Resilience Engineering vs. Traditional DR
Why planning for known failures isn't enough, and how resilience engineering changes the equation.
The Problem with Traditional DR
Traditional disaster recovery starts with a list of known failure scenarios and writes a plan for each one. Server goes down: fail over. Database corrupts: restore from backup. Region outage: switch to secondary.
The problem? The failures that hurt most are the ones you didn't predict. A cascading dependency failure. A silent data corruption that's been replicating for weeks. A third-party API change that breaks your authentication at 2 AM on a Friday.
Traditional DR plans are brittle. They work for the scenarios they were written for and fail for everything else.
What Resilience Engineering Adds
- Plans for known failure modes
- Recovery plans written once, filed away
- Tested annually (if at all)
- Binary: system is up or system is down
- Assumes you can predict what will break
- Builds systems that adapt to any failure
- Recovery is continuously validated
- Drilled quarterly with measured outcomes
- Graceful degradation: partial > total failure
- Assumes failure is inevitable and unpredictable
CloudPresto's Approach
We do both, but resilience is the foundation. Every architecture decision asks "how do we recover from this?" before "how do we prevent this?"
Prevention reduces frequency. Resilience reduces impact. You need both, but if you can only invest in one, invest in recovery, because prevention eventually fails.