Amazon Application Recovery Controller – Multi Region Recovery
Orchestrate and automate recovery for applications across AWS Regions
What are Multi-Region Recovery capabilities in ARC?
ARC's multi-Region recovery solutions help you shift traffic through a highly available DNS failover mechanism or orchestrate the failover of your entire application stack, including DNS failover, supporting both active/active and active/passive setups.
ARC offers the following solutions for multi-Region workloads:
Region switch – Orchestrate the failover of your entire application stack from one Region to another, for active/active and active/passive workloads.
Routing controls – A highly available DNS failover mechanism to shift traffic from an impaired Region to a healthy Region in a matter of minutes.
Region Switch
What is Region Switch?
Region switch is a failover orchestration service that allows you to orchestrate the failover of your entire application stack from one Region to another in the case of a Regional impairment.
Region switch supports both active/active or active/passive (pilot-light or warm standby) multi-Region approaches. If your recovery approach is active/passive you could first scale up, configure your application stack in your standby Region, and failover a database before actually shifting your application traffic from the primary to the standby Region. Region switch helps you automate recovery for your entire application stack when switching between Regions, helping you achieve a shorter RTO.
Region switch is purpose-built for recovery orchestration —build a failover plan and recover within your ideal RTO.
Benefits
Replace fragile runbooks and homegrown automation with a managed orchestration service purpose-built for recovery.
Real-time dashboards show exactly which steps have completed, are in progress, or need attention.
Recovery data is gathered automatically across resources and accounts, ready for auditors and regulators.
Plan execution runs from a healthy Region, so a Regional failure never blocks your ability to recover.
Features
Define multi-step workflows with execution blocks tailored to your application's recovery sequence.
Failover/failback for active/passive; shift-away/return for active/active.
Include resources from multiple AWS accounts in a single plan.
Be recovery ready through automatic verification of IAM permissions, resource configurations, and capacity before you need to failover.
Compose modular plans for complex, multi-application recovery.
Routing Controls
What are Routing Controls?
Routing controls let you shift traffic from an impaired Region to a healthy Region in minutes. They are simple on-off switches hosted on highly available clusters spanning five AWS Regions, integrated with Amazon Route 53 health checks.
Benefits
Your traffic-shifting mechanism works independently of any single Region, so you can always act.
Shift customer traffic between Regions without managing complex record updates.
Safety rules stop dangerous actions—like turning off all endpoints—before they happen.
Features
Data plane with endpoints in five AWS Regions for extreme reliability.
Simple switches integrated with Route 53 health checks to reroute traffic.
Assertion and gating rules to prevent unintended state changes.
Group routing controls logically for easier management.
Update multiple routing controls in a single API call.
Customer quotes
Toyota
"ARC Region Switch transformed our disaster recovery from a manual, time-consuming process into an automated orchestration across 10+ services. Pre-failover validation and single-click orchestration freed our Operations team from tedious runbook maintenance, eliminating any chances of human error during execution."
— Shashank Goyal, Sr. Manager, Digital Innovations
HashiCorp
"HashiCorp transformed their recovery capabilities by using ARC to simplify cross-Region failovers and standardize how they signal Regional context to their distributed services."
United Airlines
United Airlines uses ARC to meet business requirements for lower recovery time objectives across multi-Region application architectures as it transitions hundreds of applications to AWS.
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