AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02 Practice Question

The correct answer is to deploy a multi-site active-active architecture. A Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 1 minute requires a strategy where failover is nearly instantaneous and automatic. The multi-site active-active approach achieves this by running full, independent production stacks in two or more AWS Regions and distributing traffic between them. Using Amazon Route 53 with latency-based routing and health checks allows traffic to be automatically redirected away from a failing region to a healthy one, meeting the sub-one-minute RTO.

A warm standby approach involves a scaled-down, but functional, environment in the DR region. Failing over requires scaling up the resources, which typically takes several minutes, thereby exceeding the RTO.

The pilot light approach involves replicating data and having core infrastructure defined (e.g., as code), but the application servers are not running. In a disaster, the infrastructure must be provisioned and started, a process that takes tens of minutes to hours, which is too long for the specified RTO.

Backup and restore is the slowest DR strategy, with an RTO measured in hours or even days, as it requires restoring data from backups and rebuilding the entire environment from scratch. This is completely unsuitable for a critical application with a sub-one-minute RTO requirement.