Question

Difficulty: HardResilient and Highly Available Storage Infrastructure

A pharmaceutical company is designing a disaster recovery architecture for its genomic drug simulation datasets. The active datasets are stored in Amazon S3 in the `us-east-1` Region and are critical to clinical trial validation. Compliance mandates that these datasets must be replicated to a secondary AWS Region (`us-west-2`). The solution must guarantee a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes15\text{ minutes} and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 30 minutes30\text{ minutes} for read access to the replicated datasets in `us-west-2`. The replication mechanism must be asynchronous to prevent any performance impact on the primary simulation engines in `us-east-1`. Which configuration will meet these storage requirements?

  1. Configure Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) from the source bucket in `us-east-1` to the destination bucket in `us-west-2`, and enable Amazon S3 Replication Time Control (S3 RTC) on the replication rule.Answer
  2. B
    Configure Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) to a bucket in `us-west-2`, and apply an Amazon S3 Lifecycle policy to transition the replicated objects immediately to the S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval storage class. During a failover event, retrieve the datasets using Standard retrieval.
  3. C
    Store the datasets in an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB instance in `us-east-1` and configure an RDS Read Replica in `us-west-2`. In a failover scenario, rely on the Read Replica to automatically failover and become the primary storage endpoint.
  4. D
    Set up an Amazon EFS file system in `us-east-1` and configure a Pilot Light disaster recovery strategy. Run a daily synchronization script on an Amazon EC2 instance to replicate files to an EFS file system in `us-west-2`, scaling up the compute instances only during a failover.

Answer

Configure Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) from the source bucket in `us-east-1` to the destination bucket in `us-west-2`, and enable Amazon S3 Replication Time Control (S3 RTC) on the replication rule.
Enabling Amazon S3 Replication Time Control (S3 RTC) on a Cross-Region Replication (CRR) rule ensures that 99.9%99.9\% of objects are replicated within 15 minutes15\text{ minutes}, directly satisfying the 1515-minute Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Since the replicated data is immediately accessible in the destination S3 bucket in the secondary region, it easily satisfies the 3030-minute Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for read access without affecting write performance at the source.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) requirement.
The requirement is an RPO of 15 minutes15\text{ minutes}, which means replicated data must be at most 15 minutes15\text{ minutes} behind the primary storage.
To guarantee replication lag of under 15 minutes15\text{ minutes} with an AWS SLA, Amazon S3 Replication Time Control (S3 RTC) must be used, which replicates 99.9%99.9\% of objects within 15 minutes15\text{ minutes}.
2
Analyze the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) requirement.
The RTO is 30 minutes30\text{ minutes} for read access in the failover region.
Active replication to a standard S3 bucket allows immediate read access via S3 APIs, which fits well within the 3030-minute RTO. Glacier Flexible Retrieval with Standard retrieval is ruled out due to its 33-to-55-hour retrieval delay.
3
Evaluate administrative overhead and workload compatibility.
Amazon S3 object storage is optimal for raw simulation datasets, and native S3 CRR requires minimal operational management compared to custom sync scripts or relational databases.
Native replication features minimize custom scripts, reduce operational complexity, and avoid misusing relational database services for object storage workloads.

Key Concept

Replication Time Control (S3 RTC) guarantees replication within 15 minutes15\text{ minutes} to meet tight RPO/RTO parameters for object storage.
Estimated Time:2m 0s
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