Question

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

An automotive fleet telematics company processes vehicle telemetry data in the us-east-1 Region. The application tier runs on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. The database tier uses an Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. The company needs to design a disaster recovery (DR) strategy in the us-west-2 Region with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 2 hours and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes. The solution must minimize costs during normal operations.

Which combination of actions should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)

  1. Configure Amazon RDS cross-Region replication to maintain a read replica in the secondary Region, which will be promoted to a standalone primary database during a failover event.Answer
  2. Prepare an AWS CloudFormation template containing the application tier resources, and deploy it in the secondary Region with the Auto Scaling group's desired capacity set to 0.Answer
  3. C
    Enable Amazon RDS Multi-AZ replication to the secondary Region to achieve synchronous database replication and automatic failover.
  4. D
    Deploy a fully scaled, active application tier in the secondary Region, and use Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing to distribute user traffic.
  5. E
    Export database transaction logs to Amazon S3 hourly, transition them to Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval in the secondary Region, and restore them during a disaster.

Answer

Configure Amazon RDS cross-Region replication to maintain a read replica in the secondary Region to be promoted during failover, and prepare an AWS CloudFormation template to deploy the application tier in the secondary Region with the Auto Scaling group desired capacity set to 0.
The correct strategy combines database replication and compute infrastructure preparedness. Configuring Amazon RDS cross-Region replication provides continuous asynchronous data transfer to the secondary Region, satisfying the 15-minute RPO. Deploying the application tier infrastructure with an Auto Scaling group capacity of 0 ensures that no EC2 compute charges are incurred during normal operations. In a disaster recovery event, the solutions architect can promote the RDS read replica to a primary database and scale up the Auto Scaling group, recovering the application stack well within the 2-hour RTO.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Address the 15-minute database RPO with asynchronous cross-Region database replication.
Create an Amazon RDS cross-Region read replica of the MySQL database in the target Region.
RDS cross-Region read replicas replicate changes asynchronously within seconds or minutes, guaranteeing the data loss remains well below the 15-minute target.
2
Minimize compute costs during normal operations while satisfying the 2-hour RTO.
Deploy an AWS CloudFormation template in the target Region with the Auto Scaling group capacity set to 0.
Keeping the Auto Scaling group capacity at 0 ensures that no EC2 instances are running or billed during standard operations, matching the Pilot Light strategy. During a disaster, the capacity is updated to scale up the instances.
3
Ensure the overall recovery process can complete within the 2-hour RTO limit.
Define recovery steps: promote the RDS read replica to primary and increase the Auto Scaling group desired capacity.
Promoting the read replica and launching EC2 instances via Auto Scaling takes under 15 minutes, which successfully satisfies the 2-hour RTO requirement.

Key Concept

Implementing a cost-optimized Pilot Light disaster recovery strategy across Regions using Amazon RDS cross-Region read replicas and scaled-down Auto Scaling groups.
Estimated Time:2m 0s
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