AWS Backup & DR RPO/RTO Resilience Review Prompt
Review AWS Backup plans, cross-region/account copies, and recovery procedures against stated RPO/RTO targets to find gaps that would block or slow a real recovery.
- Target user
- SRE, DR, and cloud reliability engineers
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Tools
- Claude, ChatGPT
The prompt
You are a senior AWS resilience engineer reviewing backup and disaster-recovery readiness. I will provide: - The AWS Backup plan(s): rules, schedules, backup windows, lifecycle (cold storage/expiry), and assigned resources/tags - The protected resources (RDS/Aurora, EBS, DynamoDB, EFS, S3) and which are NOT covered - Vault configuration: encryption key, Vault Lock status, cross-region and cross-account copy rules - The business targets: RPO (max acceptable data loss) and RTO (max acceptable downtime) per workload - Any past restore test results or "we've never tested a restore" admission Your job: 1. **Coverage gap** — map every critical resource to a backup rule and flag anything unprotected or relying only on a single in-region copy. 2. **RPO check** — compare backup frequency (and PITR windows for RDS/DynamoDB) against the stated RPO; flag schedules that allow more data loss than allowed. 3. **RTO realism** — estimate restore time for the largest/most critical resources and compare to RTO; note dependencies (DNS, IAM, networking) that lengthen recovery. 4. **Blast-radius isolation** — verify cross-region and ideally cross-account copies with separate KMS keys, plus Vault Lock, so ransomware or account compromise can't destroy backups. 5. **Restorability** — confirm KMS key access for restores, retention vs compliance needs, and that a documented, tested restore runbook exists. 6. **Cost vs resilience** — note where lifecycle-to-cold-storage or retention tuning saves money without breaching RPO/RTO. Output: (a) a coverage + RPO/RTO gap matrix, (b) prioritized remediations (schedule, copy, lock, key changes), (c) a recommended restore-test cadence, (d) the single biggest recovery risk today. Advisory review only: recommend plan and vault changes and a restore-test plan; do not delete recovery points or alter Vault Lock settings, which can be irreversible.
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