Disaster Recovery — Roadmap
RTO and RPO, pg_dump and WAL-G backups, restore drills, multi-region replication, and runbooks that work at 3am.
Real-World Analogy
Insurance: you buy it before you need it, you hope you never use it, and when you do need it the quality of the policy determines whether you recover or don’t. A disaster recovery plan is your operational insurance — its value is entirely determined by whether it actually works when tested.
What you will learn
Most engineers think about disaster recovery the wrong way: as something you set up once and hope never matters. This track treats it as a practice — with measurable targets, regular drills, and runbooks that improve after every incident. You’ll learn to derive RTO/RPO from business reality (not guesswork), implement continuous backup with WAL-G, test restores on a schedule before you need them, set up streaming replication across regions, and write runbooks that an engineer under pressure can actually follow.
Chapters in this track
- RTO, RPO, and What They Actually Mean — deriving targets from business impact, recovery tiers, why untested plans fail
- Backup Strategies — pg_dump for snapshots, WAL-G for continuous PITR, retention policies, the 3-2-1 rule
- Restore Drills — automated weekly verification, full DR simulations, runbook structure, timing RTO
- Multi-Region Replication — streaming replication, sync vs async, Patroni for automated failover, cross-region architecture
- Runbooks & Incident Response — runbook structure, incident roles, communication cadence, blameless post-mortems