Reliability

At Instructure, all software services are provisioned in a high availability (HA) manner. We provision our software services with a minimum N+1 redundancy architecture, where N+1 represents a form of resiliency that ensures systems availability in the event of component failures. Components (N) have at least one independent backup component (+1) and replication enabled, and this design is in place for all critical customer and line-of-business applications and data.

Examples of these default HA design components are listed below (i.e. all applications and application data are deployed with and inherit the following):

• All deployments are versioned and replayable/repeatable.
• We have multiple regional AWS Availability Zones (AZ) in our cloud environments (our deployed services span multiple physical data centers within a given geographic region)
• N+1 redundancy levels (on a deployment, compute node, storage, power, network, HVAC)
• Automated data replication and redundancy across AWS Availability Zones

In addition to real-time replication across multiple AZ within a customer’s region, ensuring an incredibly low recovery point objective (RPO), Instructure retains full database backups (also known as "snapshots") for Canvas customers, totaling four months of rolling backup data. Specifically, we retain:

• 7 x daily snapshots
• 4 x weekly snapshots
• 4 x monthly snapshots.

This allows us to conduct point-in-time recovery (PITR) for up to 35 days, and incremental recovery up to four months of data.

Object data such as files, documents, and uploaded media, etc., are recoverable in the event of a deletion or modification for a period of one year.

• RTO and RPO within a customer region is close to real-time.
• RTO and RPO in a scenario where an entire AWS region is experiencing service degradation or offline is four hours for cross-region service recovery, with a maximum 24-hour recovery point objective for data restoration

At Instructure, we proactively approach business continuity by building resilience in our key processes, use of technology, and hiring and retention of key personnel. When unforeseen incidents impact or disrupt our business, know that we are ready to act, with detailed plans to quickly recover and ensure the continuation of both our business and yours during and following any critical incident that results in disruption to our normal operational capability.

We also stand out in transparency: We publish our availability status and updates at status.instructure.com and status.parchment.com.