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How I Designed a Disaster Recovery Architecture That Achieves Sub-60-Minute RPO & RTO in Production

Disaster recovery is a business problem before it's a technical one. The right strategy starts with a single question: what can the business actually afford to lose? With a tolerance of up to one hour of data loss and downtime, a Pilot Light architecture on AWS proved to be the ideal fit — keeping non-compute infrastructure live in a secondary region at all times, while provisioning compute only at failover. Layered data replication, parallel CI/CD pipelines, and fully automated CloudFormation scripts bring the total recovery time to well under 60 minutes — validated through quarterly DR drills. The key insight: over-engineered DR is a hidden cost, and under-tested DR is a hidden risk.