Virtual Private Clouds for Availability Zone Recovery
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current network service providers face challenges in quickly restoring computing processes to a fully operational state after events like natural disasters, which can take days or weeks, leading to prolonged downtime and resource inefficiencies.
Innovation Solution
The implementation of virtual private clouds (VPCs) that can be deployed out-of-zone and/or out-of-region to quickly route provisioning and requests, utilizing in-band or out-of-band donor availability zones and elastic compute container instances to provision new recovery capacity without dependencies on impacted software or hardware, thereby minimizing downtime and resource usage.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If traditional data center recovery methods are used after an outage, then services can be restored, but the recovery process takes days or weeks causing prolonged downtime
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements pre-provisioned virtual private clouds (VPCs) and elastic compute container instances that are ready to be deployed immediately when an outage occurs. The recovery infrastructure is prepared in advance with all necessary configurations, networking, and computing resources pre-allocated, enabling rapid deployment without waiting for manual provisioning during the crisis.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates virtual copies of availability zones and regions through VPCs that replicate the same networking, computing, and storage configurations. These virtual replicas can be instantiated in donor availability zones or regions, providing functional duplicates that take over service responsibilities immediately while the original infrastructure recovers.
2Loss of time
If recovery infrastructure is pre-provisioned in donor availability zones, then recovery speed increases to minutes or hours, but network bandwidth and resource usage increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent provisions recovery infrastructure with excess capacity in donor availability zones, maintaining standby resources that are not immediately needed but become available when outages occur. This partial pre-provisioning of recovery capacity allows rapid deployment without requiring full-scale continuous operation of recovery systems, balancing resource consumption with recovery readiness.
Data Source
AI summary
Availability zone and region recovery are described. For an availability zone (AZ), a recovery availability zone (rAZ) may be identified based on available computing capacity of the recovery availability zone and geographic proximity of the availability zone relative to the recovery availability zone. In an instance in which the availability zone is impacted in which at least one of hardware and software of the availability zone is not fully operational, a virtual private cloud (VPC) is generated that establishes a peered connection between the availability zone and the recovery availability zone. A service is executed in the recovery availability zone, permitting any other services executing in the availability zone to invoke the service and become partially or fully operational.