Question

Difficulty: HardHigh Availability and Disaster Recovery Design

A logistics company is designing a High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) architecture for its new central supply chain inventory auditing platform. The system processes inventory updates from international warehouses and has a strict Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 30 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 5 minutes. The application runs on Amazon ECS Fargate tasks behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) and relies on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL for data storage. Outbound inventory sync calls must be routed securely to third-party vendors. The architect chooses us-east-1 as the primary region and us-west-2 as the disaster recovery region. Which two configurations should the solutions architect implement to achieve these HA/DR objectives? (Select TWO.)

  1. Create an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary database cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary database cluster in us-west-2 to support sub-second physical replication and satisfy the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) requirement.Answer
  2. Configure Amazon Route 53 active-passive failover routing by creating a primary record pointing to the Application Load Balancer in us-east-1 associated with an active health check, and a secondary record pointing to the Application Load Balancer in us-west-2.Answer
  3. C
    Enable Amazon Aurora Auto Scaling on the reader instances in us-west-2 to automatically promote a reader instance to primary based on write connection load, and configure Route 53 multi-value routing to distribute write traffic across both regions.
  4. D
    Configure Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing to direct write requests to the lowest latency region, relying on application-level retries and default Aurora asynchronous cross-region replication to resolve write conflicts across both regions.
  5. E
    Deploy a single NAT Gateway in us-east-1 to route outbound traffic for both regions to third-party vendors, and configure a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) in the primary VPC without associating it with the secondary VPC.

Answer

Configure an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2 to support sub-second physical replication, and configure Amazon Route 53 active-passive failover routing to manage traffic switchover between the Application Load Balancers.
The correct architecture uses Amazon Aurora Global Database to achieve sub-second data replication across regions, easily satisfying the 5-minute RPO. Route 53 failover routing policy is used to manage the active-passive application traffic flow, directing user requests to the primary Application Load Balancer in us-east-1 and shifting to us-west-2 within minutes if a failure is detected, satisfying the 30-minute RTO.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Select a database replication technology that meets the RPO constraint of 5 minutes.
Amazon Aurora Global Database provides sub-second replication lag, ensuring the RPO is satisfied.
Since standard cross-region read replicas can introduce replication lag or require more manual configuration, Aurora Global Database is the native and optimal solution for cross-region disaster recovery.
2
Establish the Route 53 routing policy to handle traffic failover within the 30-minute RTO.
Route 53 active-passive failover routing routes all write traffic to the primary ALB in us-east-1 and fails over to us-west-2 if the health check fails.
This prevents clients from attempting to write directly to the read-only secondary database cluster and automates the DNS switchover.
3
Ensure outbound connectivity and internal name resolution are highly available and properly connected.
Deploy redundant NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone in both regions, and associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone with both the primary and secondary VPCs.
This guarantees that outbound API syncs do not suffer from single points of failure and that internal DNS resolution functions correctly after a failover.

Key Concept

Multi-region disaster recovery orchestration using Amazon Aurora Global Database and Route 53 active-passive failover routing.
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