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Difficulty: HardDatabase and Storage Strategy

A financial technology company is designing a new global payment settlement platform. The solution requires a highly available transactional metadata database (OLTP) to process high-throughput transaction records, alongside a high-volume NoSQL database for real-time audit logs. The OLTP database must support a cross-region disaster recovery strategy with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 1 second and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 1 minute. Additionally, during peak trading hours, the OLTP database must dynamically scale to support sudden read traffic spikes. All data stored in both database engines must be encrypted using customer-managed keys (CMKs) in AWS KMS, allowing a centralized security account to manage and rotate the keys. Which two database and storage configurations should the solutions architect choose to meet these requirements?

  1. Configure an Amazon Aurora Global Database with Aurora PostgreSQL. Set up Aurora Auto Scaling for the Aurora Replicas in both the primary and secondary regions to handle dynamic read scaling.Answer
  2. Provision an Amazon DynamoDB table for audit logs with encryption enabled using Customer Managed Keys (CMKs), and update the KMS key policy in the security account to grant cross-account permissions.Answer
  3. C
    Configure Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with a Multi-AZ deployment, and configure the application to direct read traffic to the standby instance to handle peak trading spikes.
  4. D
    Set up hourly cross-region copying of Amazon Aurora DB cluster snapshots to a secondary region, and write a script to restore the cluster if the primary region fails.
  5. E
    Provision an Amazon DynamoDB table for audit logs, encrypting the data with an AWS managed KMS key, and configure cross-account IAM roles to allow key administration from the centralized security account.

Answer

Configure an Amazon Aurora Global Database with Aurora PostgreSQL utilizing Aurora Auto Scaling for replicas, and provision Amazon DynamoDB tables for logs encrypted with KMS Customer Managed Keys (CMKs) managed by the centralized security account.
Configuring Amazon Aurora Global Database allows low-latency cross-region replication that meets the under 1-second RPO and under 1-minute RTO. Aurora Replicas support active read scaling, which is automated using Aurora Auto Scaling. Encrypting the Amazon DynamoDB table with Customer Managed Keys (CMKs) enables modification of the KMS key policy to permit cross-account administrative control from the centralized security account.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate the OLTP database disaster recovery requirements (RPO < 1s, RTO < 1m) and read scalability.
Amazon Aurora Global Database is selected because its physical replication matches the low RPO/RTO goals, and Aurora Auto Scaling on Aurora Replicas manages traffic spikes.
Alternative patterns like standard RDS Multi-AZ or snapshot copying fail either the RTO/RPO target or the capability to scale reads dynamically.
2
Determine the database configuration for the time-series audit logs.
Amazon DynamoDB is selected as a low-latency NoSQL database.
DynamoDB scales horizontally and natively supports high-throughput NoSQL write workloads.
3
Determine the encryption key management strategy for cross-account security delegation.
Select AWS KMS Customer Managed Keys (CMKs) rather than AWS-managed keys.
AWS-managed keys do not permit key policy edits, which prevents cross-account delegation of key rotation and management.

Key Concept

Designing a secure, highly scalable, and low-latency storage strategy using Amazon Aurora Global Database and Amazon DynamoDB with custom-managed KMS encryption policies.
Estimated Time:3m 0s
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Topics

Database and Storage Strategy

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