AWS Disaster Recovery Plan: How to Prepare for the Next AWS Outage

When the recent AWS outage hit, it reminded everyone that no cloud is immune. The question isn’t if AWS will go down — it’s how quickly your business can

get back up.

At Sisifo, we’ve seen too many infrastructures where “disaster recovery” lives inside a PowerPoint or an engineer’s head. So when outages happen, teams wait for AWS to fix the problem instead of recovering before AWS resolves it.

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The Real Impact of an AWS Outage

• Hours of downtime while teams scramble to find who owns which script or instance.

• Lost revenue and transactions that never make it back once systems sync again.

• Data inconsistencies across replicated environments that were never properly tested.

• Reputation damage as customers experience silence instead of service.

Your AWS disaster recovery plan shouldn’t live in a slide deck — it should live in your code: automated, versioned, and ready to rebuild itself without human intervention. That way, when AWS comes back online, your infrastructure restores itself.

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The Mindset Shift: From Manual Fixes to Automated Recovery

Disaster recovery isn’t about heroically logging into AWS to bring things back online. It’s about designing systems that recover without you.

If your DR playbook still includes:

• Logging into EC2s to restart apps

• Manually syncing databases

• Pushing commands to rebuild containers

Then your system isn’t resilient — it’s dependent on whoever’s awake.

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Containers: The Hero of Modern Disaster Recovery During a AWS outage

When everything breaks, containers don’t panic.

Docker lets you rebuild your entire environment with the same app, configuration, and dependencies — the backbone of repeatable recovery.

Our internal rule is simple:

“Docker for everything and nothing directly inside EC2.”

By deploying through ECS, Fargate, or Kubernetes, you’re not tied to a single server, region, or engineer’s laptop. You can spin up your environment from code in minutes, not hours.

Best Practices for AWS Disaster Recovery:

• IaC everywhere – Use CloudFormation, CDK, or Terraform so failover is reproducible, not guesswork.

• Containers only – Deploy via ECS, Fargate, or Kubernetes; never rely on a single EC2 instance.

• Replication automated – Snapshots, database syncs, and cross-region backups should run on schedule.

• Regular drills – If you’ve never tested your DR plan, you don’t have one.

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Building Your AWS Disaster Recovery Plan: The Modern Stack

Modern recovery lives in automation, containers, and infrastructure as code (IaC):

• IaC: Terraform / CloudFormation / CDK — your DR should be one deploy command.

• Containers: ECS, Fargate, or Kubernetes — not manually maintained EC2s.

• AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS): Continuous replication and automated failover.

• AWS Backup & Cross-Region Replication: Protect data across availability zones.

• Resilience Hub: Continuously test your recovery readiness.

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Sisifo’s Takeaway: Design for Graceful Failure

Infrastructure always fails — that’s the only guarantee. The question isn’t if you’ll fail, but how gracefully you’ll recover.

The best AWS disaster recovery plans don’t announce themselves. They run quietly, automatically, before panic ever enters the room.

If your first instinct during an outage is to open the AWS console, the disaster has already won.

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Build a More Resilient Cloud with Sisifo

Want to make sure your AWS environment is set up for rapid recovery and resilience?

Reach out to us for a disaster recovery diagnostic, and we’ll ensure your infrastructure is ready for the next AWS shutdown.