The checkbox that wasn't real
A few months ago, I sat in a meeting where someone confidently said, "Yes, Multi AZ is on for everything in production." Nobody pushed back. It sounded right. It had probably been true at some point, for some database, in some region.
Nobody actually checked.
That is the moment DrScore started for me. Not as a grand idea, but as a small, uncomfortable realization: most disaster recovery plans are not plans at all. They are memories of a plan, slowly going stale while nobody notices, because nothing forces anyone to look.
What DrScore actually is
DrScore is a tool for measuring disaster recovery posture without the ceremony. No forty-page whitepaper, no consultant, no compliance binder that gets updated once a year right before an audit.
Today it works as a guided self-assessment. You work through the controls that actually matter: backups, failover, monitoring, the usual suspects, and you get a score along with a breakdown by category. Every control can also carry tips from other users, the kind of "here is how we actually did this" detail that never makes it into official docs. The score tells you what is weak. The tips tell you how other engineers fixed the same weakness.
Under the hood, it is Next.js and Supabase, with row-level security keeping everyone's data locked to their own account. Nothing exotic. That is deliberate. The interesting engineering is happening in what comes next.
Trust, but verify
Here is the uncomfortable truth about self-assessments: they only work if people answer honestly, and honesty requires actually knowing the answer. Someone checks a box because it was true six months ago, or true in one region, or true before an intern changed a setting nobody documented.
So the next phase of DrScore, called AWS Live Scan, skips the honor system entirely. It connects to a real AWS account, read-only, and checks what is actually configured instead of asking someone to remember.
The flow looks like this:
User clicks Connect AWS Account | DrScore generates a unique external ID | DrScore generates a least-privilege IAM policy scoped to read-only checks | User deploys a one-click CloudFormation template in their own account | DrScore's scanner identity assumes the role via sts: AssumeRole | Findings flow back into DrScore. Nothing is ever written to the customer account.
No stored access keys, ever. If someone is going to trust a tool with visibility into their production AWS account, the least I can do is make sure that trust cannot be abused, even by accident. I would rather ship five verified checks than one convenient shortcut involving a long-lived credential.
Where things stand
I am building this in public, unfinished parts included.
The connection flow and data model are live: the tables for connections, scans, and findings, protected end-to-end with row-level security, plus the actual "Connect AWS Account" experience. The scanning backend is next, starting with a real sts AssumeRole verification and the first checks: RDS Multi-AZ, AWS Backup coverage, and EBS snapshot freshness. Right now, clicking Verify honestly tells you it is not ready yet, because I would rather show you a true "not yet" than a fake "done."
After that comes a results view with findings grouped by severity, then broader multi-region coverage: S3 replication, Route 53 failover, Aurora Global Database, and more.
If you have solved this before
If you have ever built anything that reads AWS accounts read-only, whether it was Steampipe, Prowler, or something you duct-taped together at 2 am, I want to hear about it. Specifically, how did you handle multi-region checks without getting throttled into oblivion? That is the wall I expect to hit next.
This is the first post in a series I plan to keep writing as DrScore gets built, including the parts that break. Follow along, and tell me what I am getting wrong.
