What is Amazon Application Recovery Controller?
Amazon Application Recovery Controller (ARC) helps you prepare for and complete faster recovery for applications running on the AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure. It covers both impairments of a single Availability Zone and the loss of an entire Region.
ARC groups its capabilities into two areas: multi-Availability Zone recovery with zonal shift and zonal autoshift, and multi-Region recovery with routing control, Region switch, and readiness check.
Core Features
- Zonal shift: Manual, temporary shift of traffic away from an impaired Availability Zone to healthy zones in the same Region
- Zonal autoshift: AWS shifts traffic on your behalf based on internal telemetry and ends the shift automatically
- Routing control: DNS-based failover between AWS Regions, protected by safety rules you define
- Region switch: Centralized, automated, and observable recovery across Regions and multiple AWS accounts
- Readiness check: Continuous monitoring of resource quotas, capacity, and routing policies of the replica application
Typical Use Cases
Isolating an impaired Availability Zone: Shift traffic away from an affected zone, for example after a bad code deployment or an AWS impairment.
Regional failover: Fail DNS traffic over from an impaired Region to a healthy Region in a controlled way.
Orchestrated recovery: Capture large failover procedures across multiple accounts as a plan and execute it.
Preparation and evidence: Continuously verify that the replica environment is scaled and configured to handle failover traffic.
Benefits
- No additional charge for zonal shift and zonal autoshift
- Safety rules prevent unintended states when using routing controls
- Region switch consolidates complex failover steps into a single plan
- Complements existing multi-AZ and multi-Region architectures without rebuilding them
Integration with innFactory
As an AWS Reseller, innFactory supports you with Amazon Application Recovery Controller: selecting the right recovery building blocks, enabling zonal autoshift for supported resources, defining routing controls with safety rules, and building and testing Region switch plans.
Typical Use Cases
Technical Specifications
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a zonal shift?
A zonal shift temporarily shifts traffic for a supported resource away from an impaired Availability Zone to healthy Availability Zones in the same AWS Region. Zonal shifts are manual and temporary; when you start one you specify an extendable expiration of up to three days.
How does zonal autoshift differ from zonal shift?
With zonal autoshift you authorize AWS to shift traffic away from an impaired Availability Zone for supported resources on your behalf. AWS starts an autoshift when internal telemetry indicates an impairment and ends it once the indicators show the issue is resolved.
What are routing controls and Region switch used for?
Routing controls fail DNS traffic over between AWS Regions and can be protected with safety rules, for example so that only one replica is active at a time. Region switch additionally orchestrates large-scale recovery tasks for application resources across multiple AWS accounts.
Is readiness check still available?
Readiness check continually monitors AWS resource quotas, capacity, and network routing policies of the replica application. AWS notes on its pricing page that readiness check is no longer available to new customers as of April 30, 2026. Please verify the current status in the official documentation before adopting it.
What does Amazon Application Recovery Controller cost?
According to AWS there is no additional charge for using zonal shift or zonal autoshift. Region switch plans, routing control clusters, and readiness checks are billed separately; see the official pricing page for current rates.
Note: All product information on this page has been compiled with care, but is provided without guarantee and may be outdated or incomplete. Cloud services evolve rapidly — features, pricing, SLAs, and availability change frequently. Authoritative and up-to-date information can only be found on the official product page of AWS (official documentation). This page does not represent an offer by AWS.