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Difficulty: MediumDatabase and Storage Strategy

An enterprise is designing a new critical online transaction processing (OLTP) pharmacy application across two AWS Regions: a primary region and a secondary disaster recovery region. The database layer must support high-volume read scaling with latency under 10 ms10\text{ ms}. The application must meet a database Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 5 minutes5\text{ minutes} and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 15 minutes15\text{ minutes} during a regional outage. The application also stores patient documents in Amazon S3, which must be replicated to an audit S3 bucket in a separate AWS security account. The replicated S3 objects must be encrypted at rest, and the security account must be able to decrypt the replicated data. Which of the following database and storage strategies should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements?

  1. A
    Deploy an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Multi-AZ DB instance in the primary region, configuring the standby replica to scale out read operations. Implement cross-region backup replication of database snapshots every 15 minutes. Replicate S3 objects using the AWS-managed KMS key (aws/s3) with an S3 bucket policy on the destination bucket allowing cross-account read access.
  2. B
    Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in the primary region and a secondary cluster in the secondary region. Set up Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication to the audit account's bucket, encrypting the destination objects with the default AWS-managed KMS key (aws/s3) and configuring a cross-account IAM role to delegate decrypt permissions.
  3. Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in the primary region and a secondary cluster in the secondary region. Set up Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication to the audit account's bucket, encrypting the objects with a KMS Customer Managed Key (CMK), and configure the KMS key policy in the primary account to grant decrypt permissions to the audit account.Answer
  4. D
    Deploy a single-region Amazon Aurora DB cluster in the primary region. Configure an AWS Backup plan to copy snapshots of the database to the secondary region every 4 hours, and restore the cluster using AWS CloudFormation in the event of a regional outage. Replicate S3 objects using a KMS Customer Managed Key (CMK) with appropriate cross-account key policy permissions.

Answer

Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in the primary region and a secondary cluster in the secondary region. Set up Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication to the audit account's bucket, encrypting the objects with a KMS Customer Managed Key (CMK), and configure the KMS key policy in the primary account to grant decrypt permissions to the audit account.
Deploying an Amazon Aurora Global Database provides active-passive replication with sub-second data transport lag (RPO) and quick DNS-based failover (RTO), satisfying the 5-minute RPO and 15-minute RTO database requirements. Aurora Replicas scale the application's read workload with sub-10 ms latency. To achieve cross-account replication of encrypted objects in Amazon S3, a Customer Managed Key (CMK) must be used. Unlike default AWS-managed KMS keys, a CMK allows you to modify its key policy to explicitly delegate decrypt permissions to the audit account.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate the database replication strategy to satisfy the RPO and RTO requirements.
Amazon Aurora Global Database replicates data with a latency of less than 1 second1\text{ second}, meeting the 5 minutes5\text{ minutes} RPO. It also allows failovers within minutes, meeting the 15 minutes15\text{ minutes} RTO.
Standard multi-region backups or snapshot replication strategies do not provide recovery speeds that meet the tight RTO and RPO limits.
2
Address read scaling requirements for the database layer.
Aurora Replicas in the active Aurora cluster handle read-scaling tasks with minimal replication lag.
RDS standby instances in a standard Multi-AZ deployment are passive and cannot serve read traffic.
3
Design the cross-account encryption and replication strategy for S3.
Configure S3 Cross-Region Replication using a KMS Customer Managed Key (CMK). Add permissions to the KMS key policy to allow the destination audit account to decrypt the objects.
AWS-managed keys (aws/s3) cannot be shared across accounts because their key policies are unmodifiable.

Key Concept

Designing database replication and cross-account encrypted storage strategies that align with specific RPO, RTO, performance, and compliance requirements.
Estimated Time:2m 0s
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Topics

Database and Storage Strategy

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