About Company
Customer is one of the specialized fund houses (investing in equities) from the pacific region. Customer focuses on value addtion through long term investing & independent research.
The Challenge
Customer had an internal Active Directory (AD) (on EC2) which was migrated from on-premise. Since the AD(EC2) was setup in single zone, there were issues with AD connected apps during any instance maintenance / zonal issues.
The Solution
- As the instance was restricted to single zone, the initial approach was to have a secondary / standby AD. An EC2 with AD feature enabled in different availabliity zone was setup and made as secondary domain controller. This addressed the issues with AD on single EC2, but not when there is a zonal failure.
- To ensure continuous backups are in place, AWS backup service was enabled. In case of any zonal / issues with primary or secondary instance, backup and restore process was followed to recover AD into 3rd availability zone there by ensuring availability into minimum of two zones.
- Since all the applications were setup in single region, the AD was also limited to availability in the same region.
Benefits achieved by the company
Customer was able to achieve a low cost recovery solution for a standalone instance from one zone to another. With the ability of inbuilt AD replication between multiple domain controllers, availability was achieved to an acceptable level even during zonal issue.
