Project 19 of 100: AWS Disaster Recovery Tutorial | Pilot Light Strategy with Route 53 Failover, RDS

In this video, we build a production-grade Pilot Light disaster recovery architecture on AWS, achieving automated DNS failover between two regions with an RTO of under 30 minutes. This is Project 19 of the CloudGuard 100-Project AWS Portfolio Series, designed for engineers preparing for the AWS Solutions Architect Professional (SAP-C02) certification. What you will build: A multi-region DR system using a warm primary in us-east-1 and a dormant pilot light in us-west-2, with automated failover driven by Route 53 health checks, an RDS read replica promotion, and an optional Lambda function that activates the DR environment without any manual intervention. AWS Services covered: Amazon Route 53 (Failover Routing + Health Checks) Amazon RDS (Multi-AZ + Cross-Region Read Replica) Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Application Load Balancer AWS Lambda (Automated DR Activation) Amazon EventBridge AWS CloudFormation AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store Timestamps: 0:00 — Introduction 1:15 — RTO & RPO Framework 3:00 — Architecture Overview 4:15 — Deploying the Primary Stack 6:30 — Creating the RDS Read Replica 8:00 — Copying the Application AMI 9:00 — Deploying the Pilot Light DR Stack 11:00 — Configuring Route 53 Failover 13:00 — The Failover Drill 16:30 — Automating Failover with Lambda 18:00 — Upgrading to Warm Standby 19:30 — Resource Cleanup 🔗 Resources: • CloudGuard Portfolio: https://cloudguardportfolio.com • GitHub: https://github.com/sulemoore #AWS #DisasterRecovery #Route53 #PilotLight #AWSFailover #RDS #CloudFormation #AWSCertified #SolutionsArchitect #CloudGuard #awstutorialforbeginners