Planning for disaster recovery using AWS Local Zones and AWS Outposts racks

This article provides practical design guidance for building highly available disaster recovery architectures that span AWS Outposts racks or Local Zones with minimal downtime.

• Active/passive DNS-based failover using Route 53 health checks with typical recovery time of 5 minutes or the TTL setting
• Active/active architecture using physical or virtual load balancers deployed at each site for sub-second failover
• Hybrid database recovery using native database engine replication across Outposts, Local Zones, and AWS Regions
• RTO/RPO trade-offs vary by architecture: DNS failover has longer RTO, active/active provides lowest RTO/RPO
• Anchor each site to different parent Region or Availability Zone to ensure independent failure domains
• Deploy redundant load balancers and configure session persistence to minimize disruption during failover
• Database promotion is manual but can be automated with infrastructure as code

Selecting the right disaster recovery strategy depends on RPO/RTO targets, data residency requirements, operational complexity, and budget constraints.