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Difficulty: EasyHigh Availability and Disaster Recovery Design

A shipping company is designing a disaster recovery (DR) solution for its package tracking application across two AWS Regions: us-east-1 (primary) and us-west-2 (secondary). The company requires a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 30 minutes, while minimizing baseline infrastructure costs. The primary database must be replicated to the secondary region. Which disaster recovery strategy and Route 53 routing configuration should the solutions architect select?

  1. A
    A Backup and Restore strategy with nightly database backups copied to the secondary region, using Route 53 Latency-based routing to distribute traffic.
  2. A Pilot Light strategy with Amazon Aurora Global Database replicating data to the secondary region, using Route 53 Failover routing to direct user traffic during a disaster.Answer
  3. C
    A Warm Standby strategy with a fully scaled application environment running continuously in the secondary region, using Route 53 Geolocation routing to distribute traffic.
  4. D
    A Pilot Light strategy replicating database snapshots hourly, using Route 53 Private Hosted Zones to automatically route external user traffic.

Answer

The Pilot Light strategy using Amazon Aurora Global Database for replication combined with Route 53 Failover routing meets the RPO, RTO, and cost-optimization requirements.
The Pilot Light strategy with Amazon Aurora Global Database meets the 15-minute RPO requirement because Aurora Global Database replicates data across regions with latency typically under a second. The 30-minute RTO allows enough time to spin up application servers in the secondary region when a disaster is declared, while keeping compute costs minimal during normal operations. Route 53 Failover routing is the standard policy for active-passive disaster recovery configurations.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze RPO and cost constraints to select the disaster recovery strategy.
An RPO of 15 minutes requires continuous or near-continuous database replication, which rules out backup and restore with nightly/hourly snapshots. Minimizing baseline costs rules out Warm Standby and Active-Active strategies, indicating that a Pilot Light strategy is the most suitable pattern.
The Pilot Light strategy keeps database replication active (sub-second RPO) while keeping application compute resources turned off or at zero capacity until a failover occurs, minimizing costs.
2
Analyze RTO constraints to ensure application resource provisioning is feasible.
An RTO of 30 minutes allows sufficient time to launch application servers (e.g., via Auto Scaling groups or CloudFormation templates) in the secondary region during failover.
Since the compute resources are not running during normal operations, the recovery process must fit within the 30-minute window.
3
Select the appropriate Route 53 routing policy for active-passive disaster recovery.
Route 53 Failover routing must be configured to point to the primary region as active and the secondary region as passive.
Active-passive failover routing automatically directs public traffic to the secondary region if Route 53 health checks determine that the primary region's endpoints are unhealthy.

Key Concept

Disaster Recovery Patterns and Route 53 Routing Policies
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Topics

High Availability and Disaster Recovery Design

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