BuildWithAI: Architecting a Serverless DR Toolkit on AWS

Overview I'd been getting more involved in disaster recovery planning lately and kept running into the same gap — a lot of teams on AWS have backups, but not a real Disaster Recovery (DR) plan. No documented runbooks, no tested failover procedures, no RTO/RPO targets tied to business impact. So that became the motivation for this side project: six AI-powered tools that automate the tedious parts of DR planning, built entirely on AWS. In part one of this three-part series, we will walk through the architecture — the serverless stack, the central model config, and the 5-layer cost guardrail system that keeps everything under $10/month (of course, you can set your own threshold; that's just what felt right for this side project). The next two parts will cover prompt engineering for each tool and the lessons learned setting this side project. Here is a look at what we're going to build. You can try out the live version at https://dr-toolkit.thecloudspark.com . While this was implemented wi