Disaster Recovery Testing

Table of Contents

• Overview
• When to Use
• Quick Start
• Reference Guides
• Best Practices

Overview

Implement systematic disaster recovery testing to validate recovery procedures, measure RTO/RPO, identify gaps, and ensure team readiness for actual incidents.

When to Use

• Annual DR exercises
• Infrastructure changes
• New service deployments
• Compliance requirements
• Team training
• Recovery procedure validation
• Cross-region failover testing

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

# dr-test-plan.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: dr-test-procedures
  namespace: operations
data:
  dr-test-plan.md: |
    # Disaster Recovery Test Plan

    ## Test Objectives
    - Validate backup restoration procedures
    - Verify failover mechanisms
    - Test DNS failover
    - Validate data integrity post-recovery
    - Measure RTO and RPO
    - Train incident response team

    ## Pre-Test Checklist
    - [ ] Notify stakeholders
    - [ ] Schedule 4-6 hour window
    - [ ] Disable alerting to prevent noise
    - [ ] Backup production data
    - [ ] Ensure DR environment is isolated
    - [ ] Have rollback plan ready
// ... (see reference guides for full implementation)

Reference Guides

Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:

Best Practices

✅ DO

• Schedule regular DR tests
• Document procedures in advance
• Test in isolated environments
• Measure actual RTO/RPO
• Involve all teams
• Automate validation
• Record findings
• Update procedures based on results

❌ DON'T

• Skip DR testing
• Test during business hours
• Test against production
• Ignore test failures
• Neglect post-test analysis
• Forget to re-enable monitoring
• Use stale backup processes
• Test only once a year