Recently, AWS announced the general availability (GA) of Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller, an additional new set of capabilities in Amazon Route 53. With the capabilities, it will be easier for customers to continuously monitor their applications’ ability to recover from failures and control their recovery across AWS Regions, Availability Zones, and on-premises infrastructure.
Typically, with their global infrastructure AWS provides the ability for customers to deploy application replicas redundantly across AWS Availability Zones inside an AWS Region – and leverage a Network or Application Load Balancer to route traffic to the appropriate replica. However, some customers have even more demanding requirements for high availability for their workloads and need an availability rate of 99.99% or above with recovery time objectives (RTO) measured in seconds or minutes. To meet such requirements, deploying multiple replicas across various AWS Availability Zones, AWS Regions, and on-premise environments combined with Amazon Route 53 is an option. The latter will route end-users to the appropriate replica reliably.
In an AWS News blog post on the GA release of Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller, Sébastien Stormacq, a principal developer advocate at AWS, explains:
Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller helps you to build these applications requiring very high availability and low RTO, typically those using active-active architectures, but other types of redundant architectures might also benefit from Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller. It is made of two parts: readiness check and routing control.
The readiness checks continuously monitor AWS resource configurations, capacity, and network routing policies and allow users to monitor any changes that would affect the ability to execute a recovery operation. Moreover, the checks will ensure that the recovery environment is scaled and configured to take over when needed. Secondly, the routing controls help to rebalance traffic across application replicas during failures to ensure that the application stays available. Finally, these controls work with Amazon Route 53 health checks to redirect traffic to an application replica, using DNS resolution.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/route53/application-recovery-controller/
Other public cloud vendors also provide similar capabilities as Amazon Route 53 and the new Application Recovery Controller. Microsoft, for instance, has two services:
• Azure DNS, including domain and DNS management, and
• Traffic Manager that provides DNS level traffic routing, load balancing, and failover capabilities
Lastly, the Amazon Route 53 Recovery Controller capability is available in any public, commercial AWS Region, and pricing is per readiness check and cluster per hour. More details on pricing are available on the Amazon Route 53 pricing page.
