Disaster Recovery Environment Setup from Scratch

There is no doubt that setting up a Disaster Recovery (DR) environment from scratch is essential for multiple reasons. Aimed at ensuring business continuity and minimizing the impact of unforeseen events, this practice not only protects clients’ data and reduces downtime but also enables companies to build resilience against a wide range of potential disruptions and make strategic investments in their organization’s long-term sustainability and success. With this in mind, the Matoffo team developed a state-of-the-art DR solution for one of our clients, an English assessment company.

Our client is a unique English assessment solution aimed at testing real-life communication skills through natural speech and writing. Leveraging the exclusive mesh of AI and expert human linguists, the platform offers accurate and reliable language proficiency assessment services. Owing to their authentic language assessment strategy, CEFR alignment, and fast assessment technology, the company has been recognized as the top choice of multiple market-leading organizations and educational institutions around the world.

To address the client’s critical need for minimizing downtime and data loss in the event of a disaster, Matoffo embarked on a comprehensive initiative to develop a custom solution tailored to their specific requirements.

With a stringent Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 24 hours and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 12 hours, our team understood the gravity of the challenge at hand and committed to developing a robust and reliable solution from scratch.

Setting up a Disaster Recovery (DR) environment from scratch requires careful evaluation of various crucial factors, including scalability, reliability, cost-effectiveness, and ease of management. In this regard, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Serverless technologies stand out as excellent choices for implementing a robust DR solution.

Owing to their outstanding scalability, high availability, cost-effectiveness, automation capabilities, and managed services, AWS and Serverless perfectly contribute to creating an efficient DR solution tailored to the unique needs of our clients.

In the contemporary business environment, a wide variety of companies offer cloud development services, so organizations often struggle to choose the one that genuinely provides high-quality solutions. Standing at the forefront of business competition, Matoffo not only delivers cutting-edge services that change the world but also brings innovation to every facet of the company we partner with. Therefore, with our deep industry expertise and unique client-centric strategy, our team came up with an exclusive approach designed to set up a disaster recovery environment from scratch.

First and foremost, we deployed the entire infrastructure, including Lambda functions, S3 buckets, DynamoDB tables, and Cognito user pools, across multiple AWS regions. This essential step provided geographical redundancy, ensuring service continuity even if one region experiences an outage.

Next, our team enabled cross-region replication for DynamoDB tables and S3 buckets to maintain real-time data synchronization between regions, along with implementing Route 53 health checks to monitor each region’s health.

To ensure seamless scaling during failover events, we configured automatic scaling for Lambda functions to dynamically adjust resource allocation based on traffic demands. At the same time, we configured CI pipelines to automate DR region deployment. Our team prepared a detailed runbook on how to perform DR switches between regions and how to support DR regions.

Last but not least, we implemented the Cognito user pool migration and cutover process and replicated user data across regions to ensure data availability even if one region becomes inaccessible.

The development team included 2 DevOps engineers. In general, it took us about 1.5 month to deliver a ready-to-use AWS solution. To complete this project, the Matoffo team used the following tech stack: AWS, Serverless, Bitbucket.

It is not a secret that disaster recovery environment setup can provide multiple advantages to companies that rely on cloud computing to support their operations. Below, we have gathered the areas the Matoffo solution managed to bring value in:

• The multi-region deployment and semi-manual failover mechanisms minimize downtime and ensure service continuity during disruptive events.
• Data replication across regions and regular backups protect critical data from accidental loss or corruption.
• Customers can now maintain operational functionality even in the face of significant regional outages or disasters.
• The serverless nature of the solution optimizes resource utilization and reduces operational costs.
• The multi-region deployment and automatic failover mechanisms ensure the RTO meets the requirements.
• Cross-region replication and regular backups ensure the RPO is fulfilled by minimizing data loss.

Throughout the whole development process, the Matoffo team maintained transparent communication, providing regular updates on the project’s progress and seeking feedback to ensure that the solution aligned seamlessly with the client’s evolving needs. Thanks to the iterative nature of the development, we provided fine-tuning adjustments based on the client’s input, ultimately resulting in a tailored, effective, and reliable disaster recovery solution. Subsequently, the client was delighted with the outcome, so we will be glad to continue our fruitful cooperation in the future.