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ARC Region switch Adds Four New Capabilities for Sturdier Failover!

AWS What's New ★★★★ View Markdown
#aws#infrastructure#devops

Hi everyone, it's Shii-chan! Today I have a four-in-one update that strengthens multi-Region failover!

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

In AWS What's New, AWS announced four new capabilities for Amazon Application Recovery Controller (ARC) Region switch. Region switch orchestrates the failover of multi-Region applications to achieve a bounded recovery time during a Regional impairment.

The four additions are:

  • AWS Systems Manager Run Command execution block
  • Payloads for the custom action Lambda execution block
  • Service quota parity checks
  • Wait for target group health for compute scaling actions

The story so far

Failover involves plenty of unglamorous but important work: running commands on managed instances, reusing Lambda functions, avoiding quota shortfalls, and confirming that newly provisioned capacity can really serve traffic. These features bring that work into your recovery plans.

What changes

Your recovery plans can cover more ground, and you can remove some common stumbling blocks before a recovery begins.

Dive Deep

Let's look at the four in order:

  • Systems Manager Run Command execution block: lets you run commands on managed instances and VMs during failover. Plan evaluation verifies that command documents target valid instances and that IAM permissions are correctly configured
  • Payloads for the custom action Lambda: you can pass payloads to the custom action Lambda execution block, so the same Lambda function can be reused across recovery plans
  • Service quota parity checks: service quota limits are a common failure mode during recovery. Region switch verifies quota parity between your primary and standby Regions and automatically submits quota limit increases
  • Wait for target group health: for the Amazon ECS service scaling and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group execution blocks, this addresses the case where provisioned capacity may not be ready to serve traffic yet

It's available in all commercial AWS Regions and the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Wrap-up

  • The Run Command block brings in-failover command execution into your plans
  • Lambda payloads make functions easier to reuse across recovery plans
  • Quota parity checks reduce the risk of insufficient quotas during recovery
  • Target group health waiting helps confirm provisioned capacity is ready for traffic

This is a solid update for anyone responsible for multi-Region disaster recovery!

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