What is Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller?

Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller provides three distinct capabilities: readiness checks, routing controls, and zonal shifts. With Route 53 ARC, you can gain insights into whether your applications and resources are prepared for recovery, and quickly mitigate impairments for a multi-Availability Zone or multi-Region application. Route 53 ARC helps you prepare for and accomplish faster recovery operations for applications running on Amazon.

For Route 53 ARC, only zonal shift is available in the Beijing and Ningxia Regions. Zonal shift helps you manage and coordinate recovery for Amazon applications by shifting load balancer traffic away when there’s an issue in an Availability Zone (AZ). Temporarily moving traffic for a resource away from an AZ helps your application recover quickly, minimizing impact for your customers.

The Amazon Global Cloud Infrastructure provides fault tolerance and resilience, with each Amazon Region comprised of multiple, fully-isolated Availability Zones. Route 53 ARC works within this Amazon structure to help your applications be resilient.

Multi-AZ recovery

Zonal shifts enable you to quickly recover from Availability Zone issues, by temporarily moving traffic for a resource away from an Availability Zone. Starting a zonal shift helps your application recover quickly, for example, from a developer's bad code deployment or from an Amazon infrastructure failure in a single Availability Zone, reducing the impact and time lost from an issue in one zone.

You can start a zonal shift for any managed resource in your account in a Region. Supported Amazon resources are automatically registered with Route 53 ARC. Resources that are registered for zonal shifts in Route 53 ARC are managed resources in Route 53 ARC.

Zonal shifts are temporary. You must specify an expiration when you start a zonal shift, of up to three days initially. If you want to still keep traffic away from an Availability Zone, you can update the zonal shift and set a new expiration.

Multi-Region recovery

Routing controls enable you to re-balance traffic across application replicas during failures, so that you can ensure that your application is available. Safety rules help protect you from unintended outcomes by imposing guard rails that you define. Using these rules, you can make sure, for example that only one of your endpoints, active or standby, is enabled and in service at a time.

For multi-Region recovery, Route 53 ARC can help you centrally coordinate failovers across multiple Amazon Regions. Extremely reliable routing controls enable you to recover applications by rerouting traffic, for example, across Regions. To do this, you partition your applications into redundant failure-containment units, or replicas. The boundary of each replica can be a Region or an Availability Zone, or even a smaller unit.

Readiness checks continually monitor Amazon resource quotas, capacity, and network routing policies, and can notify you about changes that would affect your ability to fail over to a replica and recover. Continual readiness checks help make sure that, on an ongoing basis, your multi-Region applications are scaled and configured to handle failover traffic.