Cloud Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery: Why It Actually Matters (Especially for DevOps)

Cloud adoption is exploding. In 2024 alone, global public cloud spend topped $675B. But scale brings complexity — and complexity breaks.

So what happens when your infrastructure breaks?

If your DR plan is still a few backup scripts and tribal knowledge, this post is for you. Let’s talk disaster recovery (DR) from a DevOps/Infra-as-Code (IaC) perspective — what it should look like, and how to make it part of your daily workflow.

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☁️ What Is Cloud Business Continuity and DR (For Devs)?

Cloud Business Continuity = Keep things running

Disaster Recovery = Recover fast when they don’t

If your Terraform codebase is the source of truth, then cloud DR is your ability to rebuild infra from code, not just restore data blobs.

Here’s what’s at stake:

• 💸 Downtime = lost revenue (esp. for e-commerce & SaaS)
• 🧠 Broken infra = dev productivity loss + missed SLAs
• 🤬 Incidents = customer churn + trust issues
• 🐒 ClickOps = drift, bugs, and unrecoverable changes

TL;DR: Treat your infra like code — version it, test it, and make rollback part of your deployment flow.

👉 Want to dig into the strategy side of this?

Check out: Cloud Disaster Recovery Strategy

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🧠 Common Gaps in Developer-Driven Cloud Resilience

Even if you're running Terraform, here’s what we often see:

🔍 1. No drift detection

Code says one thing. AWS says another. Which is correct? If you’re not detecting drift in real time, you’ll never know what's actually running.

🧱 2. No snapshot or version control for infra

You wouldn’t deploy unversioned code to prod. Why treat infra differently?

🧪 3. No testable recovery path

How fast can you recover from an aws_s3_bucket deletion? If the answer isn’t “instantly,” you’ve got a gap.

🛑 4. Too much ClickOps

Manual changes = config drift = broken state = bad day.

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✅ DevOps-Friendly DR Looks Like This:

Modern cloud resilience follows software dev best practices:

# Define infra with Terraform
resource "aws_instance" "web" {
  ami           = "ami-123"
  instance_type = "t3.micro"
}

# Snapshot code regularly
# Use version control (Git) for all infra

# Detect and fix drift
# Automatically revert broken states

Here’s how leading teams are implementing it:

🧭 Drift detection as code

Monitor for changes in cloud resources that don’t match your Terraform code. Restore alignment automatically.

🧊 Daily restorable snapshots

Think: git commits for your infra. If something goes sideways, revert.

✅ Guardrails + PR checks

Block non-compliant changes at the pull request level — before they break prod.

🔁 Rollback = first-class citizen

No more “manual fixes” at 2 a.m. Build rollback into your workflow like it’s a feature.

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🚨 Real Talk: How Block Made DR Work with Terraform

Block (you know them from Cash App) had the right idea: IaC-first, but no visibility or rollback paths.

They partnered with AWS + ControlMonkey to implement infra-level DR, not just storage recovery.

What changed?

• Terraform became the control plane
• Snapshots captured daily cloud state
• They could now recover from resource deletion with confidence

“ControlMonkey gave us full coverage and alerting — no more guesswork.”

— Ben Apprederisse, Platform Tech Lead, Block

📚 Want more dev examples and DR design tips?

Read: Cloud Disaster Recovery: A Developer's Guide

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🔁 Final Thought: DR Is Code Too

Resilience is no longer about backup files and faith. It’s about versioned, testable infrastructure that can be restored like code.

So ask yourself:

• Are we monitoring our infra like we do our apps?
• Can we recover infrastructure with a single command?
• Is rollback part of our deploy process?

💬 How are you handling infra DR today? Got rollback stories? Tools you love? Drop them below.

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👉 Want to see full-stack infra recovery in action?

Start your free cloud DR assessment