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Difficulty: HardResilient and Highly Available Storage Infrastructure

A genetics research laboratory runs a high-performance gene sequencing application on Amazon EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones in a primary AWS Region. The application requires shared, concurrent access to a common file system that can store petabytes of genomic data with consistent sub-millisecond latencies. The laboratory needs to establish a disaster recovery (DR) architecture in a secondary AWS Region. The DR plan requires a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 15 minutes for the shared storage layer. Which storage architecture should a solutions architect design to meet these requirements with the lowest operational overhead?

  1. Deploy Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) in the primary Region using the Regional storage class. Enable EFS Replication to automatically replicate data to the secondary AWS Region. In the event of a disaster, mount the replicated EFS file system on EC2 instances in the secondary Region.Answer
  2. B
    Store the genomic files in an Amazon S3 bucket. Configure an S3 Lifecycle policy to transition the files to Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval immediately, and configure S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) to replicate the Glacier objects. During a disaster recovery event, initiate standard retrievals to restore access to the EC2 instances.
  3. C
    Implement Amazon EFS in the primary Region. Configure AWS Backup to perform daily backups of the file system and copy them to the secondary Region. In the event of a failover, restore the EFS file system from the copied backup and mount it on the EC2 instances in the secondary Region.
  4. D
    Store the genomic files on Amazon EBS volumes attached to the EC2 instances. Deploy an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database cluster in the primary Region with a Read Replica in the secondary Region, and configure the database replication to synchronize the EBS volume block changes between Regions.

Answer

Deploy Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) in the primary Region using the Regional storage class and enable native EFS Replication to the secondary Region.
The correct option is the one proposing Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) with EFS Replication. EFS provides shared, concurrent access suitable for high-performance applications, and native cross-Region replication replicates changes to a destination file system within minutes, satisfying both the 15-minute RPO and the sub-15-minute RTO requirements with minimal operational overhead.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the storage access patterns and performance requirements.
The application requires shared, concurrent access to a common file system with sub-millisecond latencies, pointing to Amazon EFS rather than S3 (object storage) or EBS (block storage attached to single instances).
Choosing the correct storage service is the first step in designing a resilient architecture.
2
Evaluate the RPO and RTO constraints.
The RPO is 15 minutes and the RTO is less than 15 minutes. This requires continuous replication rather than daily batch backups.
Low recovery objectives rule out backup-and-restore or cold-tier options like standard S3 Glacier.
3
Select the replication and failover mechanism.
Native EFS Replication automatically and continuously replicates data to another AWS Region. The destination file system is active and mountable immediately, yielding an RTO of minutes and an RPO of minutes.
EFS Replication provides a fully managed, low-operational-overhead disaster recovery solution.

Key Concept

Amazon EFS Replication provides native cross-Region replication for shared file systems, offering low RPO (minutes) and RTO (minutes) for disaster recovery without operational complexity.
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Resilient and Highly Available Storage Infrastructure

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