Disaster Recovery Framework

Overview

As the prescription platform became a system of record, recovery knowledge remained distributed across infrastructure and application owners. A serious failure could stop prescription processing without a shared, tested response path.

What I Did

I defined the recovery framework, authored eight runbooks across the service’s major failure domains, and designed and facilitated a staging gameday with engineers operating the procedures live.

• Documented recovery responsibilities for application, database, cluster, network, stream, secret, delivery, and monitoring failures.
• Defined recovery and data-loss objectives appropriate for a critical pharmacy workflow.
• Exercised restart, failover, point-in-time recovery, and snapshot-restore scenarios.
• Captured timestamped validation evidence and revised the runbooks around gaps discovered during execution.
• Made recovery procedures searchable for faster use during incidents.

Engineering Decisions

A recovery plan is only a hypothesis until someone follows it under realistic conditions. The gameday measured the procedure, exposed ambiguity, and gave the team a concrete basis for improving readiness.

Outcome

The gameday executed four real recovery scenarios and validated a 30-minute recovery time. The resulting runbook set turned service recovery from undocumented team knowledge into a repeatable operational capability.