Multi-Region Replication Nobody Used
Set up multi-region database replication "for disaster recovery."
What we paid for:
- Primary in us-east-1
- Read replicas in eu-west-1 and ap-southeast-1
- Cross-region data transfer: $8,000/month
What we actually used:
- 100% of reads and writes from us-east-1
- 0 failover tests in 18 months
- No actual DR runbook
- No one knew how to trigger failover
The realization:
We were paying $8K/month for peace of mind we never validated. If us-east-1 went down, we had no idea if our DR would actually work.
What we did:
- Implemented quarterly DR tests
- Created actual runbooks
- Reduced to single read replica in us-east-1
- Cross-region only for cold backups to S3
Result: $8,000/month → $1,200/month, with DR we actually tested.
Lesson: DR that's never tested isn't DR. It's just expensive.