Disaster Recovery: Impressive RPO and RTO objectives set by Google Apps Operations
Unless you are running a fly by night shop, DR (Disaster recovery) should be one of the top issues for your operations team. In a “Scalable architecture†world, the complexity of DR can become a disaster in itself. Yesterday Google Announced that it now finally has DR plan for Google Apps . While this is nice, one should always take such messages with a pinch of salt, until they prove it that they can do it. Look at the DR plan for Google App engine which was also there, but still suffered more than 2 hour outage because of incomplete documentation, insufficient training and probably lack of someone to make a quick decisive decision at the time of failure. But back to Google Apps for now. These guys are planning for an RPO of 0 seconds , which means multiple datacenters will always be in consistent state all the time. And they want a RTO to be instant failover as well ! This is an incredible DR plan, and requires technical expertise in all 7 layers of OSI Model to achieve it