AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 Practice Question
A company needs a disaster-recovery solution that can bring its Amazon RDS database back to the latest state after a full regional outage. The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) must be no greater than 5 minutes, and the business also wants the shortest possible Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Which approach best meets these requirements?
Create Amazon RDS snapshots every 12 hours
Enable a cross-Region read replica for the Amazon RDS instance and promote it during a disaster
Deploy the database manually in multiple Regions and handle data replication yourself
Configure automatic backups of the Amazon RDS database to run every 6 hours
A cross-Region read replica keeps a near-real-time copy of the database in another AWS Region. Because updates are shipped asynchronously-typically within seconds-you can promote the replica to a standalone primary during a regional outage, keeping data loss well under the 5-minute RPO and achieving a short RTO (promotion usually takes minutes).
User-defined snapshot or backup schedules of 6 or 12 hours leave data gaps far larger than 5 minutes. Although Amazon RDS automated backups ship transaction logs every 5 minutes and can meet the RPO, restoring from those backups involves creating and initializing a new DB instance, resulting in a much longer RTO than promoting a ready-to-serve replica. Manual multi-Region replication similarly provides no built-in guarantee of meeting the 5-minute RPO and adds operational overhead.
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