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Difficulty: MediumDatabase and Storage Strategy

A healthcare provider is designing a new digital medical imaging archive and diagnostic report system. The system must store structured patient metadata logs (OLTP workload) and unstructured medical images in DICOM format (Object storage). The metadata database must support high-volume write transactions and scale read traffic to handle sudden spikes from hospital clients. The disaster recovery requirements demand a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1515 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 11 minute. Additionally, for regulatory compliance, the medical images must be securely archived and replicated to a destination bucket in a secondary, isolated AWS account in a different AWS region, encrypted at rest using AWS KMS. Which of the following database and storage configurations should the solutions architect choose to meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)

  1. Deploy an Amazon Aurora global database with the primary cluster in the active region and a secondary cluster in the disaster recovery region, utilizing Aurora Replicas in both regions to handle database operations.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy a Multi-AZ Amazon RDS PostgreSQL database in the primary region, and route read queries directly to the standby instance in the secondary Availability Zone to scale database performance during peak read hours.
  3. C
    Configure hourly database snapshots in the primary region, and schedule an AWS Lambda function to copy these snapshots to the disaster recovery region every 22 hours to reconstruct the database during a regional disaster.
  4. Store the medical images in Amazon S3, and configure S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) to a destination bucket in the disaster recovery region using a Customer Managed Key (CMK) in AWS KMS with appropriate cross-account key policies.Answer
  5. E
    Store the medical images in Amazon S3, and configure S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) to a destination bucket in a secondary AWS account using the default AWS-managed KMS key (aws/s3) to simplify cross-account encryption configuration.

Answer

Deploy an Amazon Aurora global database with the primary cluster in the active region and a secondary cluster in the disaster recovery region, and store the medical images in Amazon S3, configuring S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) using a Customer Managed Key (CMK) in AWS KMS with cross-account key policies.
Deploying an Amazon Aurora global database provides sub-second replication to the disaster recovery region, satisfying the strict RTO of 1515 minutes and RPO of 11 minute, while supporting read replicas for traffic scaling. For object storage, utilizing Amazon S3 with Cross-Region Replication (CRR) and a Customer Managed Key (CMK) configured with cross-account policies allows secure replication of medical images to a secondary AWS account, which is impossible with AWS-managed keys.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate the database tier for high performance, read scaling, and strict RTO/RPO targets.
Determine that Amazon Aurora Global Database satisfies the RTO of 1515 minutes and RPO of 11 minute via storage-based physical replication, while standard RDS snapshot replication fails the RPO target.
Aurora Global Database replicates data sub-second, allowing for near-zero RPO and rapid failover.
2
Assess the scalability and read routing configuration of the database options.
Eliminate the configuration routing read queries to the RDS standby instance because Multi-AZ standby instances do not accept read traffic.
RDS standby instances are purely passive; read scaling requires read replicas or Aurora replicas.
3
Evaluate S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) requirements for cross-account destination buckets.
Identify that the default AWS-managed KMS key (aws/s3) cannot be used because its policy cannot be modified to grant cross-account access.
A Customer Managed Key (CMK) is required to configure key policies allowing cross-account decryption and encryption.

Key Concept

Selecting and configuring highly available, secure, and compliant databases and storage with cross-region and cross-account capabilities to meet RTO/RPO constraints.
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Topics

Database and Storage Strategy

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