Question

Difficulty: HardResilient and Highly Available Storage Infrastructure

An enterprise healthcare organization is designing a highly resilient storage and database architecture for its Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) imaging application. The system consists of a metadata catalog stored in Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and raw DICOM medical images stored as objects. The disaster recovery (DR) strategy requires a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1515 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1515 minutes across a secondary AWS Region. The primary region deployment must be highly available with 99.99%99.99\% availability and 99.999999999%99.999999999\% durability for the raw images. Additionally, radiologists at local clinics require low-latency local access to the most recently acquired medical images. Which architecture meets these requirements with the lowest operational overhead?

  1. Deploy an Amazon S3 File Gateway at local clinics to cache the most recent images. Store raw images in an Amazon S3 bucket in the primary region, and configure S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) with S3 Replication Time Control (S3 RTC) enabled to a destination bucket in the secondary region. Deploy the RDS PostgreSQL database in a Multi-AZ configuration in the primary region, and configure a cross-region read replica in the secondary region.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy an Amazon S3 File Gateway at local clinics to cache the most recent images. Store raw images in an Amazon S3 bucket in the primary region, and configure an S3 Lifecycle policy to transition objects immediately to the S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval storage class in the secondary region. Deploy the RDS PostgreSQL database in a Multi-AZ configuration in the primary region, and configure a cross-region read replica in the secondary region.
  3. C
    Deploy an Amazon S3 File Gateway at local clinics to cache the most recent images. Store raw images in an Amazon S3 bucket in the primary region, and configure S3 CRR with S3 RTC enabled to the secondary region. Implement a Pilot Light disaster recovery strategy in the secondary region by using AWS Backup to copy database backups across regions, restoring the RDS PostgreSQL database from these backups only after a regional disaster is declared.
  4. D
    Deploy an Amazon S3 File Gateway at local clinics to cache the most recent images. Store raw images in an Amazon S3 bucket in the primary region, and configure S3 CRR with S3 RTC enabled to the secondary region. Deploy the RDS PostgreSQL database in a Single-AZ configuration in the primary region, and set up a cross-region read replica in the secondary region with Route 53 configured to automatically route write traffic directly to the replica if the primary instance fails.

Answer

Deploy an Amazon S3 File Gateway at the local clinics, store raw images in Amazon S3 in the primary region with S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) and S3 Replication Time Control (S3 RTC) enabled to the secondary region, and deploy Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL in a Multi-AZ configuration in the primary region with a cross-region read replica in the secondary region.
The correct architecture uses Amazon S3 File Gateway to cache images locally for radiologists, satisfying the low-latency local access requirement. Amazon S3 Standard provides 99.99%99.99\% availability and 99.999999999%99.999999999\% durability. To meet the 1515-minute RPO and RTO for the objects, S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) with S3 Replication Time Control (S3 RTC) is used, which guarantees that 99.9%99.9\% of objects replicate within 1515 minutes. For the database, RDS Multi-AZ provides high availability within the primary region, and a cross-region read replica provides continuous replication to the secondary region, allowing manual promotion within the 1515-minute RTO during a disaster.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Address the local access requirement by placing an Amazon S3 File Gateway on-premises at the local clinics to cache recently accessed DICOM images.
Radiologists receive low-latency local access to the most recently generated images.
S3 File Gateway provides a local cache for file-based access to objects stored directly in Amazon S3.
2
Address S3 data replication durability and RPO requirements by enabling S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) with S3 Replication Time Control (S3 RTC).
S3 objects are replicated to the secondary region with a SLA-backed 1515-minute replication time, meeting the 1515-minute RPO.
S3 RTC ensures 99.9%99.9\% of objects are replicated within 1515 minutes and provides CloudWatch metrics to monitor replication lag.
3
Address database high availability and disaster recovery requirements by configuring Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL in a Multi-AZ deployment in the primary region and setting up a cross-region read replica in the secondary region.
Synchronous replication across AZs provides local high availability, and asynchronous replication to the secondary region read replica satisfies the cross-region DR RPO.
Multi-AZ configuration handles local zone failures automatically, while the cross-region read replica allows quick manual promotion within the 1515-minute RTO during a regional disaster.

Key Concept

Designing highly resilient hybrid storage and database architectures using S3 Replication Time Control (RTC) and RDS cross-region replication to satisfy strict RTO and RPO objectives.
Estimated Time:2m 30s
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