Hello HN! We’re Shaw [sterwill] and Doug [doug_neumann] and today we’re very excited to share Arpio with you (https://arpio.io). Arpio is a SaaS that protects AWS environments from downtime by making it easy to recover from outages, ransomware, cyber-attacks, and human error.

What that means is that when critical AWS services go down (like the Kinesis outage in November [0]), Arpio can launch identical workloads in a healthy region. Or if a bad actor does bad things in an AWS environment (like Codespaces [1] or Webex Teams [2]), Arpio can quickly restore everything to an alternate AWS account.

Our story goes back to the big S3 outage of 2017. In February that year an AWS employee made a typo at the command line, and inadvertently took down much of AWS’s Northern Virginia region. That outage lasted 5 hours, and we were among the thousands of companies impacted.

All outages suck, but the timing on this one was particularly bad for our business. And worse, we had no control -- all we could do was wait for Amazon to get us back online. As you can imagine, the execs weren’t exactly happy about that...

With Arpio, we’re building the solution we wish we’d had back then. Arpio maintains an exact replica of your production AWS environment in a different region (that you choose) and optionally in a locked-down AWS account (that you own).

This recovery environment includes your data and your infrastructure, and it’s updated frequently as your environment evolves. It’s also checkpointed, so you can roll back to a prior state to recover from data corruption or ransomware. And when you aren’t using it, it’s dormant, so you don’t have to pay AWS for resources you don’t need.

But when you need it (or want to test it), Arpio can have it up and running in a few minutes.

Disaster recovery is usually custom-engineered for a given workload. With Arpio, we’re building a general-purpose solution that works for most AWS workloads. We handle the complexity ensuring every route table is rewired, every security group rule is correct, every private IP address is preserved, and every database hostname is aliased. And handling that complexity makes Arpio simple to implement. We can often get new customers onboarded in under an hour.

Arpio works today with EC2, EBS, RDS, ECS, ECR, ELB, VPC, IAM, ACM, Autoscaling, Cognito, ElastiCache, and CloudWatch. We’re delivering Beanstalk and EFS support in the coming weeks. If we don’t yet support your environment, drop a comment below - we’d love to get your feedback on what we should build next.

We encourage you to take it for a spin. Or if you’re up for a chat, send me a note (doug[at]arpio.io) - I’d love to walk you through it in person.

So, HN, what do you think? We’re excited to get your feedback!

Thanks, Shaw & Doug

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/message/11201/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7909791 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24319293