A practical guide to implementing disaster recovery (DR) with Terraform, covering four main strategies: backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site active/active. Explains key DR concepts (RTO, RPO, failover, failback, infrastructure drift) and walks through a concrete example using two EC2 instances across AWS regions (us-east-1 and us-west-2) with Route 53 health checks and failover routing. Also covers Terraform state management best practices in a DR context — remote storage with S3 versioning, cross-region replication, and DynamoDB locking — plus guidance on testing DR plans quarterly through failover drills and drift detection.
Table of contents
What is disaster recovery in Terraform?Terraform disaster recovery strategiesHow to implement DR with Terraform (example)Managing Terraform state in a DR contextHow to test your Terraform DR planHow Spacelift simplifies Terraform disaster recoveryKey pointsFrequently asked questionsSort: