Disaster Recovery

This article applies to deployments on AWS

VXG Cloud VMS uses a variety of methods for automatic and fast disaster recovery. There are 2 main steps:

1. Recovery of data.

2. Recovery of the infrastructure.

Data recovery

The data is stored using 2 services: Amazon RDS and Amazon S3.

Amazon RDS is used for storing indexing metadata - the most critical information required for proper operations of VXG Cloud VMS. VXG allows customers to choose between Amazon RDS Multi-AZ or Single AZ deployment. RDS Multi-AZ automatically creates a primary DB Instance and synchronously replicates the data to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone (AZ). In case of an infrastructure failure, Amazon RDS performs an automatic failover to the standby, so that you can resume database operations as soon as the failover is complete. In the case of RDS Single AZ, an automatic backup is performed every 5 minutes and allows to restore the DB to the previous state after a failover.

Amazon S3 is used for storing media data. Media data is stored in chunks usually 1 minute long. VXG allows customers to choose between S3 Standard and S3 One Zone IA object storage classes. With S3 Standard, the data will be automatically stored across multiple Availability Zones (AZ) and can be restored even in case of the Availability Zone destruction. In case of a temporary outage, only the affected objects (1 min long chunks) will be lost.

Infrastructure recovery

The infrastructure is deployed using AWS CloudFormation – an infrastructure as code that contains a complete description of the VXG infrastructure and allows to deploy it rapidly in any Availability Zone.

In addition, VXG constantly performs health checks of the system. In case if any EC2 instance shows signs of malfunctioning, it will be terminated, and the system will spin up a new instance automatically. The EC2 instances don’t retain any data and it’s safe to terminate them or when they stop due to hardware failures.