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Difficulty: MediumHigh Availability and Disaster Recovery Design

A logistics enterprise is designing a multi-region disaster recovery (DR) architecture for its new fleet tracking system. The primary database runs on an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster in the us-east-1 Region. The system has a strict Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 5 minutes in the us-west-2 Region. The architecture must minimize ongoing operational costs while ensuring automated regional failover and high availability in both regions. Which architecture should a solutions architect select to meet these requirements?

  1. A
    Deploy an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster in us-east-1 and configure automated cross-region replication of hourly snapshots to us-west-2. In the event of a disaster, restore the database from the latest snapshot and deploy the application using AWS CloudFormation. Use Amazon Route 53 failover routing with health checks to update DNS records automatically.
  2. Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2. In us-west-2, deploy application servers in a warm standby configuration with minimal compute capacity. Configure Amazon Route 53 failover routing associated with health checks to automatically redirect traffic to us-west-2 during a regional failure, and promote the secondary database cluster.Answer
  3. C
    Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2. Deploy active application servers in both regions. Use Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing to distribute traffic across both regions without health checks. In the event of an outage in us-east-1, manually promote the secondary Aurora cluster and update DNS records to point all traffic to us-west-2.
  4. D
    Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2. In us-west-2, deploy the standby application servers across multiple Availability Zones, configuring their subnet route tables to route all outbound internet traffic through a single NAT Gateway in one Availability Zone to minimize standby costs. Configure Route 53 failover routing with health checks to route traffic to us-west-2 upon primary failure.

Answer

The architecture that uses Amazon Aurora Global Database with a warm standby application configuration and Route 53 failover routing with health checks.
The correct solution utilizes Amazon Aurora Global Database to replicate data from the primary to the secondary region with latency typical of less than 1 second, fulfilling the 5-minute RPO requirement. Utilizing a warm standby architecture for the application servers minimizes ongoing costs while keeping RTO low. Configuring Route 53 with active-passive failover routing and health checks ensures traffic is automatically redirected to the secondary region upon primary failure, which, combined with database promotion, meets the 15-minute RTO.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Select a database replication mechanism that meets the RPO constraint.
Amazon Aurora Global Database provides storage-level, cross-region replication with a typical lag of less than 1 second, easily meeting the 5-minute RPO requirement.
Hourly backups or snapshots would allow up to 60 minutes of data loss, which violates the RPO threshold.
2
Select a compute scaling strategy that balances cost and recovery time constraints.
A warm standby application configuration in us-west-2 maintains minimal active resources to reduce idle costs, yet can be rapidly scaled up to handle the production workload during an event.
An active-active deployment in both regions incurs double the production compute cost, while a backup-and-restore setup from scratch is too slow to reliably meet the 15-minute RTO.
3
Establish the network routing policy to enable automated failover.
Configure Route 53 failover routing paired with health checks to monitor the health of the primary region's endpoint and automatically redirect clients to the standby endpoint when the primary is degraded.
Latency-based routing without health checks or manual DNS record modifications would require operator intervention, delaying recovery beyond the 15-minute RTO.

Key Concept

Multi-Region Disaster Recovery Design using Amazon Aurora Global Database and Route 53 Failover Routing
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Topics

High Availability and Disaster Recovery Design

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