Most multi-region plans cover the application and its database, then miss the tools around it. Audit the things you need during recovery: deployment pipeline, secrets store, identity provider, container registry, DNS, monitoring and the status page. If any lives only in the failing region, your failover may stall.
Why this matters
AWS disaster recovery guidance draws a line between data plane and control plane operations. The data plane serves live traffic. Control planes configure the environment. For maximum resiliency the guidance says to use only data plane operations during failover, because data planes typically have higher availability goals.
The same idea extends to your own tooling. A failover that needs your build system to deploy, your secrets store to start services, or your chat tool to coordinate has hidden dependencies, and they may all sit in the region that is down.
The audit
For each item, ask: where does it run, what happens if that place is down, and have we tested that?
Deployment pipeline. Can you deploy to the recovery region if your CI service or its runners are unavailable? Keep a documented manual path and test it. AWS recommends deploying infrastructure changes and code changes to both regions, so the standby does not drift.
Container and artifact registry. If images are pulled from a registry in the failing region, new instances cannot start. Replicate images to the recovery region, and check pull credentials work there.
Secrets and configuration. Services need secrets to start. Check that the recovery region has its own copy and that access policies exist there.
Identity and access. If your single sign on or your cloud login depends on one region, engineers may be locked out. Keep a tested emergency access route, covered in designing break glass access.
DNS and certificates. Where is your DNS hosted? Who can change records? Check the time to live on records you would change and that certificates exist for the recovery endpoints.
Monitoring and alerting. If monitoring runs in the failed region, you lose sight at the worst time. Run at least one external check from elsewhere.
Status page and communications. Host the status page on infrastructure separate from the product. Keep a contact list outside your main chat system.
Licensing and quotas. Service quotas in the recovery region must allow production scale, as AWS notes. Check license servers and third party services pinned to a region or an IP allow list.
Third party providers. List the vendors your service cannot run without. Find out where they run, and whether you have a plan if they are down.
Make the result useful
Put the findings in a table with columns for dependency, location, owner, workaround and last tested. Mark every item with no workaround. Those are your priorities, ranked by how many services they block.
Do not try to fix everything. Some dependencies are acceptable to leave if the workaround is cheap, such as a manual deploy script. The goal is knowing, with a named owner for each gap.
Test by simulation
Run a game day where you pretend the primary region and its tools are unreachable. Block access from the test team to those endpoints and try to deploy a trivial change to the recovery region. You will find a missing credential or an undocumented step within the first hour.
For a broader rehearsal format, see how to run a tabletop exercise.
Quick check
What is the most commonly missed dependency?
The deployment pipeline and the secrets store, because they sit behind the application and are rarely tested from the recovery side.
Should the status page live with the product?
No. Host it separately so it stays up when the product region is down.
Sources
Last reviewed: 19 October 2026.
