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Difficulty: HardHigh Availability and Disaster Recovery Design

A financial services company is designing a mission-critical transaction reporting application that must be deployed across two AWS Regions: us-east-1 (Primary) and us-west-2 (Secondary). The architecture requires an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database, private EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones (AZs) that need outbound internet connectivity to fetch compliance updates, and a Route 53 private hosted zone (PHZ) for internal name resolution across VPCs in both regions. The disaster recovery (DR) requirements specify a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 minute. Which architecture meets these requirements while ensuring high availability and fault tolerance for all components?

  1. Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and an active read replica in us-west-2. Configure Route 53 Failover routing with health checks pointing to the Application Load Balancers (ALBs) in both regions. Deploy redundant NAT Gateways across multiple AZs in the VPC of each region. Associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) with the VPCs in both us-east-1 and us-west-2.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and an active read replica in us-west-2. Configure Route 53 Failover routing with health checks pointing to the Application Load Balancers (ALBs) in both regions. Deploy a single NAT Gateway in the primary AZ of the VPC in each region to handle outbound internet traffic. Associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) with the VPCs in both us-east-1 and us-west-2.
  3. C
    Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and an active read replica in us-west-2. Configure Route 53 Geolocation routing to automatically route user traffic. Deploy redundant NAT Gateways across multiple AZs in the VPC of each region. Associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) with the us-east-1 VPC, relying on Transit Gateway peering for DNS resolution from the us-west-2 VPC.
  4. D
    Deploy Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL in us-east-1 and configure cross-region snapshot copies to us-west-2 every 1 hour. Configure Route 53 Failover routing with health checks pointing to the Application Load Balancers (ALBs) in both regions. Deploy redundant NAT Gateways across multiple AZs in the VPC of each region. Associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) with the VPCs in both us-east-1 and us-west-2.

Answer

Deploying an Aurora Global Database with an active replica in the secondary region, configuring Route 53 Failover routing, deploying redundant NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone, and associating the Private Hosted Zone with all VPCs across both regions.
The correct architecture uses Aurora Global Database to achieve low latency replication and promote the secondary cluster within the 15-minute RTO. Redundant NAT Gateways ensure outbound network paths are highly available within each region's AZs. The Route 53 Private Hosted Zone is associated with both VPCs, allowing internal resolution to succeed in both regions.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate the database tier against the RTO and RPO targets.
Aurora Global Database provides sub-second replication (meeting the 1-minute RPO) and can be promoted to primary in less than 15 minutes (meeting the RTO). In contrast, cross-region snapshots fail the RPO constraint.
Choosing the correct replication mechanism is critical to satisfying the disaster recovery bounds.
2
Verify high availability for outbound NAT traffic.
NAT Gateways must be deployed in each Availability Zone where private EC2 instances exist. A single NAT Gateway per region creates a single point of failure.
Ensuring no single point of failure exists in the networking path for application updates.
3
Assess DNS name resolution requirements for Private Hosted Zones.
The Route 53 PHZ must be associated with both the primary and secondary VPCs to allow query resolution in both regions. Peering connections do not automatically extend PHZ DNS resolution without direct association.
Ensuring internal services can resolve names correctly during a failover event.

Key Concept

Multi-region high availability and disaster recovery orchestration including database replication, network path redundancy, and cross-VPC DNS resolution.
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Topics

High Availability and Disaster Recovery Design

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