Disaster recovery testing scenarios#

Disaster Recovery (DR) is the ability of software and/or services to handle extreme scenarios; this could be the failure of the software itself or an outage within a datacenter.

These situations are uncommon but can have a huge impact, so they need to be prepared for. Aiven provides this service to any Enterprise Support customers and can run these scenarios at your request up to 4 times per year.

What is a Disaster Recovery scenario?#

This is a preset scenario where an Aiven specialist will simulate an issue with your service and sabotage one (or more) of your Virtual Machines. For example, with an Aiven for PostgreSQL® service, we can sabotage the Primary instance and test the failover functionality or we can sabotage both nodes to test recovery time for a complete outage.

What is needed?#

  1. At least 7 working days notice and the time (plus timezone) that you would like this carried out.

  2. A throwaway service (i.e. one that is created specifically for this scenario and not a service used in Production).

  3. The virtual machine and/or the availability zone that you would like to target.

  4. An Enterprise Support contract.

How do we request this?#

You can request this by opening a support ticket, emailing support@Aiven.io or by contacting your Customer Success Manager.

How is it run?#

  • All communication during the exercise will occur in the support ticket.

  • We will contact you to confirm the start of the scenario, the actions we will take and the service affected. The scenario will not begin until it is confirmed by you.

  • Actions taken on the service and/or virtual machines will be communicated through the support ticket.