Architecture decisions for disaster recovery

The following table summarizes the architecture decisions for disaster recovery when you are deploying resilient workloads on IBM Cloud VPC infrastructure.

Table 1. Architecture decisions for disaster recovery
Architecture decision	Requirement	Alternative	Decision	Rationale
Disaster recovery approach	Ensure availability of resources if unplanned outages occur. Establish an alternative site for failover of workloads if failure occurs in the primary site. Support business targets for RPO/RTO. Support Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans.	Active-active Active-standby / Hot DR site Active-standby / Warm DR site Backup and restore (Cold DR site)	Active-active	Recommended approach for mission-critical applications with continuous availability requirements and near zero RPO/RTO.
			Active-standby (Hot DR site)	Recommended approach for core business applications High availability requirements RPO < 15 mins RTO < 1 hour
			Active-standby (Warm DR site)	Recommended approach for core business applications Medium to high availability requirements RPO < 1-hour RTO < 4 hours
			Backup and restore (Cold DR site)	Recommended approach for: Dev/test environments Low-priority workloads
DR Automation	Automate recovery tasks to minimize downtime	IBM Schematics Terraform Ansible BYO tool	IBM Schematics	IBM Schematics provides Terraform-as-a-Service and Ansible-as-a-Service to automate the provisioning and configuration management of the web, app, and DB tiers in the DR site.