Objective

Design and implement resilience and recovery strategies for a Linux VM running in AWS. This checkpoint demonstrates high availability, disaster recovery, automation, and backup management for critical skills for production-grade cloud deployments.

Implementation

High Availability

• Configure an AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) in front of Nginx.
• Distribute traffic across multiple EC2 instances.
• Ensure service continuity even if one instance fails.

Disaster Recovery Drill

• Terminate the running EC2 instance.
• Launch a new instance with the same configuration.
• Validate that the application is back online.
• Restore application files from Amazon S3 backup.

aws s3 sync s3://mybucket-backup /var/www/html

Automation with Ansible

• Write an Ansible playbook to:
  • Install Nginx.
  • Deploy the HTML application.
  • Configure firewall rules (UFW).
• Run the playbook against new instances for rapid recovery.

Backup Strategy

• Ensures application data is always recoverable.
• Sync HTML app files to S3 regularly.

aws s3 sync /var/www/html s3://mybucket-backup

Deliverable

• Recovery Documentation: Step-by-step record of the disaster recovery drill.
• Automation Scripts: Ansible playbook and S3 sync commands.

Checkpoint

Learners must:

• Time their recovery drill (from failure to restored service).
• Compare against SLA goals (e.g. recovery within 15 minutes).
• Reflect on whether automation and backups improved recovery speed and reliability.

Hackers Notebook

Resilience and recovery are essential for production readiness:

• Load balancing ensures high availability by distributing traffic across multiple servers.
• Disaster recovery drills validate preparedness and highlight weaknesses in recovery workflows.
• Automation with Ansible reduces manual effort, ensuring consistent and rapid redeployment.
• Backup strategies with S3 guarantee data durability and restore capability.

By practicing resilience and recovery, administrators gain confidence that their systems can withstand failures, recover quickly, and meet SLA commitments.