Amazon Application Recovery Controller
Simplify and automate recovery for highly available applications
What is Application Recovery Controller?
Amazon Application Recovery Controller (ARC) helps you recover applications quickly—whether the impairment is in a single Availability Zone or an entire Region. ARC provides fully managed recovery capabilities so your team spends less time writing failover scripts and more time building resilient architectures.
Single Region (multi-AZ) Recovery — Zonal shift and zonal autoshift move traffic away from an impaired AZ to healthy AZs, manually or automatically
Multi-Region recovery — Region switch orchestrates full-stack failover across Regions. Routing controls provide highly available DNS-based traffic shifting between Regions.
Benefits
Go from incident detection to recovery in seconds or minutes instead of hours. ARC manages the orchestration so your team focuses on your application, not runbooks.
Know that failover will work before you need it. Automated practice runs and plan evaluations continuously validate your recovery posture.
See exactly where you are in the recovery process with real-time dashboards, and prevent mistakes with built-in safety guardrails.
Use cases
A code deployment introduces latency in one Availability Zone. Shift traffic to healthy AZs immediately while you roll back, keeping users unaffected.
An AZ experiences hardware or network issues. AWS detects the impairment and automatically moves your traffic to healthy AZs—no operator intervention needed.
An entire Region becomes impaired. Orchestrate full-stack failover—scaling compute, failing over databases, and shifting traffic—with a single recovery plan.
Validate your DR posture for auditors and regulators. Run automated recovery tests and generate compliance-ready reports without manual effort.
Customer stories
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
LexisNexis
“We adopted Amazon Application Recovery Controller’s (ARC) new Region Switch functionality to streamline our multi-region resiliency approach. Region Switch replaced custom failover orchestration with declarative plans that coordinated scaling, database switchover, and DNS routing across our services in parallel. Kiro with AWS Professional Services Delivery Agent compressed weeks of backlog creation into hours, accelerated code delivery by 60%, and enforced consistent quality across every deliverable. Our region switch test executed on schedule and we were able to run in our secondary region. This gives us even more confidence in the speed and reliability this approach delivers for our customers.”
— Matt McKeever, CTO Infrastructure & Operations, LexisNexis Legal & Professional
Autodesk
"We used to run our own failover orchestration platform, and the hardest part wasn't building it — it was the ongoing effort to keep it maintained and trustworthy. With AWS Region Switch as a managed service, we no longer worry about whether our DR infrastructure itself will be available during an actual event. What really changed the game was the Terraform integration: our teams now define and update failover plans alongside application code in the same CI/CD pipelines, so DR evolves in lockstep with development instead of being an afterthought. DR is no longer a separate workstream that lags behind development; it's embedded in our CI/CD process. And because it's a fully managed service, we retired our self-maintained platform and gained confidence that failover will simply work when it matters."
— Alan Williams, Principal Reliability Engineer, Autodesk
