Active-active across two regions, or active-passive with failover, what's sensible?
Active-active is more expensive and complex. For most SMB apps, active-passive with automated failover is plenty, and your RTO is minutes instead of seconds.
Try this first
- 1Set your RTO and RPO before choosing architecture. Can downtime be 1 hour or 5 minutes? The gap determines 80 percent of the cost.
- 2Active-passive (warm standby) is usually enough: second region runs minimal, data replicates continuously, DNS failover swaps on outage. RTO 5-30 minutes.
- 3Only go active-active if your app is inherently stateless and latency demands global presence. Then you must handle dual-write coordination or conflict resolution.
- 4Test failover every quarter. A failover never tested doesn't work. Better a chaos day in scope than discovering it doesn't work under pressure.
- 5For data: use Aurora Global Database, Cosmos DB multi-region or Spanner. Don't roll your own MySQL replication across regions.
When to bring us in
If your RTO/RPO is contractually agreed with a customer or regulator (DORA, NIS2), the design isn't a back-of-envelope project. Get a review before committing.
See also
- Everyone logs in with the AWS root accountRoot is for emergencies and billing. Day-to-day work belongs in IAM users or SSO.
- Every developer has AdministratorAccessAdministratorAccess everywhere is convenient now, painful later. Start with role-based policies.
- Everyone has individual IAM users with their own passwordIdentity Center (formerly AWS SSO) links to your IdP and issues temporary credentials per session.
None of the above fits?
Describe your situation below. We pass your input plus the steps you already saw to our AI and return tailored next-step advice. If it's too risky to DIY, we'll say so.
Or skip the DIY entirely
Our Managed IT clients do not look these things up. One point of contact, a fixed monthly price, resolved within working hours.