Engineering Resilient Systems on AWS

Part I. Foundations

Traditionally, resilient design involved a series of established practices centered on physical infrastructure, redundancy, and failover mechanisms within a company’s data center. However, these practices have evolved significantly with the advent of cloud computing. This book helps you understand the differences between traditional resilient design and resilient design in the cloud.

Organizations typically invest in duplicate hardware systems, such as servers, storage devices, and network components. This redundancy ensures that if one piece of hardware fails, another can take over without significant disruption.

To safeguard against catastrophic events, like natural disasters, companies often maintain multiple data centers in different geographic locations. Data and applications are replicated across these sites to enable failover if one data center becomes inoperable. Detailed disaster recovery plans are developed and regularly tested to ensure business operations can be quickly restored following a major incident. These plans often include backup procedures, manual intervention steps, and predefined recovery time objectives (RTOs). Monitoring hardware performance and regular maintenance is crucial for preemptively addressing potential issues before they lead to system failure.

While these methods have been effective, they come with significant costs and complexities. The capital expenditure required for duplicate hardware, the operational costs of running ...