In my role as a Database Administrator at FreshStart Tech, I've had real-world experiences deploying Amazon Aurora for High Availability and Disaster Recovery scenarios. Last year, we moved a crucial part of our customer data to the AWS environment, specifically onto Aurora.
To ensure high availability, we leveraged the Aurora Multi-AZ deployments, which automatically replicated our database across multiple zones. This configuration gave us immediate failover capability in case of a zone outage. We further enhanced availability by creating Read Replicas of our database to distribute read traffic among multiple instances.
For disaster recovery, we conducted routine snapshots of our Aurora database, storing them in AWS S3 buckets located in a separate geographical AWS region. This ensured our data could be quickly retrieved and restored in case of a catastrophic event. Our HA/DR scenario using Aurora improved system availability to 99.99%, and significantly reduced our Recovery Time Objective (RTO), safeguarding our business during potential outages or calamities.