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Difficulty: EasyHigh Availability and Disaster Recovery Design

A company is designing a cost-effective, multi-region disaster recovery (DR) architecture for a web application across two AWS regions (us-east-1 as primary and us-west-2 as secondary). The business requires a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 5 minutes. The database layer uses Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. Which two of the following database replication and routing configurations should be implemented to meet these HA/DR requirements?

  1. Create an Amazon Aurora Global Database by adding a secondary DB cluster in the secondary region, which replicates data asynchronously with a typical latency of less than 1 second.Answer
  2. Configure Amazon Route 53 active-passive failover routing with health checks to route public traffic to the Application Load Balancer in the primary region, failing over to the secondary region if the primary becomes unhealthy.Answer
  3. C
    Associate a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone with the primary region's VPC only, and configure Route 53 Geolocation routing to direct traffic to the database's Multi-AZ standby instance in the secondary region.
  4. D
    Deploy a single NAT Gateway in the primary Availability Zone of the primary region to handle all cross-region database replication traffic to the secondary region.
  5. E
    Deploy Amazon RDS Multi-AZ standby instances in the secondary region to serve read traffic during normal operations and scale them dynamically using Auto Scaling.

Answer

Create an Amazon Aurora Global Database with a secondary DB cluster in the secondary region, and configure Amazon Route 53 active-passive failover routing with health checks.
To meet the low RTO and RPO requirements, the database must replicate data continuously with sub-second latency. Amazon Aurora Global Database uses dedicated replication infrastructure to copy data across regions in less than a second, satisfying the 5-minute RPO. To meet the 15-minute RTO, Amazon Route 53 active-passive failover routing should be configured with health checks to automatically or quickly redirect traffic to the secondary region if the primary region's infrastructure becomes degraded.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Determine the replication mechanism required to meet the 5-minute RPO constraint.
Amazon Aurora Global Database provides sub-second cross-region replication, which easily satisfies the 5-minute RPO.
Standard replication or backups would introduce higher lag or manual restoration time that could exceed the RPO.
2
Select the appropriate global traffic routing mechanism to achieve the 15-minute RTO during a disaster.
Configure Amazon Route 53 failover routing policy with health checks pointing to the primary Application Load Balancer, with the secondary region as the passive target.
This allows Route 53 to redirect user traffic automatically or with minimal manual intervention to the secondary region when the primary becomes unavailable.
3
Validate the high availability design of the supporting infrastructure components.
Ensure redundant NAT Gateways are deployed per Availability Zone, and avoid relying on passive RDS Multi-AZ standbys for read traffic scaling.
A resilient architecture must not contain single points of failure like a single NAT Gateway, and must correctly utilize read replicas rather than standbys for read scaling.

Key Concept

Multi-region disaster recovery using Aurora Global Database replication and Route 53 Active-Passive failover routing.
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Topics

High Availability and Disaster Recovery Design

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