DevOps: Disaster Recovery Plan For RDS Database Instances

Following our Information System Contingency Plan (ISCP) and Incident Response Plan (IRP) tabletop exercises, we have outlined a data recovery plan for our RDS instances in the event of an AWS infrastructure disaster scenario. The plan involves restoring our last backed-up data using various methods. In the event of a database instance failure or unavailability, follow these steps to restore:

Restore from RDS Snapshots:

1. Access VAEC-AWS platform.
2. Navigate to the RDS service.
3. Select "Snapshots-->Systems" from the left sidebar of the RDS page.
4. Choose the appropriate snapshot (e.g., Dev Snapshot) if all instances are affected, start with the Dev snapshot
5. Click on the "Actions" dropdown and select "Restore Snapshot."
6. Once the database is restored, it automatically creates a new instance.

Repeat the above steps for the Staging and Production database instances if necessary.

Connecting Your EC2 Instance to Your DB Instance:

1. Access VAEC-AWS platform.
2. Navigate to the new DB instance and click on "Modify."
3. Proceed to the Security Group settings and select the security group attached to your DB instance.
4. Add the inbound rule for your EC2 instance's security group. Note that each EC2 instance has a different security group. For example, if you created a snapshot of the Dev Database, attach the Dev EC2 Security Group.
5. Confirm that your servers can communicate with your EC2 instance by SSH into your EC2 instance.
6. Change the directory to the diffusion marketplace, list Docker processes/containers, and execute the application container's shell. Navigate to the app directory and execute the following command with appropriate parameters: # psql "host=$**** port **** dbname=$**** user=$**** password=$****."
7. If you receive a confirmation from the psql client regarding the server version, the connection is successful.