In this learning activity, the student will investigate different techniques in AWS for disaster recovery. The lesson will present AWS Disaster Recovery techniques and quantify the appropriate use cases, based RTO/RPO, for each technique. The student will then utilize a CloudFormation template to recover a large environment with many AWS Resources. This exercise will show that CloudFormation is a viable option for all but the most aggressive recovery timeline. A risk in using CloudFormation in Disaster Recovery is that hardcoded AMI IDs can change. The student will examine a CloudFormation template that has a Lambda function and can retrieve AMIs in real-time. The student will execute this template and verify that an EC2 instance was created.
Learning Objectives
Successfully complete this lab by achieving the following learning objectives:
- Create a CloudFormation Stack
- Navigate to S3.
- Open the provided S3 bucket, and copy the URL of one of the provided templates (JSON or YAML — they both create the same resources).
- Navigate to EC2, and create a key pair called "drkeypair".
- Navigate to CloudFormation.
- Click Create stack.
- Select Specify an Amazon S3 template URL.
- Paste in the URL for the template from the URL bucket.
- Click Next > Next > Create.
- Create a Cross-Stack Reference
Create two CloudFormation stacks:
- Create a stack using the revised version of the original template.
- Create a stack using the "AMILookup" template.
