Question

Difficulty: EasyResilient Database Configurations and High Availability

An educational institution is migrating its student enrollment system to AWS and will use Amazon RDS for SQL Server. The database must remain highly available within the primary AWS Region with a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than 2 minutes in the event of an Availability Zone failure. Failover must be completely automated, requiring no updates to the database endpoint in the application's configuration. Which configuration will meet these requirements?

  1. A
    A Single-AZ DB instance deployment with a Read Replica in a different Availability Zone
  2. B
    A Single-AZ DB instance deployment using an Amazon Route 53 latency routing policy
  3. A Multi-AZ DB instance deploymentAnswer
  4. D
    A Single-AZ DB instance deployment with automated snapshots scheduled every hour

Answer

A Multi-AZ DB instance deployment
The Multi-AZ DB instance deployment configuration is correct because Amazon RDS automatically provisions and maintains a synchronous standby replica in a different Availability Zone within the same AWS Region. In the event of a planned or unplanned outage of the primary DB instance, Amazon RDS automatically performs a failover to the standby instance. This failover process typically completes in under 2 minutes and updates the DNS CNAME record of the DB instance to point to the standby, eliminating the need to update database endpoints in the application configuration.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the high availability and recovery requirements.
Identify that the system requires a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 2 minutes, automatic failover across Availability Zones, and no manual configuration changes to the database endpoint.
This sets the criteria for evaluating RDS deployment configurations.
2
Evaluate the capabilities of RDS Multi-AZ deployments.
Confirm that Multi-AZ deployments provide synchronous replication, automatic failover within 1-2 minutes, and automatic DNS CNAME redirection.
Multi-AZ directly satisfies all the stated constraints of the scenario.
3
Evaluate the alternative configurations against the requirements.
Determine that Read Replicas do not support automatic failover, snapshots have a high RTO for restores, and Route 53 routing cannot manage database failover state.
This rules out the incorrect options.

Key Concept

Amazon RDS Multi-AZ Deployments
Estimated Time:45s
Rate this question