What is AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery

• AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) minimizes downtime and data loss with fast, reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications using affordable storage, minimal compute, and point-in-time recovery.
• You can increase IT resilience when you use AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery to replicate on-premises or cloud-based applications running on supported operating systems. Use the AWS Management Console to configure replication and launch settings, monitor data replication, and launch instances for drills or recovery.
• Set up AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery on your source servers to initiate secure data replication. Your data is replicated to a staging area subnet in your AWS account, in the AWS Region you select. The staging area design reduces costs by using affordable storage and minimal compute resources to maintain ongoing replication.
• You can perform non-disruptive tests to confirm that implementation is complete. During normal operation, maintain readiness by monitoring replication and periodically performing non-disruptive recovery and failback drills. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery automatically converts your servers to boot and run natively on AWS when you launch instances for drills or recovery. If you need to recover applications, you can launch recovery instances on AWS within minutes, using the most up-to-date server state or a previous point in time. After your applications are running on AWS, you can choose to keep them there, or you can initiate data replication back to your primary site when the issue is resolved. You can fail back to your primary site whenever you’re ready.

How it works

Use cases

1. On-premises to AWS
   Quickly recover operations after unexpected events such as software issues or datacenter hardware failures. AWS DRS enables RPOs of seconds and RTOs of minutes.
2. Cloud to AWS
   Help increase resilience and meet compliance requirements using AWS as your recovery site. AWS DRS converts your cloud-based applications to run natively on AWS.
3. AWS Region to AWS Region
   Increase application resilience and help meet availability goals for your AWS-based applications, using AWS DRS to recover applications in a different AWS Region.

AWS DRS Architecture