AWS Global Architectures
AWS Tutorial: AWS Global Architectures
Welcome to the Global Architectures lesson. For critical applications (like banking or healthcare), surviving an Availability Zone failure isn't enough. You must prepare for an entire AWS Region to go offline.
Why Learn Global Architectures?
Building Disaster Recovery (DR) plans is a core responsibility of an AWS Solutions Architect. Learning how to spread applications across global regions guarantees 99.999% uptime.
Tutorial Overview
In this tutorial, you will learn the two main Multi-Region routing strategies:
- Active-Passive (Disaster Recovery)
- Active-Active
Multi-Region Strategies
To protect against a catastrophic regional failure, you deploy your application in two separate AWS Regions (e.g., us-east-1 and eu-west-1).
- Active-Passive (Failover): 100% of your user traffic goes to your primary Region (Active). A database replica is silently kept up-to-date in the secondary Region (Passive). If Route 53 detects the primary region has crashed, it automatically flips a switch and routes all new traffic to the backup region. This saves money while providing strong backup protection.
- Active-Active: Both regions actively serve user traffic simultaneously based on which region is geographically closest to the user. This provides the absolute highest performance and zero-downtime, but it is highly complex and expensive to keep databases perfectly synchronized across the globe in real-time.
Exercise
?In an Active-Passive disaster recovery setup, how much user traffic is normally directed to the Passive (backup) region before a failure occurs?