DevOps Engineer interview question · Most asked
How do you plan and test disaster recovery as a DevOps engineer?
Summary
Agree on RTO and RPO per system with the business, choose a recovery strategy that meets them (backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, active-active), automate the recovery steps (infrastructure as code, scripted restores, DNS failover), and test them regularly with real restores and failover exercises, measuring actual recovery times.
Longer Answer
Common gaps found in tests: backups that cannot be restored (missing keys or permissions), restores far slower than expected, dependencies forgotten (DNS, secrets, container registries, third-party services), runbooks that are out of date, and knowledge held by one person. Store backups in separate accounts or regions with immutability to survive ransomware or account compromise.
Key Points
- RTO/RPO per system.
- Strategy to match objectives.
- Automate recovery; test regularly.
- Isolated, immutable backups.
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