Pilot light
A minimal DR footprint is always alive: network foundations, secrets, and especially the replicated data plane. Compute scales when needed.
Always on
- Networking and IAM baseline
- Database replica or WAL destination
- Secrets and config path
Activated during incident
- Scale cluster or VM fleet
- Promote the data replica
- Deploy and route applications
Strength
Better RPO
Continuous replication usually improves data freshness more than cold backup alone.
Weakness
Compute still takes time
Users wait for application capacity to be created or scaled.
Good fit when data currency is critical but the business can tolerate some startup delay.