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Difficulty: Very hardResilient and Highly Available Storage Infrastructure

A financial technology firm is deploying a transaction auditing application on Amazon EC2 instances distributed across two Availability Zones in the eu-west-1 Region. The application requires a shared, POSIX-compliant file system to store transaction journals. The architecture must survive the complete loss of an Availability Zone with zero data loss (RPO = 0) and continue serving requests without manual intervention. Additionally, the journals must be replicated to the eu-central-1 Region with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 15 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 10 minutes. Which storage design meets these requirements while minimizing operational overhead?

  1. A
    Deploy Amazon EBS volumes with Multi-Attach enabled in the primary region, attach them to the EC2 instances in both Availability Zones, and configure AWS Backup to replicate EBS snapshots to the secondary region every 15 minutes.
  2. B
    Deploy Amazon EFS using the One Zone storage class in the primary region. Configure an Amazon EFS lifecycle policy to archive completed transaction journals to an Amazon S3 bucket in the secondary region, utilizing the Glacier Flexible Retrieval storage class.
  3. Deploy Amazon EFS using the Regional storage class in the primary region. Configure Amazon EFS Replication to replicate the file system to a destination EFS file system in the secondary region. During a regional failover, delete the replication association on the destination file system and mount it to the standby EC2 instances.Answer
  4. D
    Deploy Amazon EFS using the Regional storage class in both regions. Configure an AWS DataSync task scheduled to execute every 10 minutes to synchronize files from the primary file system to the standby file system on warm standby EC2 instances.

Answer

Deploy Amazon EFS using the Regional storage class in the primary region, configure Amazon EFS Replication to the secondary region, and delete the replication association during a failover to make the destination file system writable.
The correct solution uses the Amazon EFS Regional storage class, which natively replicates data synchronously across multiple Availability Zones to ensure zero data loss during an AZ outage. To achieve cross-region disaster recovery, Amazon EFS Replication provides continuous asynchronous replication to a destination EFS file system in the secondary region. During a disaster recovery event, deleting the replication association changes the destination file system status from read-only to writeable, which can be accomplished in under a minute, meeting the 10-minute RTO.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Select a storage service that supports POSIX compliance, shared concurrent access across multiple EC2 instances, and automatically replicates data across multiple Availability Zones within the primary region.
Amazon EFS Regional storage class is selected, as it satisfies POSIX compliance, multi-instance mounting, and achieves an RPO of 0 during Availability Zone outages through synchronous multi-AZ replication.
This satisfies the requirement for zero data loss and automated failover in the event of a single Availability Zone loss.
2
Determine the cross-region replication method to meet the RPO of less than 15 minutes.
Configure Amazon EFS Replication to replicate data asynchronously to a destination EFS file system in the eu-central-1 Region.
EFS Replication continuously copies changes to the destination region and typically completes replication in under 15 minutes, which satisfies the RPO requirement.
3
Identify the failover procedure that satisfies the RTO of less than 10 minutes.
In the event of a disaster, delete the replication association on the destination EFS file system to make it read-write, and mount it to the standby EC2 instances.
EFS replica file systems are read-only while replication is active. Deleting the replication association is a fast control-plane operation that makes the destination file system writable immediately, meeting the 10-minute RTO.

Key Concept

Amazon EFS Regional replication and cross-region replication failover behavior
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Topics

Resilient and Highly Available Storage Infrastructure

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