Introducing Amazon Application Recovery Controller Region Switch: A Comprehensive Multi-Region Application Recovery Service

Amazon has introduced the Application Recovery Controller (ARC) Region Switch, a fully managed high availability feature that enables organizations to confidently plan, practice, and coordinate region switches for cross-region recovery operations. ARC Region Switch provides a centralized solution for managing recovery across multiple AWS services and accounts, allowing for automated and coordinated control of multiple AWS services and accounts. It supports 9 types of execution blocks, including ARC Region Switch execution blocks, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling execution blocks, and more. This feature is designed to simplify and automate the process of switching applications between AWS regions.

Amazon has introduced the Application Recovery Controller (ARC) Region Switch, a fully managed high availability feature that enables organizations to confidently plan, practice, and coordinate region switches for cross-region recovery operations. ARC Region Switch provides a centralized solution for managing recovery across multiple AWS services and accounts, allowing for automated and coordinated control of multiple AWS services and accounts. It supports 9 types of execution blocks, including ARC Region Switch execution blocks, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling execution blocks, and more. This feature is designed to simplify and automate the process of switching applications between AWS regions.

ARC Region Switch helps organizations to orchestrate recovery for their multi-Region applications on AWS. It gives a centralized solution to coordinate and automate recovery tasks across AWS services and accounts when you need to switch your application’s operations from one AWS Region to another. Many customers deploy business-critical applications across multiple AWS Regions to meet their availability requirements. When an operational event impacts an application in one Region, switching operations to another Region involves coordinating multiple steps across different AWS services, such as compute, databases, and DNS. This coordination typically requires building and maintaining complex scripts that need regular testing and updates as applications evolve. Additionally, orchestrating and tracking the progress of Region switches across multiple applications and providing evidence of successful recovery for compliance purposes often involves manual data gathering.

Region switch is built on a Regional data plane architecture, where Region switch plans are executed from the Region being activated. This design eliminates dependencies on the impacted Region during the switch, providing a more resilient recovery process since the execution is independent of the Region you’re switching from. Building a recovery plan with ARC Region Switch, you can create recovery plans that define the specific steps needed to switch your application between Regions. Each plan contains execution blocks that represent actions on AWS resources. At launch, Region switch supports nine types of execution blocks: ARC Region switch plan execution block, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling execution block, ARC routing controls execution block, Amazon Aurora global database execution block, Manual approval execution block, Custom Action AWS Lambda execution block, Amazon Route 53 health check execution block, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) resource scaling execution block, and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) resource scaling execution block.

Region switch continually validates your plans by checking resource configurations and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions every 30 minutes. During execution, Region switch monitors the progress of each step and provides detailed logs. You can view execution status through the Region switch dashboard and at the bottom of the execution details page. To help you balance cost and reliability, Region switch offers flexibility in how you prepare your standby resources. You can configure the desired percentage of compute capacity to target in your destination Region during recovery using Region switch scaling execution blocks. For critical applications expecting surge traffic during recovery, you might choose to scale beyond 100 percent capacity, and setting a lower percentage can help achieve faster overall execution times. However, it’s important to note that using one of the scaling execution blocks does not guarantee capacity, and actual resource availability depends on the capacity in the destination Region at the time of recovery.

To facilitate the best possible outcomes, we recommend regularly testing your recovery plans and maintaining appropriate Service Quotas in your standby Regions. ARC Region Switch includes a global dashboard you can use to monitor the status of Region switch plans across your enterprise and Regions. Additionally, there’s a Regional executions dashboard that only displays executions within the current console Region. This dashboard is designed to be highly available across each Region so it can be used during operational events. Region switch allows resources to be hosted in an account that is separate from the account that contains the Region switch plan. If the plan uses resources from an account that is different from the account that hosts the plan, then Region switch uses the executionRole to assume the crossAccountRole to access those resources. Additionally, Region switch plans can be centralized and shared across multiple accounts using AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM), enabling efficient management of recovery plans across your organization.

References:
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/disaster-recovery-resiliency.html
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-application-recovery-controller-region-switch-a-multi-region-application-recovery-service/