How a small team moved from single-region risk to a simple active/passive multi-region setup without doubling complexity.

On this page

A Pragmatic Multi-Region Strategy for Small Teams

Multi-region can easily become a science project. This is what worked for a five-person platform team supporting a SaaS product.

Starting Point: Single Region, Shared VPC #

We began with everything in one AWS region: RDS, EKS, S3, and a shared VPC.

RTO/RPO were theoretical.
Failover docs existed, but no one had run them end-to-end.

Step 1: Read Replicas and S3 Replication #

Added a read replica of RDS in a second region.
Enabled S3 cross-region replication for critical buckets.
Agreed on an RPO of 15 minutes.

Step 2: Terraform Modules for Two Regions #

Instead of cloning the entire stack, we:

Created a region-aware module for shared resources.
Used workspaces to differentiate primary vs secondary.

```hcl module "vpc" { source = "./modules/vpc" region = var.region primary = var.is_primary } ```

Step 3: DNS and Runbooks #

Used Route53 failover records with health checks on a lightweight /healthz endpoint.
Wrote an explicit runbook:
- who can declare a disaster,
- which Terraform workspaces to apply,
- how to flip DNS and confirm.

We didn’t solve every theoretical edge case, but we can now lose a region and recover in under an hour with a plan the team has actually rehearsed.

A Pragmatic Multi-Region Strategy for Small Teams

A Pragmatic Multi-Region Strategy for Small Teams

Starting Point: Single Region, Shared VPC #

Step 1: Read Replicas and S3 Replication #

Step 2: Terraform Modules for Two Regions #

Step 3: DNS and Runbooks #

Stay Updated

What We Learned Running Weekly Game Days on Our CI/CD Pipeline

Systemd Tricks We Use to Keep Services Boring

More from Cloud

Best APM and Observability Tools in 2026 — Compared by Cost and Use Case

Cloud Cost Optimization — The Practical Guide for AWS, Azure, and GCP

Detecting and Rotating Leaked Cloud Credentials

Best APM and Observability Tools in 2026 — Compared by Cost and Use Case

Cloud Cost Optimization — The Practical Guide for AWS, Azure, and GCP

Detecting and Rotating Leaked Cloud Credentials

Kubernetes Cost Tools — Kubecost vs OpenCost vs Cast AI

AIOps & Self-Healing Infrastructure in 2026: A Practical Guide

Keyless Deploys to AWS with GitHub Actions OIDC

You might have missed

GitOps with Argo CD: Best Practices for 2026

Prompt Engineering Best Practices: Maximizing LLM Performance

Embedding Models Comparison: Choosing the Right Model for Your Use Case

About Kiril Urbonas

A Pragmatic Multi-Region Strategy for Small Teams

Starting Point: Single Region, Shared VPC#

Step 1: Read Replicas and S3 Replication#

Step 2: Terraform Modules for Two Regions#

Step 3: DNS and Runbooks#

Stay Updated

What We Learned Running Weekly Game Days on Our CI/CD Pipeline

Systemd Tricks We Use to Keep Services Boring

More from Cloud

Best APM and Observability Tools in 2026 — Compared by Cost and Use Case

Cloud Cost Optimization — The Practical Guide for AWS, Azure, and GCP

Detecting and Rotating Leaked Cloud Credentials

You might have missed

GitOps with Argo CD: Best Practices for 2026

Prompt Engineering Best Practices: Maximizing LLM Performance

Embedding Models Comparison: Choosing the Right Model for Your Use Case

About Kiril Urbonas

Starting Point: Single Region, Shared VPC #

Step 1: Read Replicas and S3 Replication #

Step 2: Terraform Modules for Two Regions #

Step 3: DNS and Runbooks #