To kick off Arpio’s Back to Basics blog series, our team decided to start at the very beginning and provide an answer to one of the industry’s most common questions – What is Cloud Resilience?
One definition of resilience is “The ability of a workload to resist or recover from faults or load spikes and remain functional”. The more colloquial answer is simply “Don’t let the bad stuff bring you down”. The real world is messy, whether that’s within the data center or the cloud. The challenge is, how do you keep workloads and business applications available, despite that mess?
That’s what resilience is about.
To fully understand resilience and craft the best approach for your organization, it is crucial to understand the three pillars: High Availability, Disaster Recovery, and Continuous Improvement.
High Availability
High Availability (HA) is about recovering in one place. For example, if you have a dead hard drive and need to replace a server, or experience a brief network spike and need to go to a different availability zone, you can do so within a given location within an AWS region and be back up and running quickly.
Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery (DR) which Arpio provides, is centered around larger and less frequent types of events such as regional outages & cyber attacks that impact workloads. These are events of such scope and magnitude that they require you to recover in another cloud region.
Continuous Improvement
The third part of resilience is continuous improvement–chaos engineering, observability, and so on. There are many ways to ensure your organization is continuously improving, such as:
- Regular DR Testing
- Leveraging the Well Architected Framework, a simple mental model developed by AWS to ensure you are in alignment with best practices
- Have a deep understanding of The Shared Responsibility Model
- Automate where possible
- Ensure recovery times and data loss are in alignment with stated RTO/RPO
Focusing on Disaster Recovery
As mentioned, disaster recovery has to do with more significant, though less frequent events, which fall into three categories:
- Natural disasters
- Technical failures, including bad software deployments by the cloud provider
- Human actions, including both the benign accidents and the less benign, such as malware and ransomware-type incidents.
Disaster recovery is about your business continuity, and unlike high availability, which is measured in terms of uptime, we think about disaster recovery in terms of discrete events, factoring in an organization’s RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (recovery point objective). While these events are infrequent, they have the ability to incapacitate business operations, making DR a critical piece of the resilience framework. Implementing a cloud native, automated DR solution such as Arpio is a great way to bolster your resilience strategy, allowing for swift recovery and continuous testing.
To sum it up, cloud resilience isn’t about planning for perfection—it’s about preparing for reality. By factoring in high availability, disaster recovery, and continuous improvement to your resilience strategy, you give your organization the ability to withstand disruption and recover with confidence when it matters most.
As this series continues, we’ll dig deeper into The Well Architected Framework, RTO vs. RPO, The Shared Responsibility Model, and more. For now, the takeaway is simple: outages, attacks, and failures are inevitable—but with the right approach and the right tools, their impact on your business doesn’t have to be.
Ready to improve your resilience strategy? Schedule a demo with Arpio today!
