disaster-recovery-planner_skill

Overview

This skill designs disaster recovery strategies to keep your platform and services resilient. It covers RTO/RPO tiering, automated backups, WAL-based point-in-time recovery, and multi-region failover patterns. The guidance is practical and focused on minimizing downtime and data loss for production systems.

How this skill works

The skill assesses service criticality and maps each component to RTO/RPO targets. It prescribes concrete backup scripts, retention rules, and health-check backed DNS failover configurations. It also produces runbooks for failover, recovery verification steps, and test schedules to validate readiness.

When to use it

• Planning business continuity for production services
• Defining backup and retention policies for databases
• Designing multi-region or cross-AZ failover for critical APIs
• Developing runbooks and automation for recovery drills
• Setting RTO/RPO targets for new or changing systems

Best practices

• Classify systems by criticality and assign RTO/RPO tiers (Critical/Important/Standard)
• Automate full and incremental backups, and archive WAL for point-in-time recovery
• Use health-checked DNS failover or load-balancer-based cross-region failover for services
• Test DR procedures quarterly and verify backups automatically after creation
• Document step-by-step runbooks and maintain observable alerts for backup/failover failures

Example use cases

• Designing a DR plan for payment and authentication services with <1 hour RTO and <5 minute RPO
• Implementing daily full backups plus WAL archiving to S3 for PostgreSQL with 30-day retention
• Configuring Route53 health checks and primary/secondary DNS failover for an API endpoint
• Creating automated backup verification jobs and alerting on failures
• Drafting runbooks and scheduled quarterly failover tests for a multi-region deployment