RPO and RTO

Learn recovery point and time objective concepts.

RPO and RTO

A disaster plan has two key targets:

RPO (Recovery Point Objective): the maximum acceptable period of data loss. A nightly backup makes the RPO 24 hours; an hourly backup 1 hour.
RTO (Recovery Time Objective): the longest acceptable time for the service to be working again.

              last backup        disaster                service back
   ───────────────┼──────────────────┼───────────────────────────┼──────►
                  └──── RPO ─────────┘└────────── RTO ────────────┘

Targets are chosen according to business needs: a payment system wants minutes, an internal wiki can live with hours.

Meeting the targets

To lower RPO: frequent backups, continuous WAL archiving in the database, or replication to another region. To lower RTO: fast rebuild with GitOps, a ready second cluster (warm standby), automatic DNS failover and regular drills.

service     RPO       RTO      method
odeme       1 min     15 min   database replication + warm standby
magaza      1 hour    1 hour   hourly Velero + GitOps
wiki        24 hours  1 day    nightly backup

Exercise Hourly backup

To lower the RPO to 1 hour, write two commands: create a Velero schedule named saatlik that backs up magaza on the hour ("0 * * * *") and keeps it for 48 hours; then trigger a backup from the schedule right away (velero backup create --from-schedule saatlik).

Show example solution

velero schedule create saatlik --schedule="0 * * * *" --include-namespaces magaza --ttl 48h
velero backup create --from-schedule saatlik

Test yourself

If backups are taken every 6 hours, what is the worst-case RPO?
- 1 hour
- 24 hours
- 0
- 6 hours
Show answer

6 hours — If disaster strikes just before the next backup, the last 6 hours are lost.
The longest accepted time for the service to work again.
```
Target abbreviation: ____
```
Show answer
```
Target abbreviation: RTO
```
Match.

RPO

Data loss
RTO

Downtime
warm standby

Ready second cluster
WAL archive

Continuous database backup

Next lesson: Summary - Disaster recovery

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