AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02 Practice Question
A retail company runs its mission-critical, three-tier web application entirely in a single AWS Region (us-east-1). The front-end and application tiers are stateless Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups behind an Application Load Balancer. Orders are stored in an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Multi-AZ DB instance.
During a resilience review, the business defines the following disaster-recovery objectives:
Recovery Time Objective (RTO): 5 minutes
Recovery Point Objective (RPO): < 5 minutes
The workload must continue to operate if an AWS Region becomes unavailable.
Ongoing monthly cost should be minimized, but performance in the primary Region must not be affected.
Which strategy meets these requirements most cost-effectively?
Adopt a pilot-light strategy: keep only the RDS instance and minimal networking active in a second Region, replicate data using daily snapshots, and launch the rest of the infrastructure with AWS CloudFormation when a disaster occurs.
Deploy a warm-standby environment in a second Region: run scaled-down EC2 Auto Scaling groups and an Amazon RDS cross-Region read replica; use Amazon Route 53 failover routing to promote the standby and scale out when a disaster is declared.
Build a fully provisioned active/active architecture in two Regions behind Route 53 latency-based routing with an Aurora global database to synchronize writes in under a second.
Use a backup-and-restore approach: take nightly Amazon RDS snapshots, copy them to another Region, store AMIs for the application tier in Amazon S3, and recreate the stack after a regional outage.
A warm-standby strategy keeps a scaled-down but fully functional copy of the workload running in a second Region. Continuous cross-Region replication (for example, an RDS read replica or an Aurora global database) keeps data loss below 5 minutes, satisfying the RPO. Because all components are already deployed and running, failover only requires scaling the Auto Scaling group and promoting the read replica-operations that complete within minutes and meet the 5-minute RTO. Capacity is lower than the primary Region until a disaster occurs, so the ongoing cost is far less than an active/active multi-site design.
An active/active multi-site architecture would also meet the RTO/RPO but duplicates full capacity in two Regions, making it significantly more expensive. A pilot-light approach maintains only core services in the DR Region; turning on and scaling the rest typically takes tens of minutes, so it cannot guarantee the 5-minute RTO. A backup-and-restore strategy has hourly-level RPOs and RTOs that can exceed 24 hours, which is far outside the stated objectives.
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