Secure disaster recovery operations

You own a regional RAG platform with PostgreSQL, object storage, and vector indexes at primary us-east-1 and recovery us-west-2. The goal is to prove recovery objectives through restore and failover, including data integrity and application correctness rather than infrastructure availability alone. The measurable target is meet a 15-minute recovery point objective and 60-minute recovery time objective; restore the latest consistent PostgreSQL backup, rebuild vector indexes from immutable documents, route 10% then 100% traffic, and keep citation mismatch below 0.1%. The known production tension is hot standby minimizes RTO but doubles substantial model and data cost; rebuildable vector indexes reduce backup complexity but can dominate recovery time for large corpora.

List every capability needed to configure, inspect, inject failure into, mitigate, and roll back Disaster recovery for a regional RAG platform with PostgreSQL, object storage, and vector indexes. Separate read, change, and destructive permissions. Grant them to short-lived roles rather than permanent personal credentials. The ordinary workflow must not require administrator access, and emergency access must expire automatically and emit an audit event.

Review this operational configuration for dangerous defaults:

objectives:
  rpo_minutes: 15
  rto_minutes: 60
recovery_order: [postgres, documents, vector_index, api, dns]
validation:
  database_checksum: required
  citation_mismatch_ratio_max: 0.001
traffic_steps_percent: [10, 50, 100]
abort_on: [checksum_failure, mismatch_budget_exceeded]

Check fail-open versus fail-closed behavior, external endpoints, data retention, tenant isolation, command scope, and rollback authorization. Validate unknown fields and unsafe ranges. If a setting can affect all tenants, require staged application and an independent approver. Keep secrets in the platform's secret store; never print them in config dumps, command history, metrics, or drill artifacts.

Run the security and operations gate:

./dr credentials rotate --scope drill --expires 4h
terraform -chdir=dr show -json | conftest test -p policy -

Prove a read-only responder cannot perform the mutation, an authorized role can perform only the scoped change, and the audit record contains actor, UTC time, target, revision, and result. Then revoke or expire the role and repeat the denial check. For scripts, pin dependencies, quote user-controlled values, enable strict error handling, and provide a dry-run mode for high-impact operations.

The monitoring surface backup_age_seconds, backup_restore_duration_seconds, vector_rebuild_progress_ratio, dns_failover_seconds, citation_mismatch_ratio, and recovery_checkpoint_timestamp must avoid raw prompts, document contents, credentials, email addresses, and unconstrained customer identifiers. Use reason-code enums and controlled dimensions. Restrict detailed logs by role and retention, and test redaction with deliberately planted synthetic secrets.

The system must still meet meet a 15-minute recovery point objective and 60-minute recovery time objective; restore the latest consistent PostgreSQL backup, rebuild vector indexes from immutable documents, route 10% then 100% traffic, and keep citation mismatch below 0.1%. under security constraints; a control that makes mitigation impossible during an outage is incomplete. Exercise the scenario simulate total loss of us-east-1 plus a corrupted latest vector snapshot; select the prior verified database backup, rebuild embeddings, and document the exact data-loss boundary before traffic cutover. with the least-privilege role and confirm rollback remains possible if a dependency or identity provider is degraded. Estimate provider, compute, storage, and telemetry cost, and set a hard drill budget where applicable.

The prior incident was a regional control-plane outage coincided with a silently corrupt vector snapshot; DNS moved in 11 minutes but answers cited stale documents because application validation was skipped. Ask whether excess access, missing approval, poor auditability, or unsafe tooling could have worsened it. The core tradeoff is hot standby minimizes RTO but doubles substantial model and data cost; rebuildable vector indexes reduce backup complexity but can dominate recovery time for large corpora. Document who accepts the residual risk and when it will be reviewed.

Approval requires threat model, permission matrix, redaction test, audit sample, rollback owner, cost bound, and evidence that emergency access works and expires. Do not approve on policy prose alone.