Geographical Redundancy for disaster recovery

The Geographical Redundancy feature enables an application to be fully restored and operational at an alternate data center with minimal downtime and data loss if the primary data center experiences a critical failure.

Geographical Redundancy maintains replicas of the production database of a WordPress application with realtime updates from the primary database. The replicas are located at a secondary data center, in a different geographical location than the primary data center. The availability of the replica makes it possible for the functionality of an environment to be fully restored within minutes in the event of a disaster.

Without Geographical Redundancy, functionality for an environment that has a very large database could require several hours to be restored. If hourly database backups are the only available resource to restore an environment’s functionality, data loss may also occur.

Access

By default, the Geographical Redundancy feature is disabled for all applications. When the production environment of an eligible application transitions to a launched status, Geographical Redundancy will be automatically enabled and operational.

Failover actions

The replica database at the secondary data center receives continuous monitoring and testing to ensure that it is in a ready state to handle traffic when necessary. If a critical failure occurs at the primary data center for an application that has Geographical Redundancy enabled, the following actions are taken by WPVIP:

• All resources for the application (e.g., app, cache, and batch) are activated at the secondary data center within a minute or less.
• One of the replica databases in the secondary data center is promoted to primary status.
• Traffic is redirected to the secondary data center.
• The secondary data center becomes the new primary data center for the application.
• Database replicas for the production environment are created and maintained in a new secondary data center as a fallback for future events.