Why it matters
A product can have healthy compute and replicated data while its login remains tied to an unavailable region. Authentication recovery includes the directory, issuer, signing keys, redirects, factors, sessions, and every service that validates a token.
A secondary identity provider may support sign-in but not enrollment, password resets, or every MFA method. Existing tokens and revocation state need separate rules. Decide what continues, what pauses, and when a person must sign in again.
Decisions to make
- Choose whether the same identity directory serves both regions or whether users must be migrated.
- Define a stable issuer and key-discovery contract that token consumers can validate in either region.
- Decide which login, federation, MFA, reset, and enrollment flows work during failover.
- Set continuity rules for existing sessions, API keys, revocations, and one-time challenges.
- Map custom login domains, OAuth redirects, passkey relying parties, and customer IdP callbacks.
- Determine how security changes propagate and how stale access is denied during replication lag.
Build checklist
- Inventory every identity consumer and the issuer, audience, subject, and keys it trusts.
- Configure regional login endpoints and recovery routing without changing user identity unexpectedly.
- Test old and new tokens against each region, including wrong issuer and wrong audience denials.
- Exercise a primary outage with password, federated, MFA, refresh, and logout flows.
- Define whether one-time links restart and whether a revoked session stays revoked after switching.
- Show users a clear temporary limit when a recovery region cannot perform an account action.
Common mistakes
- Assuming database replication also replicates the identity provider and signing keys.
- Accepting any newly discovered issuer or key URL to make failover appear to work.
- Promising every factor and account-management action in a secondary region without testing it.
Tools & references
3 starting points to compare or study. Check fit, maintenance, terms and current capabilities before choosing one.
