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Difficulty: MediumHigh Availability and Disaster Recovery Design

A healthcare provider is launching a new medical telemetry streaming application across two AWS Regions: us-east-1 (primary) and us-west-2 (secondary). The application requires outbound internet connectivity to verify patient insurance APIs and uses Amazon Route 53 for external DNS. The workload is deployed on Amazon ECS (Fargate) across multiple Availability Zones in each region and uses an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database. The business has specified a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1515 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 22 minutes. Internal microservices communicate using private DNS names managed via a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone. Which of the following disaster recovery and high availability architectures should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements?

  1. A
    Design an Active-Passive Pilot Light disaster recovery strategy. Configure a lifecycle policy to copy Aurora database backups from us-east-1 to us-west-2 every 4 hours. Keep the ECS infrastructure in us-west-2 offline. In both regions, deploy redundant NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone. Associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone with the VPCs in both regions. Configure Route 53 Failover routing to restore the database from the snapshot and launch ECS tasks during a failover.
  2. Design an Active-Passive Warm Standby disaster recovery strategy. Configure an Amazon Aurora Global Database to replicate data from us-east-1 to us-west-2. Deploy the ECS tasks across multiple Availability Zones in both regions, keeping the tasks in the secondary region scaled to a minimum capacity. In both regions, deploy redundant NAT Gateways across all used Availability Zones. Associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone with the VPCs in both regions. Configure Route 53 Failover routing with active health checks to manage external traffic routing.Answer
  3. C
    Design an Active-Passive Warm Standby disaster recovery strategy. Configure an Amazon Aurora Global Database to replicate data from us-east-1 to us-west-2. Deploy the ECS tasks across multiple Availability Zones in both regions. To optimize costs, deploy a single NAT Gateway in one Availability Zone in each region's VPC. Associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone with the VPCs in both regions. Configure Route 53 Failover routing with active health checks to manage external traffic routing.
  4. D
    Design an Active-Passive Warm Standby disaster recovery strategy. Configure an Amazon Aurora Global Database to replicate data from us-east-1 to us-west-2. Deploy the ECS tasks across multiple Availability Zones in both regions, keeping the tasks in the secondary region scaled to a minimum capacity. In both regions, deploy redundant NAT Gateways across all used Availability Zones. Associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone with the primary region's VPC only. Configure Route 53 Failover routing with active health checks to manage external traffic routing.

Answer

The correct strategy is to implement an Active-Passive Warm Standby disaster recovery setup using Aurora Global Database, multi-AZ redundant NAT Gateways, Route 53 Private Hosted Zone associations across both VPCs, and Route 53 Failover routing.
The correct architecture uses an Active-Passive Warm Standby strategy. Aurora Global Database ensures near-real-time cross-region replication to satisfy the 2-minute RPO. Scaling down ECS tasks instead of keeping them offline satisfies the 15-minute RTO since scaling up takes less time than bootstrapping from scratch. Associating the Private Hosted Zone with both VPCs guarantees internal DNS resolution functions after failover. Deploying redundant NAT Gateways ensures outbound internet connectivity remains highly available across all Availability Zones.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate the RTO and RPO requirements.
An RPO of 2 minutes requires synchronous or near-synchronous replication. Aurora Global Database cross-region replication latency is typically under 1 second, fulfilling the RPO constraint. An RTO of 15 minutes is easily met by a Warm Standby strategy where the recovery infrastructure is online but scaled down, as scaling up ECS tasks and promoting the Aurora secondary cluster takes only a few minutes.
Choosing the appropriate DR pattern (Warm Standby vs. Pilot Light) ensures both RTO and RPO are satisfied.
2
Ensure internal DNS resolution works across regions during a failover.
Associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) with the VPCs in both us-east-1 and us-west-2.
Route 53 Private Hosted Zones must be explicitly associated with every VPC that requires resolution of those private DNS names.
3
Design highly available outbound network paths.
Deploy a dedicated NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone where ECS tasks are running.
A single NAT Gateway creates a single point of failure for outbound traffic, violating standard high availability requirements.

Key Concept

Disaster Recovery pattern selection based on RTO/RPO, combined with multi-region network and DNS integration.
Estimated Time:2m 0s
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Topics

High Availability and Disaster Recovery Design

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