What is Amazon's own Disaster Recovery plan?

Hello.

AWS uses commercially reasonable efforts to make these AWS Cloud services available, ensuring service availability meets or exceeds AWS Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

But it is important to understand that Security is a shared responsibility between AWS and the User. The shared responsibility model describes this as security of the cloud and security in the cloud:

• Security of the cloud – AWS is responsible for protecting the infrastructure that runs AWS services in the AWS Cloud. AWS also provides you with services that you can use securely. The effectiveness of our security is regularly tested and verified by third-party auditors as part of the AWS compliance programs. In the Console, "AWS Artifact" provides on-demand access to security and compliance reports from AWS.

• Security in the cloud – Your responsibility is determined by the AWS service that you use. You are also responsible for other factors including the sensitivity of your data, your organization’s requirements, and applicable laws and regulations.

For example, a service such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) requires the customer to perform all of the necessary resiliency configuration and management tasks. Customers that deploy Amazon EC2 instances are responsible for deploying EC2 instances across multiple locations (such as AWS Availability Zones), implementing self-healing using services like AWS Auto Scaling, as well as using resilient workload architecture best practices for applications installed on the instances.

Documentation for the Shared Responsibility Model in DR plans:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/disaster-recovery-workloads-on-aws/shared-responsibility-model-for-resiliency.html

Please ensure that customer is aware of two things, shared responsibility model and AWS Global Infrastructure and region correctly. As per shared responsibility, AWS ensures availability of Infrastructure and services offered by AWS. When it comes to infrastructure, AWS has the concept of a Region, which is a physical location around the world where we cluster data centers. We call each group of logical data centers an Availability Zone. Each AWS Region consists of a minimum of three, isolated, and physically separate AZs within a geographic area. Unlike other cloud providers, who often define a region as a single data center, the multiple AZ design of every AWS Region offers advantages for customers. Each AZ has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. So if disaster strikes one AZ, region can still stay available for customers. Given that, AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple AZs to achieve even greater fault-tolerance. AWS infrastructure Regions meet the highest levels of security, compliance, and data protection.

Region can only be affected when redundancy at all levels (Power, cooling and network) are failed. Customer that need to ensure availability to their workload in the case of regional disaster, should look for cross region DR plan part of their design.