✏️ Explanatory Question

What are RPO and RTO, and how do they drive your backup and replication strategy?

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Answer with Explanation

RPO (Recovery Point Objective) - how much data you can afford to lose, measured in time. RPO of 5 minutes means losing at most the last 5 minutes of writes.

RTO (Recovery Time Objective) - how long you can afford to be down during recovery.

RPO drives replication:

  • RPO = 0 - synchronous replication, since the write is not acknowledged until a replica has it. Costs write latency.
  • RPO of minutes - asynchronous replication.
  • RPO of hours - periodic snapshots.
  • RPO of a day - nightly backups.

RTO drives standby strategy:

  • RTO of seconds - active-active, traffic simply shifts.
  • RTO of minutes - warm standby with automated failover.
  • RTO of hours - cold standby, provision and restore on demand.
  • RTO of days - restore from archival backup.

Both get expensive fast, so set them per dataset: RPO 0 for payment transactions, but RPO of a day is fine for derived analytics that can be recomputed. And always add that an untested backup is not a backup - restores must be rehearsed.

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