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This article was co-authored by Chanci Turner, Product Manager at Druva, and Alex Johnson, Senior Partner Solutions Architect at AWS. The Uptime Institute’s Annual Outage Analysis 2021 report revealed that 40% of business outages or service interruptions incur costs ranging from $100,000 to $1 million, while approximately 17% exceed $1 million. To mitigate these risks, implementing an effective data protection and disaster recovery (DR) strategy is essential for minimizing business disruption. With the increasing shift to public cloud environments, many organizations are either adopting a hybrid model with critical workloads distributed between on-premises data centers and the cloud or are fully cloud-based.
In this blog post, we’ll explore how Druva, a SaaS-based data protection solution, can help you develop a robust DR strategy for your workloads hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). We will guide you through setting up protection for AWS workloads in one AWS account and enabling failover to another AWS account or Region, thereby reducing the impact of potential disruptions.
Overview of the Architecture
The architecture outlined below demonstrates how you can safeguard your AWS workloads against outages and disasters. With Druva’s user-friendly interface, you can establish a DR plan swiftly, ensuring your AWS infrastructure is protected within minutes.
Druva’s cloud DR operates on AWS, utilizing native services to create a secure environment for comprehensive backup and disaster recovery operations. With Druva, you can:
- Effortlessly establish cross-account DR sites by cloning Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) and their associated components.
- Configure backup policies to automatically generate and replicate snapshots of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances to DR Regions based on your recovery point objective (RPO) criteria.
- Develop service level objective (SLO) compliant DR plans with options for scheduling automated tests to ensure adherence to protocols.
- Easily monitor DR plan implementation from the Druva console.
- Generate compliance reports for DR failover and test initiation.
Additional features include support for automated runbook initiation, selection of target AWS instance types for DR, and streamlined orchestration and testing to enhance data protection and facilitate recovery at scale. Druva offers the flexibility to adapt to evolving infrastructure across different geographic locations while ensuring compliance with regulations (like GDPR and CCPA) and expediting workload recovery after disasters, thus helping you meet critical recovery time objectives (RTOs). This integrated solution enables snapshotting every five minutes to optimize RPOs. As a SaaS offering, Druva reduces costs by eliminating the need for traditional hardware and software management, including maintenance, upgrades, patches, and integrations.
We will now demonstrate how to configure Druva for AWS workload protection and automate disaster recovery.
Step 1: Access the Druva Platform and Authorize AWS Accounts
To begin, log into the Druva Cloud Platform and grant Druva third-party access to your AWS account by clicking the ‘Add New Account’ button and following the prompts as illustrated in the accompanying figure.
Druva employs AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles for managing and accessing your AWS workloads. To assist with this, Druva provides an AWS CloudFormation template that creates a stack or stack set to generate:
- IAM role
- IAM instance profile
- IAM policy
The Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the IAM role created is then linked to Druva, enabling it to perform backup and DR operations for your AWS workloads. Rest assured, Druva adheres to all security protocols and best practices as recommended by AWS. All access permissions to your AWS resources and Regions are governed by IAM.
Once you are logged into Druva and your account is configured, you can proceed to establish DR for your AWS workloads.
Step 2: Identify the Source Environment
The source environment is a logical grouping of Amazon VPCs, subnets, security groups, and other infrastructure components necessary for your application.
At this step, create your source environment by selecting the relevant AWS resources you wish to protect. Druva currently supports Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS as sources for protection. With Druva’s automated DR, you can seamlessly failover these resources to a secondary site with just a click of a button.
Step 3: Clone the Environment
Next, clone the source environment to a Region designated for failover in the event of a disaster. Druva enables cloning of the source environment to another Region or AWS account of your choice. Cloning effectively replicates the source infrastructure in the target Region or account, allowing for quick and smooth failover.
Step 4: Establish a Backup Policy
You can either create a new backup policy or utilize an existing one to generate backups in the cloned or target Region. This allows Druva to restore instances using these backup copies.
Step 5: Create the Disaster Recovery Plan
A DR plan consists of a structured set of guidelines intended to recover resources in the case of a failure or disaster. The goal of DR is to restore your production-ready setup while minimizing downtime. To create your DR plan, follow these steps:
- Press the ‘Create Disaster Recovery Plan’ button to access the DR plan creation interface.
- Enter a name for the DR plan and specify your Service Level Objective (SLO), including your RPO and RTO.
It’s crucial to understand that the Recovery Point Objective determines how much data you might lose during a disaster, while the Recovery Time Objective specifies how quickly you can recover your critical IT services.
With the resources and environments defined, your DR plan will be tailored to meet your specific needs, ensuring your organization is prepared for any unforeseen events.
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