Question

Difficulty: MediumEnhancing Reliability and Disaster Recovery

A retail company operates a legacy inventory application in the us-east-1 Region. The architecture consists of Amazon EC2 instances inside a private subnet of VPC-A. Outbound traffic to third-party APIs goes through a single NAT Gateway located in a public subnet of Availability Zone us-east-1a. The application queries an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database cluster. Internal service resolution is handled via a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) associated with VPC-A.

To support a new business continuity policy, the Solutions Architect must design a disaster recovery (DR) solution in the us-west-2 Region with a target Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 5 minutes. The architect also needs to eliminate single points of failure in the us-east-1 outbound path.

Which TWO steps should the Solutions Architect take to meet these requirements?

  1. Deploy a NAT Gateway in a public subnet in each Availability Zone in us-east-1, and configure the private subnet route tables to route outbound traffic through the local NAT Gateway in the same Availability Zone.Answer
  2. Create an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2, and use Route 53 Application Recovery Controller (ARC) routing controls to manage failover.Answer
  3. C
    Deploy a single NAT Gateway in a public subnet in us-east-1a, and route outbound internet traffic from all private subnets across all Availability Zones in us-east-1 through this single NAT Gateway.
  4. D
    Configure AWS Backup to take daily snapshots of the Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database cluster, copy the snapshots to us-west-2, and restore the cluster in us-west-2 during a failover event.
  5. E
    Create a duplicate Route 53 Private Hosted Zone with the same domain name in the us-west-2 VPC to independently manage internal DNS name resolution for the resources during disaster recovery.

Answer

Deploying a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone in the primary region, configuring private subnet route tables to use the local NAT Gateway, setting up an Amazon Aurora Global Database, and using Route 53 Application Recovery Controller (ARC) for traffic management.
Deploying a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone in the primary region ensures that an outage in one zone does not impact outbound connectivity for resources in other zones, removing a single point of failure. Setting up an Amazon Aurora Global Database provides cross-region replication with a typical RPO of under 1 second, meeting the 5-minute requirement. Utilizing Route 53 Application Recovery Controller (ARC) routing controls provides a mechanism to shift application traffic across regions within minutes, achieving the 15-minute RTO requirement.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze outbound connectivity requirements and configure highly available NAT Gateways.
Redundant NAT Gateways are deployed in each public subnet of the primary region, and route tables are updated so each private subnet points to its local NAT Gateway.
Ensures outbound internet traffic has no single point of failure across Availability Zones.
2
Evaluate the DR database replication solution for the required RTO/RPO.
Amazon Aurora Global Database replication is configured to us-west-2, providing low-latency physical replication.
Achieves an RPO of under 1 second, satisfying the 5-minute RPO target.
3
Configure cross-region routing and failover control.
Route 53 Application Recovery Controller (ARC) routing controls are created to handle active/standby traffic routing.
Allows traffic shift and database promotion to execute within minutes, satisfying the 15-minute RTO target.

Key Concept

Designing a resilient multi-region disaster recovery strategy and eliminating single points of failure within a region by using multi-AZ NAT Gateways and active-standby replication configurations.
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