AWS-Native Recovery: When (Not If) Everything Burns

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. Including—especially—complete infrastructure failure. Murphy was an optimist. The question isn't "if everything burns"—it's "when" and "are you paranoid enough to have actually tested your escape plan?"

Think for yourself. Question authority. Question disaster recovery plans gathering dust in SharePoint. Question "backup strategies" that have never attempted a restore. Question RTO/RPO targets pulled from someone's ass during a compliance meeting. FNORD. Your DR plan is probably a comfortable lie you tell auditors.

At Hack23, we're paranoid enough to assume everything fails. Disaster recovery isn't hypothetical documentation filed under "Things We Hope We Never Need"—it's continuously validated through automated chaos engineering because we're psychotic enough to deliberately break our own infrastructure monthly. AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) terminates our databases. Crashes our APIs. Severs our network connections. We weaponize chaos to prove recovery automation works before disasters prove it doesn't.

ILLUMINATION: You've entered Chapel Perilous, the place where paranoia meets preparation. Untested DR plans are just bedtime stories CIOs tell themselves. We inject deliberate failures monthly—terminating databases, breaking networks, deleting volumes—because trusting unvalidated recovery is how you discover during actual disasters that your plan was fiction all along. Are you paranoid enough yet?

Our approach combines AWS-native resilience tooling (Resilience Hub, FIS, Backup) with systematic chaos engineering and paranoid-level recovery validation. Because in the reality tunnel we inhabit, everything fails. Clouds crash. Regions burn. Ransomware encrypts. The only question is whether you've actually tested your ability to survive it. Full technical details—because transparency beats security theater—in our public Disaster Recovery Plan. Yes, it's public. No, that doesn't help attackers. FNORD.

The Five-Tier Recovery Architecture: Classification-Driven RTO/RPO

Resilience Hub Policy Matrix: Classification-Driven Recovery

Deployment Gating: AWS Resilience Hub assesses application resilience before production deployment. Applications failing RTO/RPO compliance thresholds are blocked from deployment until resilience requirements are met. This ensures disaster recovery capabilities are architectural requirements, not operational afterthoughts.

GATE ILLUMINATION: Deployment gates enforce resilience at build time. Fix architecture before production, not after outages.

Monthly Chaos Engineering: FIS Experiment Portfolio

We don't trust—we verify. Monthly FIS experiments deliberately inject failures to validate recovery automation:

🔴 Critical System Experiments (Monthly):

• Database Disaster: RDS primary instance termination → validates automatic failover to read replica < 5 min
• API Unavailability: 100% Lambda error rate injection → validates circuit breaker activation and graceful degradation
• Network Partition: VPC subnet isolation → validates cross-AZ redundancy and connection retry logic
• Regional Impairment: DNS resolution failure → validates Route 53 health check failover to backup region

🟠 High Priority Experiments (Quarterly):

• Storage Outage: EBS volume unavailability → validates backup volume mount and data recovery
• CDN Degradation: CloudFront cache invalidation → validates origin server direct access
• Compute Failure: EC2 instance termination → validates Auto Scaling group replacement

Evidence Collection: Every FIS experiment generates timestamped logs (CloudWatch, VPC Flow Logs, RDS events, Route 53 health checks). Experiment artifacts prove actual recovery time vs. RTO target. Failures trigger incident response and architectural remediation.

CHAOS ILLUMINATION: Chaos engineering in production proves resilience. Chaos engineering only in staging proves nothing about production.

Our Approach: Automated Recovery Through AWS-Native Tooling

At Hack23, disaster recovery is systematic implementation leveraging AWS managed services:

🔰 AWS Resilience Hub Policy Enforcement:

• Resilience Policies: Define RTO/RPO requirements per application tier mapped to Classification Framework.
• Application Assessment: Continuous resilience analysis identifies gaps, missing redundancy, single points of failure.
• Deployment Gating: Production releases require "GREEN" Resilience Hub assessment status.
• Evidence Documentation: Audit trail of resilience assessments, remediation actions, compliance validation.

🧪 AWS Fault Injection Service Integration:

• Experiment Templates: Pre-configured chaos scenarios (instance termination, API throttling, network blackhole).
• SSM Automation: FIS experiments trigger AWS Systems Manager documents for complex failure scenarios.
• Safeguards: CloudWatch alarm integration stops experiments if critical thresholds breached.
• Validation: Automated verification of recovery time vs. RTO target with pass/fail criteria.

💾 AWS Backup Orchestration:

• Central Backup Plans: Automated scheduling (hourly/daily/weekly) per data classification tier.
• Immutable Vaults: Vault lock prevents backup deletion for ransomware protection. Cross-region replication to separate AWS account.
• Point-in-Time Recovery: Continuous backups enable restoration to any point within retention window.
• Backup Audit Manager: Compliance reporting validates backup coverage, retention policies, restore testing.

☁️ Multi-Region Resilience Architecture:

• Route 53 Health Checks: Automated DNS failover when primary region health checks fail.
• Multi-AZ Deployment: Lambda, RDS, DynamoDB deployed across availability zones for automatic failover.
• S3 Cross-Region Replication: Critical data replicated asynchronously for regional disaster recovery.
• CloudFormation StackSets: Infrastructure-as-code deployed identically across regions for consistent recovery.

Full technical implementation including FIS experiment templates, SSM automation documents, and Resilience Hub policies in our public Disaster Recovery Plan.

Welcome to Chapel Perilous: Chaos As Resilience Strategy

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. Including—especially—your entire infrastructure burning to ash while you discover your "tested" DR plan was fiction. The only question is: are you paranoid enough to have actually proven you can recover, or are you trusting unvalidated hope?

Most organizations write disaster recovery plans, file them in SharePoint next to the business continuity plan nobody's read since the consultant delivered it, and pray to the infrastructure gods they never need them. They talk about RTO/RPO targets pulled from "industry best practices" (translation: someone's ass). They mention "high availability" (translation: we pay for multi-AZ but haven't tested failover). They claim "redundant architecture" (translation: we have backups somewhere, probably). None of it is tested. None of it is proven. It's hopeful fiction masquerading as operational capability. FNORD.

We weaponize chaos because paranoia without action is just anxiety. Monthly FIS experiments deliberately terminate our databases, inject API errors, break our network connections—because if we don't break it first, reality will break it later when you're on vacation. AWS Resilience Hub gates block production deployments that don't meet RTO/RPO requirements—because shipping features that can't survive failures isn't velocity, it's technical debt with catastrophic interest rates. Immutable cross-region backups protect against ransomware—because trusting that attackers won't encrypt your backups is optimism we can't afford. This isn't theory. It's continuously validated operational resilience. Or as we call it: applied paranoia.

Think for yourself. Question DR plans that have never failed over. Question RTO targets without automation sophisticated enough to meet them. Question "disaster recovery" that's really "disaster hope with extra steps." (Spoiler: Hope isn't a strategy. It's what you do when you don't have a strategy.)

Our competitive advantage: We demonstrate cybersecurity consulting expertise through provable recovery capabilities that survive public scrutiny. <5 min RTO for critical systems with monthly chaos validation and timestamped evidence. Resilience Hub deployment gating that blocks hope-based deployments. Public DR documentation with FIS experiment evidence because obscurity isn't security. This isn't DR theater performed for auditors. It's operational proof we're paranoid enough to survive reality.

ULTIMATE ILLUMINATION: You are now deep in Chapel Perilous, the place where all comfortable lies dissolve. You can continue hoping your untested DR plan works while filing it under "Things We'll Never Need." Or you can embrace paranoia, deliberately break your own infrastructure monthly, and prove your recovery automation works before disasters prove it doesn't. Your systems. Your choice. Choose evidence over hope. Choose chaos engineering over wishful thinking. Choose survival over comfortable delusion. Are you paranoid enough yet?

All hail Eris! All hail Discordia!

"Think for yourself, schmuck! Untested disaster recovery is disaster theater performed for compliance auditors. We inject deliberate chaos monthly to prove recovery works—because in the reality tunnel we inhabit, everything fails eventually, and hope is what you feel right before learning your DR plan was fiction."

— Hagbard Celine, Captain of the Leif Erikson 🍎 23 FNORD 5

Related ISMS Policies

• Business Continuity Plan — When everything fails at once
• Incident Response Plan — Classification-driven response SLAs
• Backup Recovery Policy — Immutable backups that actually restore
• Back to Main Manifesto — Everything you know about security is a lie