Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Getting started with multi-Region recovery in Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller

To fail over your applications by using routing control in Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller, you must have Amazon applications that are in multiple Amazon Web Services Regions. To get started, first, make sure that your applications are set up in siloed replicas in each Region, so that you can fail over from one to another during an event. Then, you can create routing controls to reroute the application traffic to fail over from a primary application to a secondary, maintaining continuity for your users.

So that you can use Route 53 ARC routing control to recover applications during an event, we recommend that you set up at least two applications that are replicas of each other. Each replica, or cell, represents an Amazon Web Services Region. After you've set up your application resources to align with Regions, make sure that your application set up for successful recovery by taking the following steps.

Tip: To help simplify setup, we provide Amazon CloudFormation and HashiCorp Terraform templates that create an application with redundant replicas that fail independently of one another. To learn more and download the templates, see Setting up an example app.

To prepare to use routing control, make sure that your application is set up to be resilient by doing the following:

Get started with routing control for traffic failover

Routing control in Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller enables you to trigger failover for your traffic to fail over between redundant application copies, or replicas, that are running in separate Amazon Web Services Regions. Failover is performed with DNS, using the Amazon Route 53 data plane.

After you set up your replicas in each Region, as described in the next section, you can associate each one with a routing control. First, you associate routing controls with the top-level domain names of your replicas in each Region. Then, you add a routing control health check to the routing control so that it can turn traffic flow on and off. This enables you to control traffic routing across replicas of your application.

You can update routing control states in the Amazon Web Services Management Console to fail over traffic, but we recommend that instead you use Route 53 ARC actions, using the API or Amazon CLI, to change them. API actions aren't dependent on the console, so they're more resilient.

For example, to fail over between Regions, from us-west-1 to us-east-1, you can use the update-routing-control-state API action to set the state of us-west-1 to Off and us-east-1 to On.

Before you create routing control components to set up failover for your application, make sure that your application is siloed into Regional replicas, so that you can fail over from one to the other. To learn more and get started siloing a new application or creating a example stack, see the next sections.

Setting up an example app

To help you understand how routing control works, we provide an example application called TicTacToe. The example uses Amazon CloudFormation templates to simplify the process, as well as downloadable Amazon CloudFormation and HashiCorp Terraform templates with a sample app so that you can quickly explore setting up and using Route 53 ARC yourself.

After you deploy the sample app, you can use the templates to create Route 53 ARC components, and then explore using routing controls to manage traffic flow to the app. You can adapt the templates and process for your own scenario and applications.