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Difficulty: Very hardHigh Availability and Disaster Recovery Design

A clinical trial organization is designing a real-time clinical patient monitoring platform across two AWS Regions: us-east-1 (primary) and us-west-2 (secondary). The platform processes real-time telemetry from wearable IoT sensors via an API gateway, storing the records in an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database. The business requires a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 minute and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 5 minutes. The internal microservices run in private subnets, resolve external dependencies through interface VPC endpoints, and require private DNS resolution of internal domain names across both regions. Outbound calls to external medical validation endpoints must be highly available and resilient to Availability Zone (AZ) failures. Which architecture meets these requirements while minimizing recovery time and operational complexity?

  1. Deploy Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2. Deploy the application servers across multiple Availability Zones in private subnets in both regions. In each region, deploy a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone to manage outbound calls. Associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) with the VPCs in both us-east-1 and us-west-2. Configure Route 53 Application Recovery Controller (Route 53 ARC) routing controls with health checks to automate failover of the public API endpoint via Route 53 failover records.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with cross-region read replicas from us-east-1 to us-west-2. Deploy the application servers across multiple Availability Zones in private subnets in both regions. Deploy a single NAT Gateway in the primary Availability Zone of each region to route outbound traffic. Associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) with the VPC in us-east-1 and configure Route 53 Active-Passive failover routing policy pointing to the regional Application Load Balancers (ALBs).
  3. C
    Deploy Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL in us-east-1 and configure AWS Backup to replicate snapshots to us-west-2 daily. Deploy the application servers in us-east-1 and write an AWS CloudFormation template to deploy identical resources in us-west-2. In the event of a failure, restore the database from the replicated snapshot, launch the CloudFormation stack in us-west-2, and update the Route 53 failover routing policy to point to the new Application Load Balancer (ALB).
  4. D
    Deploy Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2. Enable Aurora Auto Scaling on both the primary and secondary clusters to dynamically scale instances to handle read-write write forwarding workloads during failover. Deploy NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone in both regions. Associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) only with the us-east-1 VPC and rely on Route 53 Geolocation routing to automatically direct VPC-to-VPC traffic to the nearest regional database endpoint.

Answer

Deploy Amazon Aurora Global Database, multi-AZ application servers with NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone in both regions, associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone with VPCs in both regions, and use Route 53 Application Recovery Controller (ARC) for automated DNS failover.
The correct architecture uses Amazon Aurora Global Database to achieve near-zero recovery point objective (RPO) through sub-second cross-region replication. By having the application stack pre-deployed in both regions, deploying redundant NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone for resilient outbound external API access, associating the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) with both VPCs for cross-region internal name resolution, and utilizing Route 53 Application Recovery Controller (ARC) for automated failover, the solution achieves the strict 5-minute recovery time objective (RTO).

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Select a database replication strategy that satisfies the sub-minute RPO requirement.
Amazon Aurora Global Database provides physical, sub-second replication latency across regions, meeting the 1-minute RPO constraint.
Standard backup restoration or cross-region read replicas can introduce higher RPO or failover latency.
2
Design the network egress and internal DNS resolution to support high availability and cross-region failover.
Deploy a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone within each region's VPC, and associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) with the VPCs in both us-east-1 and us-west-2.
A single NAT Gateway per region is a single point of failure for outbound connections. A PHZ must be associated with every VPC that needs to resolve its records, spanning both regions.
3
Implement an automated region-level failover mechanism that meets the 5-minute RTO constraint.
Use Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller (Route 53 ARC) routing controls with health checks to coordinate the failover of the API entry point.
ARC provides low-latency, deterministic routing controls and automated failover that can redirect traffic within seconds, fulfilling the 5-minute RTO target without manual DNS updates.

Key Concept

High Availability and Multi-Region Disaster Recovery Design with strict RTO/RPO, NAT Gateway redundancy, Route 53 PHZ VPC association, and automated DNS failover.
Estimated Time:3m 0s
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Topics

High Availability and Disaster Recovery Design

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