AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02 Practice Question
A financial services company hosts a critical trading application on AWS. The application uses a fleet of EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones for its web tier. The database tier runs on a large, single EC2 instance with a self-managed PostgreSQL database in the us-east-1a Availability Zone. Data is backed up nightly to Amazon S3. During a recent AZ failure, the entire application became unavailable because the database was a single point of failure. The company must implement a solution that provides automatic database failover with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of near-zero and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than a minute. Which solution best meets these reliability requirements while enabling self-healing capabilities?
Create a second EC2 instance with a PostgreSQL read replica in a different Availability Zone using asynchronous streaming replication. In the event of a primary failure, manually promote the replica.
Provision a new EC2 instance in a different Availability Zone and configure PostgreSQL streaming replication from the primary. Use a Route 53 health check to trigger an alarm for an operator to manually promote the standby.
Migrate the self-managed PostgreSQL database to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and enable the Multi-AZ deployment option.
Migrate the self-managed PostgreSQL database to an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster with a primary writer instance and at least one Aurora Replica in a different Availability Zone.
The correct answer is to migrate the self-managed PostgreSQL database to an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster. Amazon Aurora is designed for high availability and reliability, making it the best choice for the stringent RPO and RTO requirements. Aurora's storage is fault-tolerant and self-healing, replicating six copies of the data across three Availability Zones. In the event of a primary instance failure, Aurora can automatically fail over to an Aurora Replica in as little as 30 seconds, which meets the sub-minute RTO and near-zero RPO requirements.
Incorrect answers:
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with Multi-AZ: While an RDS Multi-AZ deployment provides automatic failover, the failover time is typically 60-120 seconds. This does not consistently meet the strict sub-minute RTO requirement for this critical application. Aurora's architecture provides faster failover capabilities.
Manual failover with streaming replication and Route 53: This solution involves manual intervention to promote the standby instance and update DNS records. Manual processes are error-prone and would result in a much higher RTO, failing to meet the sub-minute and automatic failover requirements.
Manual promotion of a read replica: Promoting a read replica is a manual process, not an automatic one for high availability. Furthermore, standard read replicas use asynchronous replication, which can lead to data loss upon failover, thus not meeting the near-zero RPO requirement.
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