A medical imaging provider hosts its diagnostic report processing application in the us-west-2 Region. The current architecture consists of EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer, and a multi-AZ Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database. The provider needs to establish a disaster recovery (DR) strategy in the us-east-1 Region. The DR solution must achieve a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 2 minutes, while minimizing ongoing infrastructure costs during normal operations. Which combination of actions should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)
- Create an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-west-2 and a secondary cluster in us-east-1, configuring the secondary cluster to use Aurora Serverless v2 to scale down to a minimal configuration during idle periods.Answer
- Pre-provision an Application Load Balancer and an Auto Scaling group in us-east-1 with the minimum and desired capacity set to 0, and use an automated deployment script to scale out instances to match the primary region during a failover event.Answer
- CSchedule cross-region Amazon Aurora snapshot replication every 15 minutes from us-west-2 to us-east-1, and write an automated script to restore the database to a new cluster in the recovery region in the event of a disaster.
- DMaintain a duplicate Auto Scaling group in us-east-1 running at full compute capacity, and configure Route 53 latency-based routing to dynamically balance active traffic across both regions during normal operations.
- EConfigure Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing to automatically fail over database traffic to the secondary region's Aurora read replica without using health checks or promoting the database cluster.
Answer
The correct combination consists of creating an Amazon Aurora Global Database with a secondary cluster configured for Aurora Serverless v2, and pre-provisioning an Application Load Balancer and an Auto Scaling group in the recovery region with a minimum capacity of 0, which is scaled out via automation during failover.
The correct strategy combines database storage-level replication with a Pilot Light compute strategy. Amazon Aurora Global Database uses dedicated infrastructure to replicate data across regions with sub-second latency, satisfying the 2-minute RPO. Operating the secondary Aurora instances as Serverless v2 ensures they only consume minimal capacity when idle, keeping costs low. For the compute layer, pre-provisioning the Application Load Balancer and an Auto Scaling group with a capacity of 0 costs nothing for compute resources during normal operations, but keeps the infrastructure configuration warm. This allows automated scripts to scale the instances up within the 15-minute RTO during a disaster recovery event.
Step-by-Step Solution
Key Concept
Disaster recovery designs (specifically Pilot Light) utilizing Aurora Global Database and scaled-down compute infrastructure to balance RTO/RPO targets against standby operational costs.