Testing Your Disaster Recovery in AWS Lightsail

According to Murphy's law, anything that can go wrong will go wrong (at some point in time), not just AWS, Azure, GCP, or your on-premise environments. Computers and infrastructure are complex and it is perfectly understandable that one small component may one day bring down the whole work load.

Thus having fault-tolerant, resilient set up, with the relevant backup and disaster recovery process, is critical to the continuity of your operations.

Assuming if you have a AWS virtual machine instance running on Lightsail, it is super easy to prepare and stimulate that rainy day. Here is how I did it:

1. Create a snapshot (backup of your instance)

2. Spin up a new instance from the snapshot

3. Re-connect the public IP address

Detach from the old instance and attach it to the new instance

Tada! You are done! Have fun infrastructuring!