Enterprise applications need to stay up even when an entire AWS region goes down. The goal was to design and deploy a containerized application that could survive a full regional outage with minimal downtime, and prove it with real failover testing. Also needed a data pipeline that could process uploaded financial documents automatically.
Deployed the same ECS service in two AWS regions (us-east-1 and us-west-2), each behind its own ALB with Auto Scaling Groups. Route 53 health checks ping both regions every 10 seconds. If the primary region fails the health check, traffic automatically routes to the secondary within about 60 seconds.
Built a separate serverless ETL pipeline: financial documents land in S3, trigger a Lambda function that extracts transaction data (price, vendor, totals), transforms it through business logic, and loads the results into DynamoDB. CloudWatch dashboards track everything. WAF sits in front with rate-limiting and signature-based rules.
Deployed and validated. Failover tested with simulated regional outage. ~99.99% measured availability.