Region switch for automated multi-Region application recovery

Each AWS Region has strict logical and physical separation from other AWS Regions. This purposeful design ensures that an infrastructure or service disruption in one Region will not have a correlated failure in another Region. This unique property of AWS Regions can be used to build multi-Region applications with predictable fault domains. Some organizations deploy their critical systems with the capability to failover across AWS Regions to meet regulatory requirements and achieve resilience goals. Fidelity and Vanguard, for example, deploy many of their core trading and investment platforms and customer-facing applications across multiple Regions.

Until now, orchestrating the specific steps needed to operate your multi-Region application out of another AWS Region was challenging because it required hours of engineering effort. First, you had to create scripts to execute failovers, which was manual and complex, especially if there were cross-account resources and dependencies to coordinate. Second, for a centralized view of the recovery process, you had to build a custom dashboard that incorporated detailed logs from all your resources. Finally, reporting on the success of your test, failover exercise, or actual recovery was also a manual and time-consuming data gathering process.

Region switch is now available in Application Recovery Controller, to help you save hours of engineering effort. It is an automated, centralized solution for multi-Region application recovery, even across AWS accounts. Region switch allows you to orchestrate the specific steps needed to operate your cross-account application resources out of another AWS Region. It provides dashboards for real-time visibility into the recovery process, and gathers data from across resources and accounts that are required for reporting to regulators and compliance teams.

A recovery across Regions has to work when you need it most, so Region switch is a highly available solution for multi-Region recovery, with a data plane in each Region that it operates in. When you create a Region switch plan, it is replicated to all the Regions that your application operates in. This allows you to trigger your plan execution from the same Region you're recovering to.

To get started, build a Region switch plan with the ARC console, API, or CLI. A Region switch plan allows you to create the specific workflow required to recover your applications in another Region. Once you create the plan, Region switch will evaluate it every 30 minutes to ensure correct configuration and readiness for recovery. When you’re recovering from an operational event, you can use the plan Executions in Region dashboard to monitor your application’s recovery.

To learn more, please see the ARC Region switch documentation, tutorial video, prescriptive guidance for building and running critical workloads across Regions, and list of AWS services with multi-Region capabilities.