Highly Available AWS Architecture
More than one of everything that matters, and a failover somebody has actually performed.
From $849 5–10 days
AWS Backup & Disaster Recovery
Backups covering everything that matters, and one of them restored and timed in front of you.
Price and scope
From $449
Typically $449–$999, fixed in writing before anything starts.
What moves it up
- Cross-region copies, where the recovery has to work in a region you do not normally use
- A stated recovery time or recovery point objective somebody outside engineering has committed to
- Data spread across services — RDS, S3, EBS and a file system — rather than one database
Some of this you can check yourself, right now, for free: Downtime Cost Calculator →
What actually goes wrong
Backups almost always run. What almost never happens is a restore, so what you have is a job that completes rather than a recovery that works, and nobody finds out which until it matters. The gaps are consistent when you look for them: the schedule covers the RDS instance but not the S3 bucket the application writes uploads to, so a restore brings the database back pointing at files that are gone. And retention is set to seven days, which is fine for a server that dies and useless for data that was corrupted quietly on a Tuesday and noticed the following week.
How I find it
aws backup list-backup-plans, compared against an actual inventory of what holds dataaws rds describe-db-instances --query 'DBInstances[].[BackupRetentionPeriod,LatestRestorableTime]'aws s3api get-bucket-versioning on every bucket the application writes toA real restore into a scratch environment, timed with a clock, before anything is signed off
What you get
- A backup plan covering every store that holds state, not only the database
- Retention set against how long a quiet corruption could go unnoticed, rather than a default
- Point-in-time recovery where the service offers it, and versioning where it does not
- A restore performed end to end into a scratch environment, with the elapsed time written down
- A recovery runbook naming the order things come back in, and what has to be checked afterwards
Questions
You actually perform a restore? Not just configure backups?
Yes, and it is the deliverable that matters. Anyone can enable a backup schedule in ten minutes. The number you are paying for is how long a real restore took and what broke while doing it, because that number is always different from the one people assume.
Does this protect me from ransomware or a deleted account?
Partly, and only if the backups are somewhere the compromised credentials cannot reach — which usually means a separate account and immutable retention. Backups sitting in the same account with the same permissions are backups an attacker deletes first. Say if that is the threat you care about, because it changes the design.
How long should I keep backups for?
Long enough to cover the slowest way you would notice a problem. For accidental deletion that is days; for a corruption that only shows up in month-end reporting it is months. That question gets asked at the start, because retention is the one setting you cannot fix retroactively.
What is the difference between this and high availability?
High availability keeps you running when something breaks. Backup gets you back when something is destroyed or corrupted — including by a bad deploy or a mistaken delete, which high availability faithfully replicates to the standby. You need both, and they solve different problems.
If this is not quite it
AWS Monitoring & Alerting
Alerts that fire when customers are affected, and stay quiet the rest of the time.
From $299 2–4 days
Want this done?
Tell me what you are running and I will come back with a fixed price and a date. If it turns out you do not need this, I will say that instead.
Prefer to talk? Book a free call ↗ · Or hire me on Upwork ↗ · Typical reply within one business day.
Before you enquire
When I answer
Sunday to Thursday, 09:00–18:00 EET. Outside that I will still look, but I will not promise a time.
No 24/7 desk, and I will not pretend otherwise
One person, one time zone. If round-the-clock cover is what you need, you need a team, and I will say so rather than sell you a plan that cannot deliver it.
Your AWS bill stays yours
You pay Amazon directly and you keep control of the account. Nothing here resells your infrastructure or sits between you and your own billing.
A price that starts with "from" is a starting price
Every service page lists exactly what pushes a quote above it, before you ask. You get a fixed number in writing before any work begins.