists (ACLs) and security groups, as well as IAM entities such as instance profiles, IAM roles, and IAM managed policies are all staged in your recovery environment and ready in the event of a failover. All IAM policies are also translated during the replication process so that they are appropriate for the recovery environment.
This replicated infrastructure forms the foundation of the environment into which Amazon EC2 instances and other AWS services can be recovered. Once the underlying infrastructure is recovered, Arpio has integrated with DRS to seamlessly launch your EC2 recovery process.
The configuration of your restored EC2 instances is driven by an EC2 launch template that DRS creates for each EC2 server in the primary environment. During a failover, Arpio will first update your EC2 launch template to have the appropriate settings to create a new server that is an identical clone of the primary environment server. These settings include instance type and size, the instance’s private IP address, and the Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume configuration of all replicated volumes. Arpio then requests that DRS launch the recovered server.
EC2 instances can be launched in parallel or in a coordinated sequence based upon server-level dependencies. Arpio natively understands server dependencies and will launch them accordingly. Arpio can also recover other resources that depend upon these servers. For example, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and their target groups can be recovered to sit in front of these servers as necessary to serve traffic.
Beyond EC2 Workloads
Once you have configured DRS and Arpio to get comprehensive failover capability for your EC2 workloads, you can also use Arpio to recover other managed services.
Arpio’s disaster recovery capabilities extend beyond Amazon EC2 to recover managed data services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Arpio also replicates and recovers managed compute services such as Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and AWS Elastic Beanstalk, as well as containerized compute resources including Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS Fargate, and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR). Arpio can also recover serverless workloads that rely on AWS Lambda and Eventbridge.
If you are using DRS to achieve zero data loss data recovery, Arpio will drive AWS’s native capabilities for your dependent services to meet an RPO that is as close to real time as possible. If you’d prefer to balance cost with time to recovery, you can also use Arpio to separate workloads into different RPO targets, and configure Arpio to use lower cost snapshotting capabilities to protect workloads with longer RPOs.
Arpio’s easy to use SaaS solution streamlines the DR process for all of your cloud workloads, giving you a unified view of your RPOs across your entire AWS estate, and a single solution to manage your recovery, regardless of the scope of your workload.
Wrapping It Up
Responsibly operating any IT infrastructure, including workloads that run in AWS, requires thoughtful investment in DR to ensure that it is resilient to unexpected downtime due to natural disasters, infrastructure outages, cyber events, and human error.
For workloads using DRS for real time EC2 replication, Arpio can provide an invaluable layer of infrastructure resilience that integrates seamlessly with DRS. What’s more, Arpio’s easy to use SaaS solution only takes a few minutes to set up and can be easily configured to protect all of your critical AWS services and resources.
Want to learn more about how DRS and Arpio work together? Contact us today, or set up a demo to see it in action.
