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Lesson 2: Production Patterns - Hot-Hot, Hot-Warm, Hot-Cold

Multi-Region Platform Engineering: AWS, Kubernetes, and Aurora at Scale​

Episode 2 of 16 | Duration: 16 minutes

Target Audience: Senior platform engineers, SREs, DevOps engineers (5+ years experience)

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What You'll Learn​

  • RTO/RPO and cost trade-offs for each pattern
  • Hot-warm: 5-minute RTO, reasonable cost - the most common production pattern
  • Hot-hot: Subsecond failover, 7.5x cost multiplier
  • Hot-cold: 30+ minute RTO, 2x cost, acceptable for non-critical workloads
  • Pattern selection framework: Match architecture to actual business downtime costs

Key Takeaways​

  • Hot-hot architecture: Subsecond failover, 7.5x cost multiplier, requires active-active database writes
  • Hot-warm architecture: 5-minute RTO, 3-4x cost, most common production pattern for pragmatic teams
  • Hot-cold architecture: 30+ minute RTO, 2x cost, acceptable for non-critical workloads
  • RTO vs RPO trade-offs: Understand Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective requirements
  • Cost comparison: Real production numbers showing infrastructure spend across patterns
  • Pattern selection framework: Match architecture to actual business downtime costs, not fear-driven design

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