Managing and testing the IT disaster recovery of your workloads in the cloud or any virtualized environment can be time consuming and cumbersome. As a result, resilience in cloud management and automation across your teams and technology can benefit the enterprise in terms of increased efficiency and avoiding reputationally damaging errors caused by repetitive manual procedures.
This article provides an overview of cloud principles and insights, cloud disaster recovery best practices, and automation for cloud and disaster recovery.
Cloud principles and insights
With on-premises applications, you know where your data, applications and servers are located. With cloud-native architectures, it is all microservices so your workloads could be spread across different availability zones. You need a different recovery model to understand where all your workloads and servers are in the cloud.
Understanding cloud resilience and cloud disaster recovery
Cloud resilience is the ability for an application to resist or recover from disruptions, like outages or failures. This can include disruptions to infrastructure, dependent services, misconfigurations, network issues or load spikes.
Cloud disaster recovery (DR) is the process to recover systems and data after a disaster event. Cloud DR shares the same objective as traditional, on-premises IT DR, that is, swiftly recovering your critical applications and data from disruptions to maintain business operations.
Here's the takeaway: Cloud DR isn't a completely new concept, but rather it is a traditional IT DR strategy enhanced by the power and flexibility of cloud computing.
Shared responsibility of cloud disaster recovery
When using a public cloud provider for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), your provider manages and protects their infrastructure, storage, and network. However, you, as the enterprise, manage the workloads, security, middleware, and guest operating systems.
This means that you own the availability and recovery (including recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives) of the workloads, security, middleware, guest operating systems and data sets.
Figure 1 below illustrates the responsibility of managing workloads and services in the cloud. As you migrate to the cloud, your disaster recovery procedures require updates. Learn about the challenges that come with managing cloud resilience and disaster recovery (DR) and how to overcome them in this eGuide:. What cloud providers aren’t telling you about disaster recovery.
Figure 1: Understand the shared responsibility of managing application and services in the cloud
Automation for cloud resilience
Recovery procedures, including failovers, can consist of hundreds or thousands of tasks across multiple teams. This is true whether your applications are on-premises in a data center or in the cloud. Automating recovery processes provides you confidence that you can seamlessly failover your applications.
Through integrating technology tools, you standardize functionality, interfaces and implementation across cloud workloads - enabling automation and efficiencies.
As enterprises embark on their cloud journey, there is a focus on people and processes early in the adoption process. Many enterprises are incorporating cloud-first principles to accelerate adoption, ensure commitment, and secure the funding necessary to execute a successful cloud strategy. One way the cloud helps improve efficiency is by forcing more adoption of automation practices. Managing workloads in the cloud is complex and multifaceted compared to a traditional data center, and without automation scale simply can’t happen.
“Without automation, you can’t manage cloud at scale.” - Gartner
By enabling automation for cloud resilience, you reduce friction, lower complexity and cost, and remove configuration drift. However, not everything can or should be automated. Human judgment, decision making and approval are still required to fill in the gaps of your recovery processes.
Key recommendations for automating cloud disaster recovery
- Know your goals and where you are today
Understand your automation capabilities today and set realistic goals and expectations for your team. Don’t automate for automation’s sake. Rather, your automation initiatives should directly align to business goals.
- Start small, think big with automation
While your automation initiatives should marry up to business goals, it’s important to start with a smaller, less complex workflow or integration and consider factors such as the amount of teams it will impact or the level of change management required. This aligns to the continuous integration, continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline methodology.
- Ensure that tooling addresses aggregation
It’s important that your technology tools bring together all tasks, both manual and automated. This way, you can orchestrate an entire aggregated recovery process, not just portions.
- Partner across business and developer teams
Alignment and stakeholder management is key to any project’s success. With automation, business managers need to understand the implications, costs and benefits of the automation, just as developers need to understand the business requirements and impacts of the automation they are building. It should be a real partnership so both teams are invested in mutual success.
- Identify your cloud management and resilience functional requirements
While commonalities across cloud management and resilience requirements exist, there are nuances that you need to consider. Identify and outline the requirements to ensure that your cloud resilience automation strategy and tooling can address your enterprise’s specific needs.
- Have a common template repository and execution engine
Complete visibility across cloud disaster recovery and resilience plans provides the transparency needed to collaborate and make more informed decisions. A cloud disaster recovery template repository and execution engine provides the foundation for repeatable and automated processes.
- Automation is a long-term strategy, not just a tool
Create an automation strategy that builds a portfolio of initiatives across both operations and deployment domains. Recognize that successful automation requires knowledge of automation value possibilities and attention to related people and processes. Drive prioritization decisions with a long-term perspective to produce a flexible and interconnected portfolio of initiatives. Continue to develop and spread critical software engineering and product management skills to grow automation capabilities across the infrastructure and operations (I&O) function.
Advantages of automated cloud disaster recovery
Automation of resilience and recovery operations in the cloud applies the same engineering discipline that you use for recovery of your on-premises applications. Automation reduces manual errors and increases efficiency and productivity across multiple technology resilience domains. Recovery procedures should be captured in runbooks, tested, and their execution automated to occur in response to observed events when appropriate. When outlining your automation strategy, consider automating repetitive processes such as:
- Deploying application code
- Maintaining canaries that constantly monitor and test applications
- Performing regular automated failover recovery testing to ensure that each part of an application performs properly under all conditions
How can Cutover help with cloud DR automation
Cutover works with enterprises to turn complex cloud disaster recovery plans into automated, executable runbooks. Cutover’s cloud disaster recovery software connects teams and technology to take the risk and cost out of executing your cloud DR plans.
Schedule a demo to learn more.
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