How do you approach disaster recovery planning in a cloud-based infrastructure, and what tools do you rely on for backup and recovery?

When preparing for disasters, in environments it's crucial to use strategies like replicating data across multiple regions having backup versions and utilizing tools such as AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery or Azure Site Recovery to automate the switch to a backup system when issues arise. Regularly testing these recovery plans is key to ensuring they work properly. Backups for data should be done at frequencies and follow specific time and point objectives for recovery. This helps maintain the integrity of the data. Additionally having storage options that're immutable can help protect against ransomware attacks, safeguard data availability and minimize disruptions to business operations, during emergencies. 

Disaster recovery in a cloud-based infrastructure involves creating a backup strategy with automated, regular snapshots of data and configurations. Tools like AWS Backup, Google Cloud's Backup and DR, and Azure Site Recovery are used for seamless backup and quick recovery. Plan for redundancy, testing recovery procedures, and ensuring off-site storage for critical data.

A comprehensive disaster recovery plan for cloud infrastructure starts with clearly defined recovery points and time objectives that align with business requirements. These objectives determine acceptable data loss timeframes and system downtime limits, shaping the recovery strategy.

Infrastructure as Code is the foundation for rapid recovery. It uses tools like Terraform or CloudFormation to version control and automatically rebuild infrastructure. This approach ensures that environments can be consistently recreated across regions during failover events.

The data protection strategy leverages cloud-native tools like AWS Backup and Azure Site Recovery alongside third-party solutions such as Veeam and Rubrik. These tools enable regular automated backups, cross-region replication, and point-in-time recovery capabilities. Critical databases and storage systems require continuous replication across regions, with encrypted backup storage and appropriate retention policies.

Testing and documentation are crucial, incorporating regular disaster recovery drills, validated failover procedures, and clear team responsibility assignments. Implementation typically includes recovery tiers based on workload criticality, continuous health monitoring through services like CloudWatch or Azure Monitor, and regular compliance validation to ensure the strategy meets business requirements.

The system should undergo periodic reviews and updates to accommodate changing business needs and emerging cloud capabilities.

To approach disaster recovery planning in cloud-based infrastructure, you have to answer the following questions.

1) What is your RPO (recovery point objective)?
2) What is your RTO (recovery time objective)?
3) How critical your workload?
4) How critical is your data?

Then you choose your solution in between the simpliest one - "backup and restore" and the most complex and expensive - "zero-downtime recovery".

Your solution may include:

• Multi-region strategies: deploy critical resources across regions using failover routing and traffic management 
• Automated backups: schedule backups for databases, volumes, and file systems with centralized policies.
• Cross-region replication to secondary regions for redundancy.
• Use light or scaled-down environments for fast recovery.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to automate environment restoration.
• Monitoring and Alerts: alarms and a health dashboard

Ensure that you are testing your DR plans to validate processes and identify gaps.

In a cloud-based infrastructure, my approach to disaster recovery emphasizes high availability (HA) over multiple geographic locations and, where feasible, across multiple clouds. By designing the environment with HA across redundant, geographically separated sites, we eliminate the need for traditional disaster recovery plans for single-site failures; services remain accessible without interruption. For critical applications, multi-region or multi-cloud architectures provide added resilience, ensuring that even if an entire location goes down, services can fail over to another seamlessly.

In scenarios where the environment is constrained to a single location, disaster recovery planning becomes essential. For these cases, disaster recovery tools natively available on cloud platforms such as Azure are preferred, and frequent backups with a strong focus on the 3-2-1 backup rule: three copies of the data stored on two different media types, with at least one copy in a geographically separate location or different cloud platform. This approach ensures that we have reliable, accessible backups in case of a disaster affecting the primary location.

In cloud-based disaster recovery planning, start by defining a clear disaster recovery (DR) strategy that includes Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). Leverage cloud-native tools and services such as AWS Backup, Azure Site Recovery, or Google Cloud Backup to automate and manage backups. Implement regular, automated backups and ensure they are stored in multiple locations or regions for redundancy. Conduct routine testing of your DR plan to validate that backup and recovery processes work effectively. Additionally, use monitoring and alerting tools to detect issues early and maintain a detailed documentation of the DR procedures for quick execution during an incident.