Testing compliance with the initial requirements (for example, failover test, resiliency)

Question: Can you describe the key steps involved in conducting a failover test in AWS to ensure compliance with initial high-availability requirements?

In a failover test on AWS, you would typically follow these steps:
Review the initial high-availability requirements to ensure the test matches the specified criteria.
Provision resources across multiple Availability Zones to provide redundancy.
Configure Route 53 or a load balancer to handle traffic shifting.
Implement proper health checks to detect the failure of primary resources.
Manually trigger a failure or use AWS Fault Injection Simulator to simulate infrastructure disruptions.
Observe the system’s response and measure the failover time.
Validate that the application continues functioning with acceptable performance.
Document the results and compare them with the initial requirements.

Question: What is the purpose of performing resiliency testing in the context of AWS architecture, and how does it relate to compliance with initial requirements?

Resiliency testing on AWS ensures that the system remains functional under adverse conditions, such as network failures, server failures, or spikes in user traffic. This testing helps to validate that the architecture meets the initially defined resiliency requirements such as RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective). Performing resiliency testing is crucial to compliance because it demonstrates that the system can withstand and quickly recover from disruptions, maintaining service levels as per the initial design considerations.

Question: In AWS, how do you ensure that your VPC configurations are compliant with network resiliency and failover requirements?

To ensure VPC configurations are compliant, you should:
Set up subnets across multiple Availability Zones for high availability.
Utilize Elastic IP addresses and Network Load Balancers for failover.
Implement VPC peering and AWS Direct Connect for robust networking connectivity.
Use AWS Transit Gateway for scalable and resilient connectivity between VPCs.
Regularly review and test route tables and network ACLs to ensure they align with the failover and resiliency strategy.
Follow AWS best practices and continually monitor the environment with tools like AWS Config and AWS CloudTrail.

Question: What AWS services can you use to monitor compliance with the initial requirements of a network failover and how would you configure them?

To monitor compliance with network failover requirements, you can use:
AWS CloudWatch for monitoring the performance of resources and setting up alarms for failover events.
AWS Config to track changes to the AWS environment and verify that they meet the compliance requirements.
Amazon CloudTrail to log and track user actions and API usage that might affect failover configurations.
AWS Route 53 health checks to monitor endpoint health and trigger failover in case of endpoint failure.
You would configure these services to continuously monitor defined metrics and policies, alerting in case of deviations from the initial requirements.

Question: What testing methods would you use to verify that RDS instances in AWS comply with initial failover and recovery requirements?

For RDS compliance, you would:
Set up RDS Multi-AZ deployments to provide high availability and enable automatic failover without administrative intervention.
Manually initiate a failover to measure recovery times and observe if they meet the Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
Enable RDS Enhanced Monitoring for more granular metrics and Real-Time Query Monitoring to assess database performance during failover.
Use AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) for continuous replication and to test compliance with recovery objectives during the migration (failover test).

Question: How would you measure and evaluate the effectiveness of a failover procedure on AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) in relation to initial SLAs?

To evaluate ELB failover effectiveness:
Benchmark the normal operation metrics against SLAs for response times and throughput.
Conduct a failover simulation by de-registering instances or using the AWS Fault Injection Simulator.
Measure how long it takes for the ELB to detect the failed instances and reroute traffic to healthy ones.
Assess if the failover time and performance post-failover are within SLA bounds.
Analyze the logs and metrics from CloudWatch to identify any deviations from expected behaviors.

Question: What considerations should you take into account when designing a multi-region failover strategy on AWS for compliance with initial disaster recovery requirements?

In designing a multi-region failover strategy on AWS, consider:
The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) set in the initial requirements for disaster recovery.
Utilize services like Amazon Route 53 for DNS failover to redirect traffic to a healthy region.
Implement replication strategies using Amazon RDS cross-region replication or Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication.
Design the application for region failover, for instance using DynamoDB Global Tables for multi-region deployments.
Regularly test the failover mechanism to ensure it activates and works within the desired time frame and data loss objectives.

Question: During a failover test in AWS, what metrics are most critical to monitor to ensure that the process aligns with the initial requirements?

During a failover test, critical metrics to monitor include:
Failover Time – the time it takes for the failover process to complete.
System Recovery Time – duration before the system is fully operational again.
Data Loss – any data lost during the failover, to assess compliance with RPO.
Transaction Integrity – ensuring that transactions in progress during the failover are handled correctly.
Application Performance – response time and throughput during and after failover.
These metrics must be assessed against the initial requirements to confirm compliance.

Question: How can AWS Organizations help in enforcing and managing compliance with failover and resiliency policies across multiple AWS accounts?

AWS Organizations can help by:
Applying Service Control Policies (SCPs) to enforce failover and resiliency policies across all accounts in the organization.
Using consolidated billing to track costs associated with high availability and failover configurations for budget compliance.
Facilitating automated deployment of compliance-ready resource configurations across accounts using AWS CloudFormation StackSets with predefined templates.

Question: Explain how automation plays a role in testing and ensuring compliance with initial failover and resiliency requirements in AWS.

Automation helps to:
Execute failover tests consistently and frequently without manual intervention, ensuring continuous compliance.
Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools like AWS CloudFormation or Terraform to standardize and replicate compliant architectures quickly.
Use AWS Lambda functions in conjunction with Amazon CloudWatch Events to automate response and recovery actions.
Incorporate AWS Step Functions to orchestrate complex failover sequences across different AWS services automatically and reliably.