AWS has released a new feature under the Route 53 umbrella i.e., Route 53 Application Recovery Controller. It is a new AWS service to help automatically recover from application and infrastructure failures. Also, it provides true zero-data loss application protection for your cloud-native applications. Today, let’s dig a little deeper into the Route 53 Application Recovery Controller. 

Table of Contents

How does the Route 53 Application Recover controller work?

Capabilities of the Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller

Use cases

Conclusion

About CloudThat

How does the Route 53 Application Recover controller work?

The Route 53 Application Recovery Controller provides a set of capabilities that make it easy for developers to continuously monitor an application’s ability to recover from failures and control its recovery across AWS Regions, and AWS Availability Zones. Applications that require high availability and minimal recovery time objectives can benefit from Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller, such as those that use active-active architecture. However, applications that use other redundant architectures may also benefit from this.

Capabilities of the Amazon Route 53 Application

Recovery Controller

Application replicas are usually deployed redundantly across availability zones within an AWS Region using AWS’ global infrastructure, and traffic is routed to the correct replica using a Network Load Balancer. It has three different capabilities a Readiness check, routing control, and safety rules.

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/route53/application-recovery-controller/ 

Use cases

Readiness check continuously monitors AWS resource capacity configurations, AWS quotas, and routing policies, and provides information that you can use to successfully recover from application failure. By performing a readiness check, you can make sure that your recovery infrastructure is adequately scalable and configured to handle any eventuality. 

One example is the AWS service limits, where the Readiness Check makes sure that you have enough capacity to deploy in the region where you are falling off. So, if you don’t have enough capacity to scale to lower capacity, to handle the traffic, then your region is not ready. In this case, it will let you know that the region is not ready.

1. Readiness check continuously monitors AWS resource capacity configurations, AWS quotas, and routing policies, and provides information that you can use to successfully recover from application failure. By performing a readiness check, you can make sure that your recovery infrastructure is adequately scalable and configured to handle any eventuality.
2. Routing control Routing controls give you a mechanism or single button switch to route traffic from one region to another region. Routing controls ensure that the system remains available during failures by balancing traffic between application replicas. Traffic is redirected to application replicas with Amazon Route 53 health checks and DNS resolutions. Amazon Route 53 traditional automated health-check based failover can be improved in three ways by routing controls: 
   • Routing controls allow you to failover an entire stack of applications based on metrics or partial failures. Examples include increasing error rates by 5% or reducing latency by a millisecond. 
   • Router controls allow you to override routing easily and safely, whether it’s for maintenance purposes or when your monitors fail to detect an issue. 
   • To prevent flapping and other side effects associated with fully automated health checks, routing controls use safety rules.
3.  Safety rules
   • Customer-defined rules that enforce certain preconditions before failover.
   • Avoids cascading failures due to client-side bugs
   • prevents small issues causing outsized impacts due to health checks failing for non-critical issues
   • Examples
     • failover only if there is sufficient spare capacity
     • failover only one availability zone at a time.

Conclusion

After taking a deep dive into the topic, we can say that applications are not at stack as AWS Route 53 Application Recovery Controller is out for the rescue. With the help of it, the manual and time-consuming task of application failover is eased. 

About CloudThat

CloudThat being the first organization in India to visualize the need for cloud certification training for corporates & professionals, incepted in 2012, as an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, AWS Advanced Training Partner, and Microsoft Gold Partner adheres to its vision of “Empowering people and businesses to be future-ready and future-secure” through a proven training methodology.  Being AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, we offer consulting services in the areas of Multi-Cloud Security & Compliance, Cloud Enablement Services, Cloud-Native Application Development, OTT-Video Tech Delivery Services, Training & Development & System Integration Services. Know more about us…

References

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-route-53-application-recovery-controller/

https://aws.amazon.com/route53/application-recovery-controller/

WRITTEN BY Aishwarya Joshi

Aishwarya works as a Research Associate (AWS Media services) with CloudThat. She is an enthusiastic individual and a good team player. A positive attitude is her way of dealing with everything. She enjoys learning new technologies and exploring various ways of problem-solving. As of late, she has become proficient in cloud services and enjoys writing technical blogs.