Creating an organizational multi-Region failover strategy

This article discusses different strategies organizations can adopt for creating a multi-Region failover approach on AWS. It highlights the tradeoffs and considerations for each strategy in terms of flexibility, testability, modal behavior, and organizational investment.

Specifically, the article covers:

• Component-level failover: Failing over individual components across Regions, which adds latency, data inconsistency risks, and complexity in configurations.
• Individual application failover: Allowing individual applications to fail over entirely to another Region, mitigating latency but introducing modal behavior across applications.
• Dependency graph failover: Failing over all interconnected applications as a single unit based on dependency graphs, requiring more upfront coordination.
• Entire application portfolio failover: Failing over the whole application portfolio together, requiring significant multi-Region investment but simplifying operations.
• Conclusion: Organizations can start with a simpler strategy and iteratively move towards a more coordinated multi-Region failover approach over time.