Question

Difficulty: EasyMulti-AZ, Multi-Region Architectures and Disaster Recovery (DR)

A company wants to set up a disaster recovery (DR) solution for its database in a secondary AWS Region. The solution must support a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 24 hours and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 24 hours. The company wants to minimize costs and does not want to run any active database instances in the secondary Region during normal operations. Which DR strategy meets these requirements?

  1. Backup and restore by copying database snapshots to the secondary RegionAnswer
  2. B
    Pilot light by keeping a scaled-down, active database instance running in the secondary Region
  3. C
    Multi-AZ replication to replicate data to the secondary Region
  4. D
    Backup and restore using Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive to store live database backups

Answer

Backup and restore by copying database snapshots to the secondary Region
The correct answer is the option that suggests backup and restore by copying snapshots. Backup and Restore is the most cost-effective DR strategy. Backups (snapshots) of the database are copied to a secondary Region. No active database or compute resources run in the secondary Region under normal conditions, which meets the cost requirement. When a disaster occurs, the database is restored from the snapshot, which can comfortably be completed within the 24-hour RTO.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the requirements for RPO, RTO, and cost.
The target RPO is 24 hours, the RTO is 24 hours, and there must be zero running compute/database costs in the secondary region.
This establishes the boundaries for evaluating the DR options.
2
Evaluate the Backup and Restore strategy against the constraints.
Backup and Restore keeps only backups in the secondary region and creates resources only when a disaster occurs, which aligns with zero running database instances and is the most cost-effective solution.
To verify if the cheapest option meets the recovery timeline.

Key Concept

Disaster Recovery strategies (Backup & Restore, Pilot Light, Warm Standby, Multi-Site) differ in RTO, RPO, and cost.
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