Multi-region that works when it matters

AWS defines four Disaster Recovery strategies, ordered from lowest to highest cost and from highest to lowest RTO/RPO: (1) Backup & Restore — backups in another region only, RTO of hours; (2) Pilot Light — minimal core replicated in standby, scaled on-demand when primary fails, RTO of tens of minutes (sometimes called "cold standby"); (3) Warm Standby — scaled-down version of full environment always running, RTO of minutes; (4) Multi-Site Active-Active — traffic distributed across both regions simultaneously, RTO of seconds. Each pattern is chosen based on business downtime cost.

AWS Application Recovery Controller is the official AWS multi-region control plane. It lets you orchestrate failover without depending on the downed region's control plane — a classic problem that broke previous DRs. Includes routing controls, readiness checks that validate the secondary region is actually ready, and zonal shift for moving traffic between AZs. Caleidos implements it as standard in Warm Standby and Active-Active architectures.

Because that is what we see in most cases. Companies with impeccable multi-region infra that on incident day cannot execute failover: outdated runbooks, untrained on-call, change management that blocks the switch, improvised business communication. That is why Caleidos does both: technical architecture + IT operational transformation. Together they make resilience real.

Multi-region is recommended when your workload is critical for revenue (payments, banking core), you have regulation requiring it (FSI, healthcare, data sovereignty), or your required RTO is below one hour. For many mid-market workloads, multi-AZ in a single region solves the problem at significantly lower cost. We do a Business Impact Analysis to decide together.

The choice depends on real geography (submarine cables, not maps), user mix and data sovereignty requirements. For Peru: AWS Virginia (primary by Pacific submarine cable ~75-90ms) + AWS Oregon or AWS Santiago Chile as secondary — AWS São Paulo only if compliance requires it (high latency crossing the Andes). For Chile: AWS Santiago (primary sub-30ms) — Caleidos is the official Launch Partner — combined with Virginia (maximum maturity), São Paulo (southern cone) or Oregon (US west) per case. For Ecuador: AWS Virginia + Oregon or Santiago as secondary. For Costa Rica and USA: AWS Virginia + AWS Oregon.

Multi-Site Active-Active typically doubles AWS compute spend. Warm Standby adds 30-50%. Pilot Light adds 10-20%. Backup & Restore is the cheapest (storage cross-region only). The right calculation compares this cost against the cost of NOT having it: revenue downtime, churn, and regulatory fines. For critical workloads the investment almost always pays off.

Yes. Quarterly or semi-annually based on criticality. We use AWS FIS (Fault Injection Service) to inject controlled faults, run GameDays with the full on-call, measure real RTO and RPO against the defined SLO, and document findings. It is the /en/services/chaos-engineering offering in its recurring form.

Yes. Aurora Global Database for critical SQL (sub-second cross-region replication), DynamoDB Global Tables for multi-master NoSQL, ElastiCache Global Datastore for replicated caches, S3 Cross-Region Replication for objects. We evaluate each for its consistency, latency, and cost tradeoffs.

Caleidos Lens© operates the multi-region architecture 24×7 — health monitoring per region, failover runbook execution, automated escalation, trained on-call, and monthly readiness reports. It is the natural complement to a multi-region design: someone has to operate the operational complexity multi-region introduces.