Question

Difficulty: MediumHigh Availability and Disaster Recovery Design

A gaming company is deploying a global multiplayer matchmaking service. The primary application tier runs in us-east-1 across multiple Availability Zones inside a private subnet, requiring outbound internet access to contact external anti-cheat APIs. The database tier uses Amazon Aurora MySQL. The company wants to design a disaster recovery (DR) architecture in us-west-2 with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 minute and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 10 minutes. The design must ensure that the game client automatically routes to the healthy region during a regional failure. Which architecture meets these requirements while minimizing single points of failure?

  1. A
    Deploy an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster in us-east-1. Use AWS Backup to take daily snapshots of the database and copy them to us-west-2. Deploy an Application Load Balancer (ALB) and Auto Scaling group in both regions. Configure NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone. Use Amazon Route 53 with a latency-based routing policy to automatically shift traffic based on proximity.
  2. B
    Configure an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a read replica cluster in us-west-2. Deploy an Application Load Balancer (ALB) and Auto Scaling group in both regions. In us-east-1, deploy a single NAT Gateway in one Availability Zone to minimize idle NAT Gateway costs across all private subnets. Use Amazon Route 53 failover routing policy with active-passive health checks on the ALBs.
  3. Configure an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a read replica cluster in us-west-2. Deploy a Multi-AZ Application Load Balancer (ALB) and Auto Scaling group in both regions. Deploy a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone in both VPCs. Use Amazon Route 53 failover routing policy with active-passive health checks on the ALBs to automatically manage client failover.Answer
  4. D
    Configure an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a read replica cluster in us-west-2. Deploy an Application Load Balancer (ALB) and Auto Scaling group in both regions. Deploy a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone in both VPCs. For internal microservice DNS resolution, configure a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone but associate it only with the us-east-1 VPC. Use Route 53 public failover routing for client-facing records.

Answer

Configure an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a read replica cluster in us-west-2. Deploy a Multi-AZ Application Load Balancer (ALB) and Auto Scaling group in both regions. Deploy a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone in both VPCs. Use Amazon Route 53 failover routing policy with active-passive health checks on the ALBs to automatically manage client failover.
The correct architecture uses Amazon Aurora Global Database to achieve near-zero replication lag, satisfying the 1-minute RPO. Setting up Route 53 failover routing with active-passive health checks ensures automatic DNS failover to the secondary region within the 10-minute RTO. Deploying NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone removes any single points of failure for outbound internet access to external APIs.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Assess database replication requirements for RPO.
Amazon Aurora Global Database is selected because it replicates data in less than 1 second, meeting the 1-minute RPO requirement, whereas backup/restore with daily snapshots fails this requirement.
To guarantee data loss is kept under 1 minute.
2
Evaluate NAT Gateway design for high availability.
NAT Gateways must be deployed in every Availability Zone in the VPC.
To prevent a single Availability Zone outage from disrupting outbound internet access needed for external API validation.
3
Verify DNS and Route 53 routing policies.
Active-passive failover routing with associated health checks is configured to route client traffic to us-west-2 if us-east-1 is unhealthy. Route 53 Private Hosted Zones must be associated with both VPCs for internal resolution.
To automate regional failover within the 10-minute RTO and ensure internal name resolution works correctly in both regions.

Key Concept

Multi-region disaster recovery and high availability design with database replication, NAT Gateway redundancy, and Route 53 failover policies.
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