AWS Outage May 2026: Lessons for Database Disaster Recovery

This post analyzes a real-world AWS regional outage (May 2026) to highlight the limitations of multi-AZ high availability for regional failures. It contrasts this with the necessity of multi-region disaster recovery, using the outage as a case study to underscore the importance of SingleStore's Smart DR. The post details the RPO of up to 10 minutes, no idle compute cost until failover, full topology replication (workspace config, users, roles, permissions, firewall, pipelines, metadata), and simplified failover/failback processes. It also introduces the concept of 'Hot Standby' for faster RTO.