Examkin

Question

Difficulty: MediumResilient and Highly Available Storage Infrastructure

A healthcare provider is designing a resilient, highly available architecture on AWS for its critical patient imaging system. The system consists of: (1) A database layer that requires automated, immediate failover with zero data loss in the event of an Availability Zone outage. (2) A shared file storage system to host active image files that must be concurrently read and written by multiple Amazon EC2 instances across three Availability Zones. (3) An archiving solution for older images that requires retrieval in under 10 minutes for emergency cases. Which combination of storage and database configurations will meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)

  1. Configure the database using Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB clusters to provide automatic failover and synchronous replication across Availability Zones.Answer
  2. Use Amazon EFS as the shared file system for active image files, and archive historical images in Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval using Expedited retrievals.Answer
  3. C
    Archive historical images in Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval and use Standard retrievals to reduce costs while meeting the under 10 minutes retrieval requirement.
  4. D
    Deploy the database on Amazon RDS in a single Availability Zone and configure an RDS Read Replica in a separate Availability Zone to serve as the automatic failover target.
  5. E
    Set up a Pilot Light disaster recovery configuration for the image processing servers, running them continuously at a scaled-down capacity in a secondary AWS Region to guarantee instant failover with no start-up delay.

Answer

Configure the database using Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB clusters to provide automatic failover and synchronous replication across Availability Zones, and use Amazon EFS as the shared file system for active image files while archiving historical images in Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval using Expedited retrievals.
Deploying the database using Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB clusters provides high availability, synchronous replication, and automated failover across multiple Availability Zones, which addresses the zero data loss and automated failover requirement. Utilizing Amazon EFS as a shared file system allows multiple EC2 instances to concurrently read and write files with high availability across three Availability Zones. Furthermore, archiving historical images in Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval and using Expedited retrievals allows the company to meet the RTO requirement of under 10 minutes, as Expedited retrievals make data available within 1 to 5 minutes.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the database resilience requirements: automated, immediate failover with zero data loss in the event of an AZ outage.
Identify Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB clusters or standard Multi-AZ deployments as the correct choice since they support synchronous replication and automated failover.
To ensure high availability and prevent data loss during an AZ outage.
2
Analyze the shared storage requirements: active image files must be concurrently read/written by multiple EC2 instances across three AZs.
Identify Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) as the correct shared file system since it natively supports multi-AZ concurrent access.
EBS volumes cannot be mounted concurrently across multiple AZs under these constraints.
3
Analyze the archive retrieval requirements: historical images must be retrieved in under 10 minutes.
Select S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval using Expedited retrievals, which completes in 1-5 minutes.
Standard retrievals take 3-5 hours, which violates the RTO target.

Key Concept

Designing resilient storage and database architectures involves matching application workloads with the correct storage service (e.g., EFS for concurrent multi-AZ file access) and retrieval configuration (e.g., Expedited retrievals for tight RTOs), while using Multi-AZ replication to ensure database resilience.
Estimated Time:2m 0s
Rate this question

Topics

Resilient and Highly Available Storage Infrastructure

More questions from this topic