AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery
- What it is
- Continuously replicates on-premises or cloud servers into a low-cost staging area in AWS.
- On disaster, launches full production instances in minutes (low RTO), with sub-second data loss (low RPO).
- Why it is cheap
- The staging area runs minimal, low-cost resources. You only pay for full compute during a drill or an actual failover.
- Key terms it maps to
- RPO (Recovery Point Objective) — how much data you can afford to lose.
- RTO (Recovery Time Objective) — how long you can afford to be down.
- Not to be confused with
- AWS Backup — scheduled point-in-time copies; restoring is slower and loses more data.
- Application Migration Service — same underlying technology, but for a one-time migration rather than ongoing DR readiness.