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Difficulty: MediumResilient and Highly Available Storage Infrastructure

A financial auditing firm is migrating its document management system to AWS. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances deployed across multiple Availability Zones in the us-west-2 Region and requires concurrent read and write access to a shared file system. The storage solution must sustain the loss of an Availability Zone without data loss or downtime. Additionally, compliance regulations mandate a cross-region disaster recovery strategy with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 30 minutes.

Which storage architecture meets these requirements with the least operational overhead?

  1. A
    Create an Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) file system using the One Zone storage class to reduce cost, and configure an AWS Backup plan to perform cross-region copies to an S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval vault in the secondary region.
  2. B
    Configure an Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) gp3 volume with Multi-Attach enabled, mount it to all EC2 instances across the Availability Zones, and configure AWS Backup to copy snapshots to the secondary region every 15 minutes.
  3. Create an Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) using the Standard storage class in the primary region, and configure Amazon EFS Replication to copy data to a destination EFS file system in the secondary region.Answer
  4. D
    Provision an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL database in a Multi-AZ deployment to store the files, set up a cross-region Read Replica in the secondary region, and configure the application to write directly to the replica during a disaster recovery event.

Answer

Create an Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) using the Standard storage class in the primary region, and configure Amazon EFS Replication to copy data to a destination EFS file system in the secondary region.
The correct solution uses the Amazon EFS Standard storage class, which natively replicates data across multiple Availability Zones to ensure high availability and prevent downtime during an AZ failure. It pairs this with Amazon EFS Replication to automate cross-region synchronization. EFS Replication operates continuously and asynchronously, aligning with the 15-minute RPO compliance requirement, while keeping the destination file system mounted and ready in the secondary region to satisfy the 30-minute RTO.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate the requirement for concurrent access and high availability.
Amazon EFS Standard provides simultaneous read/write access for multiple EC2 instances across different Availability Zones and replicates data across those AZs to survive failures.
Amazon EBS is restricted to a single Availability Zone (even with Multi-Attach), and EFS One Zone does not span multiple AZs.
2
Address the disaster recovery metrics (RPO and RTO).
Amazon EFS Replication copies data asynchronously to another AWS Region, meeting an RPO of minutes (well under the 15-minute limit) and a low RTO as the secondary file system is already warm.
Using Glacier vaults for backup recovery introduces significant retrieval delays that would violate the 30-minute RTO.
3
Select the solution that minimizes operational overhead.
EFS Replication is a native, fully-managed feature that automatically replicates data without custom backup scripting or database configurations.
Relational databases like Amazon RDS are structurally inappropriate for direct shared file storage.

Key Concept

Amazon EFS Replication and Multi-AZ Resiliency
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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Topics

Resilient and Highly Available Storage Infrastructure

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