A bad Terraform apply recently targeted the wrong workspace and removed a significant portion of a staging-adjacent VPC before the mistake was caught. Our backups covered data stores, but the recovery plan did not include IAM roles, networking, infrastructure configuration, or cross-service dependencies. That incident highlighted the difference between having snapshots and being able to rebuild an entire AWS environment. For client accounts, how often do you test full-account recovery, and what cadence gives you realistic confidence without consuming a huge amount of engineering time?
3 Answers
If the infrastructure is genuinely defined as code, the basic recovery path should be deploying the correct version into a clean environment. The important part is proving that the code really recreates everything required, including networking, permissions, integrations, and ordering between services.
A recovery test is much more convincing when the rebuilt environment is capable of becoming the real production environment. If nobody would trust the rebuilt account to take over, that usually reveals missing configuration, undocumented dependencies, or manual steps that still need to be addressed.
Treat the account itself as rebuildable infrastructure. Use Terraform or another IaC system for the foundational resources, keep backups for the data, document service dependencies, and make sure secrets and access procedures are covered too. A quarterly full-recovery exercise, combined with smaller restore tests, is a reasonable starting point. Add guardrails such as protected environments, plan reviews, policy checks, and restrictions on destructive changes.
Exactly. A successful plan or deployment is not enough by itself; you need to validate application behavior, access, monitoring, and data restoration in the rebuilt environment.