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Difficulty: MediumDatabase and Storage Strategy

A solutions architect is designing a new document management platform for an enterprise. The platform must store PDF documents and their metadata. The document storage must use a shared file system that supports the NFSv4 protocol and automatically reduces storage costs for files that are not accessed for 30 days, while keeping them immediately available when requested. The metadata database must support an OLTP workload with high read volume, and must dynamically scale read capacity while maintaining low latency. In the event of an Availability Zone outage, the database must have a recovery point objective (RPO) of less than 1 second and a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than 1 minute. Which two database and storage configurations should the solutions architect choose to meet these requirements?

  1. Deploy an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster with one primary instance and one or more Aurora Replicas, and enable Aurora Auto Scaling for the reader endpoint.Answer
  2. Deploy an Amazon EFS file system configured with Lifecycle Management to transition files to the EFS Infrequent Access (IA) storage class after 30 days.Answer
  3. C
    Deploy an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance in a Multi-AZ configuration, and configure the application to route read queries to the standby instance in the secondary Availability Zone.
  4. D
    Deploy an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance with daily automated backups and use AWS Backup replication to restore the database from snapshots in a new Availability Zone if a failure occurs.
  5. E
    Deploy an Amazon EFS file system encrypted with the AWS-managed KMS key (aws/elasticfilesystem) and replicate files to a backup account using cross-account replication.

Answer

Deploying an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster with Aurora Replicas and Auto Scaling meets the database requirements, while deploying an Amazon EFS file system with Lifecycle Management to transition files to EFS Infrequent Access (IA) after 30 days meets the shared file system requirements.
Deploying Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with reader replicas and auto-scaling addresses the relational OLTP workload's high read volume while meeting the strict RTO (< 1 minute) and RPO (< 1 second) targets. Deploying Amazon EFS with Lifecycle Management configured for EFS Infrequent Access (IA) satisfies the NFSv4 storage requirement and optimizes costs for files inactive for more than 30 days while keeping them instantly accessible.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the file system requirements: the system must support NFSv4 and automatically transition files to lower-cost storage after 30 days while keeping them instantly accessible.
Amazon EFS supports NFSv4 and has a Lifecycle Management feature that transitions inactive files to EFS Infrequent Access (IA) after 30 days, keeping them immediately available for reads with low latency.
EFS is a fully managed NFSv4 file system designed to scale dynamically and support life cycle transitions to optimize costs.
2
Analyze the database requirements: support OLTP workloads with high read volume, dynamic scaling of reads, RPO < 1 second, and RTO < 1 minute during Availability Zone failures.
Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL replicates data across 3 AZs with near-zero lag (RPO < 1 second), supports automated failover within 30 seconds (RTO < 1 minute) to an Aurora Replica, and allows Aurora Auto Scaling on reader endpoints to handle high read volumes dynamically.
Aurora architecture separates compute and storage, facilitating fast replication, quick failovers, and horizontal scaling of read replicas.
3
Evaluate the incorrect options against the constraints and identify underlying errors.
The option suggesting routing read traffic to the RDS Multi-AZ standby instance fails because standby instances are passive. The option suggesting snapshot recovery fails the 1-minute RTO target. The option using AWS-managed KMS keys for cross-account EFS replication fails because AWS-managed keys cannot be shared across accounts.
Understanding AWS-managed KMS key limitations, RDS Multi-AZ architecture, and RTO capabilities of snapshot restores helps eliminate incorrect options.

Key Concept

Selecting the optimal database and file storage solutions on AWS that align with strict RTO/RPO objectives, read-scaling requirements, NFSv4 protocol compatibility, lifecycle management cost optimizations, and security best practices.
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Topics

Database and Storage Strategy

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