RTO
Recovery Time Objective
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
RTO is how long you can afford to be down after a disaster. If your RTO is 4 hours, you need to be back online within 4 hours of failure. The lower your RTO, the more expensive your setup. An RTO of zero basically means you need active-active multi-region — and a very generous budget.
Real Talk
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum acceptable amount of time that a system can be offline after a failure or disaster before unacceptable business impact occurs. It drives architecture decisions — lower RTOs require more redundancy, automation, and infrastructure investment. RTO is measured from the moment of failure to full service restoration.
When You'll Hear This
"Our SLA mandates a 1-hour RTO, so we need automated failover." / "They set an RTO of 24 hours — basically backup and restore from S3 is fine."
Related Terms
Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery (DR) is your plan for when everything goes absolutely wrong — data center floods, region-wide outage, ransomware attack.
RPO (Recovery Point Objective)
RPO is how much data you can afford to lose in a disaster, measured in time. If your RPO is 1 hour, your backups need to run at least every hour.
SLA (Service Level Agreement)
An SLA is a contract between you and your users about how reliable your service will be. 'We promise the app will be up 99.9% of the time.