How We Built Cross-Region Disaster Recovery for Astro on Google Cloud

Astro has introduced cross-region disaster recovery (DR) for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) data planes, enabling platform teams to pair primary and secondary clusters to ensure business-critical data pipelines remain operational even during regional outages. This DR capability, previously available on AWS, allows Airflow workloads to failover seamlessly with minimal downtime, adhering to a recovery time objective (RTO) of under one hour and a recovery point objective (RPO) of under 15 minutes. Unique to GCP, DR requires specific region pairings based on Google's supported dual-region configurations, impacting decisions on primary region selection. The infrastructure spans multiple availability zones and uses GCP's Cloud Storage dual-region buckets and Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL for state replication across regions. The implementation minimizes disruptions by maintaining consistent cluster IDs and configurations across failovers, with the DR system modeled as an extension of the existing cluster record. Networking on GCP demands planning for separate network ranges for the secondary cluster, and setting up DR involves a guided process with support from Astronomer for existing clusters. The capability is designed to be reliable and is continuously tested to ensure effectiveness during actual failover events, with Azure support planned for future expansion.

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