Region Failure Readiness Checklist for AWS Workloads

Retrospective: this article looks back at events from October 2025, written in 2026 with the benefit of hindsight.

Use this checklist to check whether an AWS workload is ready for a regional failure.

Business requirements

• Recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) agreed with the business.
• DR strategy chosen and funded (backup/restore, pilot light, warm standby, active-active).

Dependencies

• AWS services the workload depends on documented, including regional and global dependencies.
• Third-party SaaS dependencies documented, with their regional exposure.
• DNS, identity and certificate dependencies identified.

Data

• Replication configured for databases and storage.
• Replication lag monitored.
• Backups copied to another region and account.

Infrastructure

• Infrastructure as code can deploy the workload in the secondary region.
• Capacity pre-provisioned for warm standby or active-active.
• Secrets and KMS keys available in the secondary region.

Failover mechanism

• Route 53 health checks and failover records configured.
• Failover doesn't require control-plane changes in the failed region.
• Runbook documented and accessible outside AWS.

Operations

• Monitoring and alerting work in the secondary region.
• Status communication plan for customers.
• Break-glass access to AWS not dependent on a single region or SSO path.

Testing

• Failover tested within the past 12 months.
• Actual RTO and RPO measured.
• Gaps tracked to closure.