Recovery targets come from business tolerance#
| Objective | Question | Illustrative target |
|---|---|---|
| RPO | How much recent data loss can the business tolerate? | 5 minutes |
| RTO | How long may recovery take? | 30 minutes |
These are objectives for a specified disaster scenario, not unconditional guarantees. A payment ledger may require a very low RPO; an internal analytics dashboard may tolerate hours. Lower targets generally increase replication, standby, automation, testing, and operational cost.
- Claiming “zero loss and instant recovery” without a failure model.
- Using one RPO/RTO for every product capability.
- Confusing data-loss tolerance with downtime tolerance.
Related practice problems
Use the manifest-backed prompts below to apply this lesson in a complete design.
- Use defined recovery strategies to meet recovery objectivesAWS Well-Architected Framework
Reach this point to mark the lesson as read.