Designing for High Availability & Disaster Recovery (RTO/RPO)

Short summary

A senior-level guide distinguishing high availability (redundancy within a running system) from disaster recovery (rebuilding after catastrophic failure). HA protects against single-component failures via multi-AZ replicas; DR handles region-wide outages, corrupting deploys, or ransomware. The article frames RTO and RPO as business decisions—not engineering ones—where the cost of downtime and data loss should drive how much resilience to buy.

• •HA and DR solve different problems and must be budgeted separately
• •RTO (how long down) and RPO (how much data lost) are business decisions driven by real cost analysis
• •Lowering RPO means more frequent backups; lowering RTO means faster restore or warm standby infrastructure

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