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Difficulty: MediumHigh Availability and Disaster Recovery Design

A global automotive manufacturer is designing a new critical parts tracking system on AWS. The application will be deployed across two AWS Regions: us-east-1 as the primary active region and us-west-2 for disaster recovery. The business requires a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 10 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 5 minutes. The database tier must support cross-region replication, and the network design must ensure outbound internet connectivity remains highly available even if an entire Availability Zone experiences an outage. External client traffic must automatically fail over to the secondary region if the primary region's endpoints become degraded. Which architecture meets these requirements while minimizing cost and operational complexity?

  1. A
    Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2. Deploy Application Load Balancers (ALBs) in both regions behind Route 53 failover routing records with active health checks. Deploy a single NAT Gateway in one Availability Zone in each region's VPC, routing all outbound traffic from all private subnets through it to minimize gateway costs.
  2. B
    Deploy the application servers in us-east-1 and perform daily backup snapshots of the database, replicating them to us-west-2. In the event of a disaster, use AWS CloudFormation to spin up the application tier in us-west-2, restore the database from the replicated snapshots, and use Route 53 failover routing to update the DNS records.
  3. Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2. Deploy Application Load Balancers (ALBs) in both regions behind Amazon Route 53 failover routing records with active health checks. Deploy NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone within the private subnets of both regions' VPCs.Answer
  4. D
    Deploy an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL DB instance with Multi-AZ enabled in us-east-1, and configure the application to scale read operations horizontally by routing read queries directly to the standby instance in the secondary Availability Zone. Set up cross-region replication to us-west-2 for disaster recovery, and use Route 53 failover routing for the ALBs.

Answer

Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2. Deploy Application Load Balancers (ALBs) in both regions behind Amazon Route 53 failover routing records with active health checks. Deploy NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone within the private subnets of both regions' VPCs.
The correct solution uses Amazon Aurora Global Database, which offers a typical replication latency of less than one second, easily satisfying the 5-minute RPO requirement, and can be promoted to a standalone read-write cluster in under a minute to satisfy the 10-minute RTO. Route 53 failover routing automatically redirects traffic to the secondary region's Application Load Balancer when health checks fail. Outbound internet redundancy is preserved by deploying NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone, preventing outbound connection failures if a single Availability Zone goes offline.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate the database tier requirements against the target RTO (10 minutes) and RPO (5 minutes).
An Amazon Aurora Global Database is selected because it replicates data across regions in under 1 second (meeting the 5-minute RPO) and can be promoted to a primary cluster in under 1 minute (meeting the 10-minute RTO).
Standard cross-region replication or backup-and-restore patterns do not reliably guarantee the tight RTO and RPO limits under load.
2
Assess regional routing failover and health checking requirements.
Configure Amazon Route 53 failover routing records pointing to Application Load Balancers in both regions, backed by active health checks.
This configuration automatically detects primary region endpoint degradation and diverts traffic to the secondary region without manual intervention.
3
Design outbound NAT connectivity to ensure no single point of failure during an Availability Zone outage.
Deploy NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone within the private subnets of the VPCs.
Deploying a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone ensures that if one AZ fails, resources in the remaining AZs can still access the internet through their respective local gateways.

Key Concept

Multi-region disaster recovery design using Amazon Aurora Global Database, Route 53 failover routing, and redundant NAT Gateways to satisfy stringent RTO/RPO and high availability requirements.
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Topics

High Availability and Disaster Recovery Design

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