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?
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
Enable a cross-Region read replica for the Amazon RDS instance and promote it during a disaster
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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What are cross-region read replicas in Amazon RDS?
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What is a Recovery Point Objective (RPO)?
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Why are automatic backups and snapshots not sufficient for an RPO of 5 minutes?