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Difficulty: HardHigh Availability and Disaster Recovery Design

A manufacturing corporation is launching a global IoT device fleet configuration management platform. The primary system runs on Amazon EC2 instances within a private subnet across three Availability Zones in the us-east-1 Region, communicating externally through NAT Gateways. The database tier uses Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. The business requires a disaster recovery solution in the us-west-2 Region with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 minute. Which two options should the Solutions Architect choose to implement a highly available and resilient architecture that meets these requirements?

  1. Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2.Answer
  2. Configure Amazon Route 53 failover routing policies with active-passive settings, associating health checks with the Application Load Balancer endpoints in both Regions.Answer
  3. C
    Deploy a single NAT Gateway in a single Availability Zone in us-east-1 to centralize and reduce costs for all outbound internet traffic from the private EC2 instances.
  4. D
    Configure AWS Backup to take nightly database snapshots in us-east-1 and copy them to us-west-2 to serve as the database recovery source.
  5. E
    Configure Amazon Aurora Auto Scaling to dynamically spin up Aurora Replicas in us-west-2 to handle write failover operations automatically during high CPU utilization spikes in us-east-1.
  6. F
    Associate the application's Route 53 Private Hosted Zone only with the us-east-1 VPC, relying on default VPC peering DNS resolution to resolve endpoints from the us-west-2 VPC.

Answer

Deploying Amazon Aurora Global Database for cross-region replication combined with Route 53 active-passive failover routing policies linked to regional Application Load Balancers.
The correct strategy combines low-latency database replication and automated DNS failover. Deploying an Amazon Aurora Global Database meets the 1-minute RPO because replication lag is under 1 second, and the secondary cluster can be promoted to a primary cluster within minutes. Setting up Route 53 active-passive failover routing with health checks linked to the Application Load Balancer endpoints automates routing to the standby Region during a primary Region failure, helping achieve the 15-minute RTO.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Determine the database replication strategy to satisfy the 1-minute RPO.
Identify that Amazon Aurora Global Database provides physical, storage-based replication with replication lag under 1 second, meeting the RPO.
Standard cross-region snapshots do not meet the 1-minute RPO target.
2
Determine the global traffic routing strategy to satisfy the 15-minute RTO.
Identify that Route 53 active-passive failover routing policies automatically steer client requests to the secondary Region when the primary Region's endpoint is determined to be unhealthy by Route 53 health checks.
Automated DNS failover is necessary to minimize manual intervention and ensure the recovery window stays under 15 minutes.
3
Review architectural constraints such as NAT Gateway redundancy and Private Hosted Zone configuration to identify potential failure points.
Ensure NAT Gateways are deployed per Availability Zone, and make sure that any Private Hosted Zone is associated with both regional VPCs.
Outbound connectivity and internal DNS resolution must remain functional during localized AZ outages or full-region failovers.

Key Concept

Selecting and configuring cross-region database replication and global DNS failover policies to meet precise RTO/RPO targets.
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Topics

High Availability and Disaster Recovery Design

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