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Difficulty: MediumEnhancing Reliability and Disaster Recovery

A digital publishing company hosts a content delivery and document archiving platform on AWS. The application runs on Amazon ECS tasks on AWS Fargate behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in a single AWS Region. The document metadata is stored in an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless v2 database cluster. Files are uploaded directly to an Amazon S3 bucket.

Currently, the company's disaster recovery (DR) strategy relies on daily automated Aurora snapshots copied to a second region and cross-region S3 replication. The company wants to improve its reliability and disaster recovery posture to achieve a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1515 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 55 minutes in a secondary region.

Which two actions should a solutions architect take to meet these requirements with the least operational overhead?

  1. Convert the existing Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database cluster into an Aurora Global Database by adding a secondary DB cluster in the secondary AWS Region.Answer
  2. Deploy the Amazon ECS tasks and the Application Load Balancer in the secondary AWS Region, and configure Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller (ARC) routing control to manage traffic failover.Answer
  3. C
    Configure Amazon Route 53 active-passive failover routing to point to the Application Load Balancer in the primary and secondary regions, disabling Route 53 health checks to avoid routing flap.
  4. D
    Configure AWS Backup to take database snapshots every 4 hours, replicate them to the secondary region, and run an automated script to restore the database in the secondary region during a disaster.
  5. E
    Create a new Route 53 Private Hosted Zone in the primary region's account to resolve the database endpoint, without associating the zone with the secondary VPC.

Answer

Convert the database to an Aurora Global Database and deploy the application in the secondary region using Route 53 Application Recovery Controller (ARC) for failover routing.
To meet the 5-minute RPO, a live replication strategy is required. Converting the Aurora database to an Aurora Global Database ensures data is replicated across regions in near-real-time. To meet the 15-minute RTO, deploying the ECS tasks and ALB in the secondary region and using Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller (ARC) routing control allows fast, deterministic failover of application traffic.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Address the 5-minute RPO database requirement by setting up real-time cross-region replication.
Converting the database cluster to an Aurora Global Database and adding a secondary cluster in the secondary region ensures sub-second replication latency.
This guarantees that database state is kept up to date within seconds, satisfying the 5-minute RPO with minimal administrative effort.
2
Address the 15-minute RTO traffic and compute failover requirements.
ECS tasks and an ALB are provisioned in the secondary region, and Route 53 Application Recovery Controller (ARC) routing controls are configured to direct traffic.
This allows deterministic, fast traffic redirection during a disaster, fulfilling the RTO requirement.

Key Concept

Selecting and configuring AWS multi-region disaster recovery mechanisms to achieve low RTO and RPO targets while ensuring proper cross-region resource connectivity and traffic control.
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Topics

Enhancing Reliability and Disaster Recovery