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Difficulty: MediumDatabase and Storage Strategy

A medical records company is launching a new patient portal that requires a highly available relational database for a read-heavy OLTP workload. During morning hours, read traffic increases tenfold, while write volume remains low and stable. The database must be encrypted at rest. In the event of an Availability Zone failure, the database must fail over automatically with zero data loss (RPO = 0) and a recovery time of less than 2 minutes (RTO < 2 minutes). Additionally, the database security audit logs must be securely shared with a centralized compliance account in the organization. Which database and storage strategy meets these requirements?

  1. A
    Deploy an Amazon RDS DB instance in a Multi-AZ deployment. Direct the application's read queries to the standby DB instance's endpoint to distribute the load during peak hours. Encrypt the DB instance using an AWS KMS Customer Managed Key.
  2. B
    Deploy an Amazon RDS DB instance in a single Availability Zone. Enable automated backups and configure a script to restore the DB instance to a different Availability Zone if a failure occurs. Encrypt the DB instance using an AWS KMS Customer Managed Key.
  3. Deploy an Amazon RDS DB instance in a Multi-AZ deployment. Create RDS Read Replicas to handle the read traffic and configure Auto Scaling for the replicas. Encrypt the DB instance and its replicas using an AWS KMS Customer Managed Key.Answer
  4. D
    Deploy an Amazon RDS DB instance in a Multi-AZ deployment with Read Replicas. Encrypt the primary DB instance using the default AWS-managed KMS key for Amazon RDS (aws/rds). Configure a cross-account key policy on the default key to share access with the centralized compliance account.

Answer

Deploy an Amazon RDS DB instance in a Multi-AZ deployment. Create RDS Read Replicas to handle the read traffic and configure Auto Scaling for the replicas. Encrypt the DB instance and its replicas using an AWS KMS Customer Managed Key.
The correct strategy uses an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployment to provide synchronous replication, achieving zero data loss (RPO = 0) and automatic failover in 1-2 minutes (RTO < 2 minutes). Read replicas are created with Auto Scaling to handle the tenfold read traffic spike, as the passive standby DB instance cannot serve reads. Encrypting the DB instances using a Customer Managed Key allows the key policy to be customized, enabling secure cross-account logging and access sharing.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate high availability and disaster recovery requirements.
The target workload requires synchronous replication for zero data loss (RPO = 0) and automated failover in under 2 minutes (RTO < 2 minutes).
An Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployment replicates data synchronously to a standby instance in another Availability Zone, providing automatic failover within 1 to 2 minutes during an outage.
2
Address the read scalability requirements.
The portal expects a tenfold increase in read traffic during peak hours.
Amazon RDS Read Replicas must be used to scale reads horizontally. The standby DB instance in an RDS Multi-AZ deployment is passive and cannot serve read traffic.
3
Examine the database encryption and cross-account access constraints.
The database must be encrypted at rest, and audit logs/access must be shared with a centralized compliance account.
An AWS KMS Customer Managed Key must be selected because default AWS-managed keys (like aws/rds) cannot have their key policies modified and cannot be shared across different AWS accounts.

Key Concept

Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments provide high availability and synchronous replication for zero data loss, while Read Replicas are utilized for scaling read workloads. Customer Managed Keys are required for cross-account sharing.
Estimated Time:2m 0s
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Topics

Database and Storage Strategy

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