Architecture Visualization
All regions operational. Traffic distributed across US East, Central, and West.
Failover Timeline
00:00
Region Failure Detected
Health checks fail in US East. Automated monitoring triggers failover protocol.
00:15
DNS Propagation Initiated
Route 53 begins redirecting traffic to healthy regions with 60s TTL.
01:30
Database Failover Complete
RDS read replicas promoted to primary in US Central region.
02:00
Full Recovery
All traffic successfully routed to healthy regions. Zero data loss.
Traffic Distribution During Failover
Recovery Time
2m
DNS + health checks
Data Loss
0
Synchronous replication
Affected Users
<0.1%
In-flight requests only
Cost Analysis
| Component | Monthly Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-region compute (3x) | $45,000 | Active-active across all regions |
| Database replication | $18,000 | Cross-region RDS with read replicas |
| Data transfer | $12,000 | Inter-region sync + CDN |
| Route 53 + health checks | $500 | Global DNS with latency routing |
| Total | $75,500 | 2.5x single-region cost |
Performance Metrics
Key Achievement: P99 latency improved by 40% globally due to geographic distribution. Users automatically routed to nearest healthy region.
The Real Win
Multi-region isn't just about disaster recovery. It's about sleeping through incidents that would have been 3am pages. When AWS US East went down in 2023, our customers didn't notice. Our on-call engineer found out the next morning from Slack, not PagerDuty.