An energy management company is designing a disaster recovery (DR) architecture for a critical smart meter telemetry processing platform. The platform processes real-time data from millions of IoT devices. The company requires a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 minute. The primary deployment is in the us-east-1 Region, and the DR target is the us-west-2 Region. The architecture consists of public Application Load Balancers (ALBs) routing requests to containerized backend tasks running on Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate in private subnets. The backend tasks must call an external third-party API over the internet to validate device payloads. The application's state is stored in an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database. The backend tasks resolve the database endpoint using a private DNS name, db.internal.telemetry. Which architecture meets these requirements with the lowest cost and operational complexity while maintaining high availability (HA) in the primary Region?
- Configure a Route 53 Active-Passive failover routing policy using Route 53 health checks on the primary ALB. Deploy Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2 running a single reader instance. In both regions, run the ECS Fargate tasks across three Availability Zones (AZs) in private subnets, with Route Tables in each private subnet pointing to a dedicated NAT Gateway in the same AZ. Create a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) for db.internal.telemetry containing a CNAME record pointing to the local cluster endpoint, and associate this PHZ with both the us-east-1 and us-west-2 VPCs. Keep the ECS service in us-west-2 scaled to 0 tasks, and use an AWS Step Functions workflow to promote the secondary Aurora cluster and scale up the ECS service to the required capacity during failover.Answer
- BConfigure a Route 53 Active-Passive failover routing policy using Route 53 health checks on the primary ALB. Deploy Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2 running a single reader instance. In both regions, run the ECS Fargate tasks across three Availability Zones (AZs) in private subnets, with Route Tables in all three private subnets in us-east-1 pointing to a single NAT Gateway deployed in a single AZ. Create a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) for db.internal.telemetry containing a CNAME record pointing to the local cluster endpoint, and associate this PHZ with both the us-east-1 and us-west-2 VPCs. Keep the ECS service in us-west-2 scaled to 0 tasks, and use an AWS Step Functions workflow to promote the secondary Aurora cluster and scale up the ECS service during failover.
- CConfigure a Route 53 Active-Passive failover routing policy using Route 53 health checks on the primary ALB. Deploy Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2 running a single reader instance. In both regions, run the ECS Fargate tasks across three Availability Zones (AZs) in private subnets, with Route Tables in each private subnet pointing to a dedicated NAT Gateway in the same AZ. Create a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) for db.internal.telemetry containing a CNAME record pointing to the local cluster endpoint, but associate this PHZ only with the us-east-1 VPC. Keep the ECS service in us-west-2 scaled to 0 tasks, and use an AWS Step Functions workflow to promote the secondary Aurora cluster and scale up the ECS service during failover.
- DConfigure a Route 53 Active-Passive failover routing policy using Route 53 health checks on the primary ALB. Set up AWS Backup to take hourly snapshots of the Aurora database in us-east-1 and copy them to us-west-2. In both regions, run the ECS Fargate tasks across three Availability Zones (AZs) in private subnets, with Route Tables in each private subnet pointing to a dedicated NAT Gateway in the same AZ. Create a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) for db.internal.telemetry containing a CNAME record pointing to the local cluster endpoint, and associate this PHZ with both the us-east-1 and us-west-2 VPCs. Keep the ECS service in us-west-2 scaled to 0 tasks, and use an AWS Step Functions workflow to restore the database from the copied snapshot and scale up the ECS service during failover.
Answer
The architecture using Route 53 Active-Passive failover, Amazon Aurora Global Database, multi-AZ ECS Fargate tasks with dedicated NAT Gateways per AZ, and a Private Hosted Zone associated with both VPCs satisfies the RTO, RPO, cost, and high availability requirements.
The correct architecture utilizes Route 53 Active-Passive failover to route external traffic to the healthy region. Aurora Global Database ensures that data is replicated continuously with sub-second latency, satisfying the 1-minute RPO. Operating the secondary region as a Warm Standby (with ECS tasks scaled to zero and a single small Aurora reader) minimizes idle resource costs. High availability in the primary region is preserved by deploying a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone. The database private DNS name resolves correctly in both VPCs because the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone is associated with both the primary and secondary VPCs.
Step-by-Step Solution
Key Concept
High Availability and Disaster Recovery Design
Alternative Method
Instead of using AWS Step Functions to orchestrate database promotion and service scaling, AWS Application Recovery Controller (ARC) routing controls and Aurora Global Database managed planned failover can be configured to coordinate and automate the failover process with minimal human intervention, although at a higher service cost.
Estimated Time:3m 0s