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Difficulty: MediumResilient and Highly Available Storage Infrastructure

A telehealth provider runs a medical imaging and patient record application on AWS. The application tier runs on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances distributed across multiple Availability Zones in a single AWS Region. The application requires a shared storage layer to host patient medical images. This storage layer must allow concurrent read and write access from all EC2 instances. The architecture must achieve high availability with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 0 and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 1 minute against an Availability Zone outage. For compliance, the images must also be replicated to a secondary AWS Region. In the event of a disaster in the primary Region, the secondary Region must be able to serve the images with a recovery time (RTO) of less than 5 minutes. Which two configurations should a solutions architect recommend to build a resilient storage solution? (Select TWO.)

  1. Use an Amazon EFS file system configured with the EFS Regional storage class in the primary Region.Answer
  2. Configure Amazon EFS Replication to replicate the file system to a destination EFS file system in the secondary Region.Answer
  3. C
    Migrate the medical images to an Amazon RDS DB instance in the primary Region, and configure a cross-Region Read Replica in the secondary Region to automatically failover and serve the images.
  4. D
    Deploy an Amazon EBS volume in the secondary Region in a Pilot Light configuration, keeping the volume detached until a failover occurs, then mounting it to a standby EC2 instance.
  5. E
    Set up an AWS Backup vault in the secondary Region to copy daily file system snapshots directly into Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, using Standard Retrieval to restore the file system during a disaster.

Answer

The correct configurations are to use an Amazon EFS file system with the EFS Regional storage class in the primary Region, and to configure Amazon EFS Replication to replicate the file system to a destination EFS file system in the secondary Region.
The correct options are to use an Amazon EFS file system with the Regional storage class and to configure Amazon EFS Replication. EFS Regional storage class stores data redundantly across multiple Availability Zones in a single Region, ensuring that even if one Availability Zone fails, the file system remains online with no data loss (RPO = 0, RTO < 1 minute) and allows concurrent access from all application instances. Amazon EFS Replication replicates data across AWS Regions continuously in near real-time, allowing the destination file system to be immediately writable during a failover with a recovery time of less than 5 minutes.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate the requirement for shared, concurrent storage access across multiple Availability Zones in the primary Region.
Identify that Amazon EFS with the Regional storage class is designed for multi-AZ concurrent file access with high availability.
Amazon EFS Regional replicates data across multiple AZs and allows concurrent read/write from EC2 instances in different AZs, satisfying RPO=0 and low RTO.
2
Analyze the cross-Region disaster recovery requirements (RTO < 5 minutes).
Determine that Amazon EFS Replication continuously synchronizes EFS file systems across Regions with minimal latency.
EFS Replication provides a destination file system that is immediately ready during failover, satisfying the sub-5-minute RTO.
3
Examine the recovery time constraints of alternative storage tiers like S3 Glacier and EBS.
Eliminate options utilizing S3 Glacier Standard Retrieval due to hours-long retrieval delays, and eliminate EBS due to single-AZ limits and manual recovery times.
Meeting strict low RTO and RPO requirements necessitates active replication rather than slow restore processes or single-AZ block storage.

Key Concept

Implementing resilient, shared multi-AZ file storage using Amazon EFS with cross-Region replication to meet low RTO and RPO targets.
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Topics

Resilient and Highly Available Storage Infrastructure

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