Don’t make DR an afterthought. Pick your RTO/RPO first; everything else (replication method, cost, complexity) flows from that. For many teams, synchronous replication across datacenters sounds tidy but kills write throughput and availability; async with automated failover and careful gap-handling often wins in practicality.
A few pragmatic knobs to turn:
- Treat snapshots/backup metadata as first-class data — you’ll regret a backup that can’t be restored because the catalog is corrupt.
- Use point-in-time recovery where possible (PITR) for human-error scenarios; combine PITR + periodic full backups to balance storage.
- Network matters: cross-site WAN latency changes behavior. Test failovers over realistic links, not on the LAN.
- Consistency across components — if your app, cache, and DB need to failover together, orchestration (Terraform/Ansible + runbooks) beats ad-hoc scripts.
- Regularly rehearse restores. A “green” DR plan that’s never been exercised is just a hallucination.
- Don’t ignore the small stuff: DNS TTLs, client retry logic, credentials rotation, and monitoring alert sanity all bite during recovery.
If you’re hybrid (cloud + metal), aim for repeatable, declarative infrastructure and keep a lightweight “canary” DR path that proves end-to-end recovery without blowing the budget. Happy to unpack a specific stack (Postgres/MySQL/Oracle + K8s/VMs) if anyone wants.
