Incident Management
Practical
By Samson Tanimawo, PhD
Published Jun 1, 2026
4 min read
Warm Spare vs Cold Spare: Recovery Time Tradeoffs
Spare resources cost money. The decision between warm (running) and cold (provisioned on demand).
Live workflow · 3 working · 1 queuedLive
Signal · gather Working
Decide · pick action Working
Apply · with verify Working
Learn · update playbook Queued
Warm spare
Running and ready. Failover in seconds.
Cost: full resource cost continuously.
Cold spare
Provisioned but not running. Failover in minutes (boot, warm caches).
Cost: significantly less; only storage cost.
Decide
Critical paths: warm.
Less-critical: cold.
Many teams over-provision warm. Audit and downgrade where seconds vs minutes is acceptable.