An enterprise healthcare platform hosts its critical medical imaging application in the `u… — AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate

An enterprise healthcare platform hosts its critical medical imaging application in the `us-east-1` Region. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances distributed across three Availability Zones (AZs) and requires concurrent, POSIX-compliant read/write access to shared storage for active patient scans. Active scans must be immediately resilient to AZ-level failures. Scans older than $90$ days must be transitioned to a lower-cost tier to optimize costs, but must remain accessible within an emergency retrieval window of under $5$ minutes. Additionally, a disaster recovery (DR) site in the `us-west-2` Region must be maintained using a pilot light strategy. The DR site has a target Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of $15$ minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of $10$ minutes. Which storage architecture meets all of these requirements with the lowest operational complexity?

Deploy a Multi-AZ Amazon EFS file system in us-east-1 and configure an EFS Lifecycle policy to transition files to EFS Archive after $90$ days. Enable EFS Replication to copy data to a destination EFS file system in us-west-2. Deploy pilot light EC2 instances in us-west-2 that remain stopped until a failover event, at which point they are started and mount the replicated EFS file system.Answer
B
Deploy a Multi-AZ Amazon EFS file system in us-east-1. Implement a custom script to move files older than $90$ days to Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval using Standard retrieval. Configure EFS Replication to a destination EFS file system in us-west-2, and maintain stopped EC2 instances in us-west-2 to mount the replica during failover.
C
Deploy a Multi-AZ Amazon EFS file system in us-east-1 and configure an EFS Lifecycle policy to transition files to EFS Archive after $90$ days. Set up AWS Backup to copy EFS snapshots to us-west-2 once daily. Deploy pilot light EC2 instances in us-west-2 that remain stopped, and restore the EFS file system from the daily backup during a failover event.
D
Deploy a Multi-AZ Amazon EFS file system in us-east-1 and configure an EFS Lifecycle policy to transition files to EFS Archive after $90$ days. To implement disaster recovery, configure an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL DB instance with a Read Replica in us-west-2, and use the database replication stream to synchronize EFS mount points and file changes, promoting the replica during failover.

Answer

Deploy a Multi-AZ Amazon EFS file system in us-east-1, configure an EFS Lifecycle policy to transition files to EFS Archive after 90 days, enable EFS Replication to us-west-2, and use stopped EC2 instances in us-west-2 as pilot light recovery targets.

The correct architecture utilizes Multi-AZ Amazon EFS to support concurrent, POSIX-compliant writes across three Availability Zones. Transitioning to EFS Archive via EFS Lifecycle Management ensures cost optimization while preserving sub-second file retrieval speeds (well below the

5

-minute RTO). EFS Replication continuously synchronizes data to a target EFS file system in the destination region, achieving an RPO of minutes (meeting the

15

-minute target). Finally, starting stopped EC2 instances (pilot light strategy) to mount the destination EFS file system can easily be completed in under

10

minutes, meeting the RTO.

Step-by-Step Solution

Select Multi-AZ EFS for us-east-1 storage.

Provides concurrent POSIX-compliant file system access across all three Availability Zones, ensuring immediate resilience to AZ failures.

Meets the requirement for active patient scans to have regional high availability and shared access.

Configure EFS Lifecycle Management to transition files to EFS Archive after 90 days.

Files are automatically moved to a lower-cost tier while maintaining sub-second retrieval times.

Satisfies the regulatory requirement for cost-efficient long-term storage while keeping access times under the 5-minute RTO.

Enable native EFS Replication to a destination EFS file system in us-west-2.

Replicates file modifications asynchronously with an RPO of minutes (typically under 15 minutes).

Satisfies the 15-minute RPO disaster recovery requirement.

Configure stopped EC2 instances in us-west-2 to mount the replicated EFS file system upon startup.

A pilot light disaster recovery target that can be fully active in under 10 minutes.

Satisfies the 10-minute RTO disaster recovery requirement with minimal cost.

Key Concept

Designing a multi-region, resilient storage architecture with EFS Multi-AZ, EFS Archive lifecycle tiering, EFS Replication, and pilot light EC2 compute failover.

Estimated Time:3m 0s

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