The Challenge 

The company powers dealership operations across sales, service, and parts for automotive and powersports dealers throughout North America. As a cloud-first platform where downtime directly translates to lost revenue and customer trust for hundreds of dealers, the absence of a multi-region disaster recovery strategy represented a critical business risk. The provider needed to address several compounding challenges: 

• No tertiary disaster recovery region. The existing AWS environment lacked a Pilot Light standby capable of absorbing traffic during a regional outage. 
• Legacy service discovery dependency on etcd. A fragile, single-region component that needed migration to a globally distributed DynamoDB solution. 
• Complex multi-account networking. A growing AWS Organization with multiple production VPCs required a unified Cloud WAN strategy across four regions. 
• Knowledge gap risk. Internal engineering teams lacked hands-on AWS DR operations experience, creating dependency on external support for recovery execution. 
• Tight timeline. Business continuity requirements demanded a fully operational DR environment, tested and documented, within a 3.5-month window.
   

“With UTurn, we went from a single-region risk to a fully automated, multiregion recovery posture that our own engineers can operate and extend. They didn’t just deliver an architecture; they made sure our team could stand behind it when it matters most. For a platform that hundreds of dealers run their business on, that confidence is everything.” 
— Cloud-Based Dealership Management Software Provider

The Solution 

UTurn’s certified AWS Architects designed and implemented a comprehensive Pilot Light disaster recovery solution integrated directly into the customer's existing AWS Organization. The engagement covered five workstreams delivered in parallel: Cloud WAN networking across four regions with automated Route 53 failover; crossregion IAM governance with 100% IaC coverage committed to customer-owned repositories; a full migration from etcd to Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables with corresponding Java development on the core dealer management web service; and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL configured with Pilot Light architecture and automated failover runbooks. 

On the compute and application layer, UTurn provisioned a minimal EKS cluster in the tertiary region, supporting both EKS Standard and Automode/Karpenter, with ArgoCD deployment templates, Lambda failover orchestration, and ECR image replication, allowing the cusomer's services to scale from standby to full capacity within defined RTO/RPO thresholds. 

A key element of the solution was the integration of Arpio, an AWS ISV partner purpose-built for automated disaster recovery orchestration. Arpio is architecturally unique in that it operates entirely within native AWS services, using Elastic Disaster Recovery, S3 Cross-Region Replication, Lambda, EventBridge, and other AWS-native primitives, with no third-party agents or proprietary drivers involved. This makes it a natural fit for the customer's existing AWS environment, functioning as an intelligent orchestration layer over services already part of the DR stack. Arpio also supports fully air-gapped operation, a critical capability for DR scenarios involving cybersecurity incidents or ransomware where network isolation is required. 

Throughout the engagement, UTurn standardized Terraform modules for multi-region deployment, replaced hardcoded regional API endpoints with DNS-based service discovery, and delivered immersion training to ensure the customer's engineering team can independently operate, extend, and test the DR environment going forward.

Measurable Results

Fully operational Pilot Light DR environment in a tertiary AWS Region, 
complete with automated and manual failover procedures and documented RTO/RPO targets. 

100% IaC coverage. 
All durable DR infrastructure deployed via Terraform and ArgoCD, committed to customer-owned repositories for full operational transparency. 

etcd eliminated. 
Service discovery migrated to Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables, removing the last single-region dependency from the customer's critical data path. 

Comprehensive DR runbooks. 
Tabletop exercises, testing frameworks, and operational procedures enable the customer's team to execute and maintain DR independently. 

Engineering team upskilled. 
Immersion training on AWS DR operations, CI/CD pipelines, and IaC ensures the team can extend and customize the DR plan without external dependency.

Tech Stack

Networking: Amazon Cloud WAN Amazon Route 53 Amazon VPC AWS Network Manager BGP 

Identity & Security: AWS IAM AWS Secrets Manager AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store AWS RAM 

Data Services: Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Amazon S3 Amazon ECR 

Compute & Containers: Amazon EKS (Standard & Automode/ Karpenter) AWS Lambda Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling 

GITOPS & CI/CD: Terraform ArgoCD Kubernetes (RBAC, manifests, persistent volumes) Java 

DR ORCHESTRATION: Arpio (AWS-native: Elastic Disaster Recovery, S3 Cross-Region Replication, Lambda, EventBridge)

Why UTurn 

The company chose UTurn for its combination of AWS Premier Tier Services Consulting Partner status, five AWS Competencies including Migration & Modernization and DevOps, Chicago-based enterprise cloud delivery experience, and a delivery model that prioritizes knowledge transfer and long-term customer independence. As an AWS MAP-authorized partner, UTurn unlocked significant MAP program funding, reducing the customer's net investment while maintaining a comprehensive, production-grade engagement scope. UTurn’s ability to assign certified AWS Architects embedded with the customer's engineering teams ensured strategic alignment at every milestone, from initial tabletop exercises through final project sign-off.

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