In a recent large-scale AWS outage, more than 6.5 million disruption reports were logged across banks, airlines, AI companies, and apps like Snapchat and Fortnite.
Root cause: a malfunction in AWS’s EC2 network monitoring subsystem that cascaded across multiple regions.
For DevOps and cloud teams, this wasn’t “a few minutes of downtime.”
It was a blunt reminder:
Disaster Recovery isn’t just about data.
Real cloud disaster recovery means protecting your entire configuration — infrastructure, policies, and dependencies — not just storage.
When configuration breaks, recovery breaks with it.
This post walks through five things you can do tomorrow to harden cloud resilience — not just data recovery, but fast configuration recovery.
1. 🔍 Audit What You Really Run
Start with visibility.
Use tools like the AWS Well-Architected Tool to baseline your setup and map the resources your workloads depend on — across services, regions, and integrations.
Questions to answer:
- Which regions host your most critical workloads?
- Do you have single-region choke points?
- Are there “shadow” or untracked resources in production?
- Are staging and test environments included in your DR scope?
Many teams found out the hard way that their most sensitive workloads lived in us-east-1 — the region most impacted in the outage.
Untracked resources become silent risks for any Cloud DR strategy. You can’t protect what you can’t see.
✅ Action item: Build or refresh a single source of truth for all cloud resources that matter to uptime.
2. 🧱 Close the IaC Gap
If you were forced to click around in the AWS console during the outage, it’s a warning sign:
Parts of your environment still live outside Infrastructure as Code.
Typical IaC gaps include:
- Legacy stacks not migrated
- ClickOps-created resources
- “Temporary” patches that became permanent
- Manually tuned network or security settings
Your goal: minimize the infrastructure that can’t be recreated from code.
Bring those gaps under Terraform or another IaC tool:
# Example: capturing a "previously manual" security group in Terraform
resource "aws_security_group" "api_sg" {
name = "api-sg"
description = "Security group for public API"
vpc_id = var.vpc_id
ingress {
description = "Allow HTTPS"
from_port = 443
to_port = 443
protocol = "tcp"
cidr_blocks = ["0.0.0.0/0"]
}
egress {
from_port = 0
to_port = 0
protocol = "-1"
cidr_blocks = ["0.0.0.0/0"]
}
}
When everything lives in code, Cloud DR becomes:
- Predictable
- Repeatable
- Region-agnostic
3. 🧪 Run a “Mini AWS Outage” Drill
Don’t wait for the next global event to test your resilience.
Pick one critical service and simulate a regional failure:
- Assume a region is down.
- Try to bring the service up in an alternate region or environment.
- Measure:
- Time to detect
- Time to fail over
- Time to full restore
Validate your assumptions:
- Did runbooks match reality?
- Did scripts still work?
- Were secrets, configs, and dependencies all accessible?
These drills expose where:
- Automation is missing
- Documentation is outdated
- Human steps introduce delays
✅ Action item: Schedule a 60–90 min mini-DR drill this week for one critical system.
4. 🌪️ Detect and Eliminate Drift
Every outage reveals hidden drift — when live infra no longer matches your IaC.
Drift during recovery leads to:
- Failed redeployments
- Security inconsistencies
- Environments behaving unpredictably
Common drift sources:
- Hotfixes applied in the AWS console
- Emergency manual security group changes
- One-off scripts creating untracked resources
Keep code and infra aligned by:
- Continuously comparing live infra to your IaC
- Alerting on unmanaged changes
- Auto-remediating drift when safe
When your code mirrors reality, recovery is:
- Clean
- Fast
- Auditable
5. ⏪ Automate Daily Snapshots and Recovery Workflows
Traditional backups protect data — not operations.
For real Cloud DR maturity, you need:
- Daily infrastructure snapshots (configs, policies, dependencies)
- Automated rebuild workflows
Examples:
- Capture Terraform state + config in a central versioned repo
- Use nightly CI jobs to validate plans
- Archive validated DR artifacts
# Nightly job example (simplified)
terraform init
terraform validate
terraform plan -out=nightly.tfplan
# Archive plan & state for DR artifacts
tar -czf dr-artifacts-$(date +%F).tar.gz \
nightly.tfplan terraform.tfstate
These snapshots are essentially a cloud time machine, enabling quick rebuilds when (not if) outages occur.
🌐 Resilience Can’t Depend on One Provider
The AWS outage showed the fragility of shared cloud infrastructure.
Your systems might depend on:
- AWS, Azure, GCP
- Datadog or other observability tools
- Cloudflare or other CDNs
- Managed databases
- SaaS APIs
Key principles:
- Avoid single-region and single-AZ designs
- Understand third-party blast radius
- Treat DR as end-to-end: infra, data, configs, dependencies
🧠 AWS Outage FAQs for DevOps Teams
💡 What caused the AWS outage?
A failure in the EC2 network monitoring subsystem disrupted instance communication and caused widespread downtime, especially in us-east-1.
Always check the official AWS Service Health Dashboard for active incidents.
🛡️ How can DevOps teams prepare for the next outage?
A practical playbook includes:
- Visibility & audits
- IaC coverage
- Drift detection
- Snapshots & automated recovery
- Regular DR drills
📚 Want to Go Deeper on Cloud Disaster Recovery?
Long-form version of this article:
👉 https://controlmonkey.io/blog/aws-outage-cloud-disaster-recovery/
Related deep dives:
- IaC & DR strategy: https://controlmonkey.io/blog/infra-as-code-critical-aspect-for-your-disaster-recovery-plan/
- Business continuity & DR guide: https://controlmonkey.io/resource/cloud-business-continuity-and-disaster-recovery/
💬 Let’s Talk: How Are You Preparing for the Next Outage?
Outages are inevitable. Downtime doesn’t have to be.
I’d love to hear from other DevOps leaders and platform teams:
- Have you run a DR drill in the last 6 months?
- Where does your plan break first — infra, data, or people?
- What tools or patterns helped the most?
Drop your lessons learned in the comments 👇
Top comments (0)