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Difficulty: EasyMulti-AZ, Multi-Region Architectures and Disaster Recovery (DR)

A software company wants to design a disaster recovery (DR) strategy for a non-critical internal application. The company has specified a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 24 hours and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 24 hours. The database backups must be stored in a secondary AWS Region, and the primary goal is to minimize ongoing infrastructure costs. Which disaster recovery strategy should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements at the lowest cost?

  1. Backup and Restore, by copying database backups to the secondary Region daily and deploying application resources using AWS CloudFormation only during a disaster recovery event.Answer
  2. B
    Pilot Light, by running a scaled-down version of the application servers and database instances in the secondary Region to achieve near-zero failover time.
  3. C
    Backup and Restore, by replicating databases to RDS Read Replicas in the secondary Region to serve as the automatic, immediate failover target.
  4. D
    Backup and Restore, by archiving the database snapshots to Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval and using standard retrieval to recover the data within 10 minutes.

Answer

Backup and Restore, by copying database backups to the secondary Region daily and deploying application resources using AWS CloudFormation only during a disaster recovery event.
The correct option is the Backup and Restore strategy using AWS CloudFormation. Because the RTO and RPO are both 24 hours, the company does not need active servers or continuous replication running in the disaster recovery region. Storing daily backups in Amazon S3 in the secondary region satisfies the 24-hour RPO. Deploying resources on-demand via CloudFormation templates during an actual disaster easily fits within the 24-hour RTO while minimizing ongoing costs to only S3 storage.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the RTO and RPO requirements.
The target RTO is 24 hours and RPO is 24 hours.
Identifying these targets helps narrow down the acceptable disaster recovery strategies.
2
Evaluate the cost constraint.
The primary goal is to minimize ongoing infrastructure costs.
Since the RTO and RPO are lenient (24 hours), we should select the strategy that runs the fewest active resources in the secondary Region.
3
Select the most cost-effective strategy.
Backup and Restore meets the 24-hour RTO/RPO limits and incurs the lowest ongoing cost because no active compute or database instances run in the DR region until a failover occurs.
Other strategies like Pilot Light or Warm Standby keep active resources running, increasing costs unnecessarily.

Key Concept

Disaster recovery strategies differ in their RTO, RPO, and cost trade-offs, with Backup and Restore being the most cost-effective but slowest option.
Estimated Time:45s
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Topics

Multi-AZ, Multi-Region Architectures and Disaster Recovery (DR)

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