There are many types of failures that can happen at any time. These could be a result of disk failures, power outages, natural disasters, software errors, and human errors. In addition, there are several points of failure in any given cloud application. These would include DNS or domain services, load balancers, web and application servers, database servers, application services-related failures, and data center-related failures. You will need to ensure you have a mitigation strategy for each of these types and points of failure. It is highly recommended that you automate and implement detailed audit trails for your recovery strategy, and thoroughly test as many of these processes as possible.

In the next few sections, we will discuss various strategies to achieve high availability for your application. Specifically, we will discuss the use of AWS features and services such as: