Architecting Complete Resilience: Integrating High Availability with Cross-Region Disaster Recovery

When it comes to system resilience, high availability and disaster recovery are two sides of the same coin—one incomplete without the other. In this session, I'll walk through a comprehensive implementation that combines robust HA practices with cross-region DR capabilities in AWS, achieving RTOs of less than 1 hour and RPOs under 5 minutes while maintaining predictable costs.

I'll demonstrate how we created a complete resilience strategy for an application hosted in AWS through AWS Route 53, Auto Scaling Groups, redundant ALB configurations, RDS and EFS replication, and infrastructure-as-code practices with Terraform.
Attendees will learn:

Why high availability within a region is the foundation for effective disaster recovery
How to implement cross-region replication for both database and file storage systems
Techniques for creating seamless failover using Route 53 and load balancers
Strategies for health check implementation that span both HA and DR concerns
Building comprehensive runbooks that address both everyday disruptions and regional outages
Cost optimization strategies that kept our implementation between $55-$550 per month
The critical interplay between ASG configurations and cross-region resilience

This session provides a practical blueprint for implementing a holistic approach to system resilience that works for real-world budgets and operational requirements—because true resilience requires thinking beyond a single region.