Question

Difficulty: MediumResilient Database Configurations and High Availability

A company runs a logistics and package tracking application on AWS that uses an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database. The database must be configured to survive a single Availability Zone (AZ) failure within the Region. The solution must support automatic failover with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 22 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 00 (no data loss). Additionally, the company needs to scale read performance for historical tracking queries without affecting the write performance of the primary database. Which configuration will meet these requirements?

  1. A
    Deploy two independent Single-AZ DB instances in different Availability Zones, and configure Amazon Route 53 with a latency routing policy and health checks to automatically route read and write requests to the healthiest instance.
  2. B
    Deploy the database as a Single-AZ DB instance, create an asynchronous Read Replica in a different Availability Zone, and configure the application to manually promote the Read Replica if the primary instance fails.
  3. Deploy the database as an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB instance, create one or more Read Replicas in different Availability Zones, and route application read traffic to the replica endpoints.Answer
  4. D
    Deploy the database as a Single-AZ DB instance, and configure a disaster recovery strategy to restore the database from daily automated snapshots to a new instance in a different Availability Zone during a failure event.

Answer

Deploy the database as an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB instance, create one or more Read Replicas in different Availability Zones, and route application read traffic to the replica endpoints.
Deploying the database as an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB instance provides synchronous replication to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone, guaranteeing a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 00 (no data loss). In the event of an infrastructure failure, Amazon RDS automatically performs a failover to the standby instance, typically in under 6060 to 120120 seconds, which satisfies the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 22 minutes. To scale read performance without impacting the primary writer, one or more Read Replicas can be deployed to handle read-only queries.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Select Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB instance deployment.
Enables synchronous replication to a standby replica in a second Availability Zone.
Synchronous replication guarantees that write operations are committed to both zones before succeeding, satisfying the RPO of 00 (no data loss).
2
Rely on RDS automatic failover mechanism.
Database failover to the standby instance occurs automatically within 6060 to 120120 seconds during an outage.
Automatic failover satisfies the RTO requirement of less than 22 minutes without manual intervention.
3
Create one or more RDS Read Replicas in different Availability Zones.
Provides dedicated read endpoints for the application to query historical tracking data.
Offloads read-intensive queries from the primary database instance to keep write performance optimal.

Key Concept

High Availability and Read Scaling with Amazon RDS Multi-AZ and Read Replicas
Estimated Time:2m 0s
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