13. RTO/RPO and backup recovery setup

13.2. Recovery strategies

13.2.1. Pilot Light

The term pilot light is often used to describe a DR scenario in which a minimal version of an environment is always running in the cloud. The idea of the pilot light is an analogy that comes from the gas heater. In a gas heater, a small flame that’s always on can quickly ignite the entire furnace to heat up a house. This scenario is similar to a backup-and-restore scenario.

For example, with AWS you can maintain a pilot light by configuring and running the most critical core elements of your system in AWS. When the time comes for recovery, you can rapidly provision a full-scale production environment around the critical core.

AWS re:Invent 2018: Deep Dive: Hybrid Cloud Storage Arch. w/Storage Gateway, ft. CME Grp. (STG305-R)