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Amazon Application Recovery Controller (ARC)

Definition

Amazon Application Recovery Controller (ARC) is an AWS service for application recovery readiness and automated failover across Regions and Availability Zones. It provides:

  • Readiness checks — validates that recovery configurations (cross-region replicas, DNS routing, capacity) are correctly provisioned and ready.
  • Routing controls — enables or disables traffic flow to specific cells/regions via highly-available data plane (cluster of 5 regional endpoints).
  • Safety rules — prevents accidental failover of too many cells simultaneously.

ARC sits at the orchestration layer of multi-region architectures — it doesn't replicate data or reroute traffic directly, but coordinates the signals that trigger failover actions.

Pattern of appearance

ARC typically appears as the automated failover trigger in active-active or warm-standby architectures. CloudWatch alarms detect degradation → ARC routing controls shift traffic → downstream systems (Route 53, ALB, custom handlers) respond.

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