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A logistics company is launching a new high-transaction transit-tracking application. The infrastructure is provisioned using AWS CloudFormation, with the application running on Amazon EC2 instances managed by an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The business requirements dictate that all application updates must be deployed using a canary pattern to limit exposure to a subset of users, and the system must support instant rollbacks to the previous version without any traffic interruption or capacity degradation if post-deployment anomalies are detected. Which two configurations should the solutions architect combine to meet these requirements? (Select two.)

Select all that apply

Configure AWS CodeDeploy to manage a blue/green deployment for the Auto Scaling group, using a traffic-shifting canary configuration to redirect a percentage of traffic to the new instances via the Application Load Balancer.

Create Amazon CloudWatch alarms that monitor application error rates and Application Load Balancer 5XX counts, and associate these alarms with the CodeDeploy deployment group to automatically trigger a rollback.

Configure the CloudFormation template's UpdatePolicy attribute on the Auto Scaling group resource to use AutoScalingRollingUpdate with WaitOnResourceSignals enabled.

Deploy duplicate CloudFormation stacks for the new and old versions of the application, and use Amazon Route 53 weighted routing policies to shift traffic between the two load balancer endpoints.

Configure the CloudFormation template's UpdatePolicy attribute on the Auto Scaling group resource to use AutoScalingReplacingUpdate to replace the entire Auto Scaling group on updates.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: Configure AWS CodeDeploy to manage a blue/green deployment for the Auto Scaling group, using a traffic-shifting canary configuration to redirect a percentage of traffic to the new instances via the Application Load Balancer.; Create Amazon CloudWatch alarms that monitor application error rates and Application Load Balancer 5XX counts, and associate these alarms with the CodeDeploy deployment group to automatically trigger a rollback.

Answer

Configure AWS CodeDeploy to manage a blue/green deployment for the Auto Scaling group with a traffic-shifting canary configuration, and create CloudWatch alarms for application metrics to associate with the deployment group for automated rollback.

The correct options implement a CodeDeploy blue/green deployment style for the Auto Scaling group and integrate CloudWatch alarms for automatic rollbacks. CodeDeploy deploys a new green Auto Scaling group, shifts traffic using a canary pattern, and keeps the original blue Auto Scaling group running. If the CloudWatch alarms trigger, CodeDeploy instantly redirects traffic back to the blue group, achieving a zero-downtime instant rollback.

Step-by-Step Solution

Evaluate the rollback and zero-downtime requirements.

Identify that the solution requires instant rollbacks without capacity degradation or traffic interruption.

This rules out in-place rolling or replacing updates because their rollbacks are rolling processes that require time and capacity changes.

Determine the traffic-shifting mechanism.

Choose AWS CodeDeploy blue/green deployments over DNS-based routing (Route 53 weighted).

Route 53 DNS changes are delayed by client/resolver DNS caching, whereas CodeDeploy manages traffic shifting instantly at the Application Load Balancer target group level.

Configure the automated rollback triggers.

Create CloudWatch alarms for key application metrics (5XX counts, error rates) and link them to the CodeDeploy deployment group.

CodeDeploy monitors these alarms during the traffic-shifting phase and will automatically execute an instant rollback if any alarm is triggered.

Key Concept

AWS CodeDeploy Blue/Green Deployment with Canary traffic shifting offers instant, zero-downtime rollback capabilities by keeping the original Auto Scaling group active during the deployment verification period, which is superior to CloudFormation rolling updates or Route 53 DNS-based routing for strict SLA requirements.

Question 162Question →

A financial services firm with a multi-account AWS environment in the `us-west-2` Region has established a 10 Gbps AWS Direct Connect connection to link their on-premises data center with an AWS Transit Gateway. To ensure high availability, the firm wants to implement an IPsec VPN connection over the internet to the same Transit Gateway as a backup path. The primary requirement is that all traffic between the on-premises data center and the AWS VPCs must use the Direct Connect connection under normal conditions, and automatically fail over to the VPN connection only if the Direct Connect path becomes unavailable. Which TWO configurations must the solutions architect implement to achieve these requirements? (Select TWO.)

Select all that apply

Associate the Transit Gateway with the Direct Connect gateway, create a Transit Gateway VPN attachment, and enable BGP propagation for both attachments.

Configure the on-premises customer gateway device to assign a higher BGP local preference to the routes received from the Direct Connect gateway compared to the routes received from the VPN connection.

Configure the on-premises customer gateway device to prepend its own AS number (AS-Path prepending) on the BGP session of the Direct Connect connection when advertising its prefixes to the Direct Connect gateway.

Deploy a Virtual Private Gateway (VGW) in each spoke VPC to terminate both the Direct Connect connection and the VPN connection, and configure the VPC route tables to route traffic through the VGW instead of the Transit Gateway.

Configure static routes in the Transit Gateway route table pointing to the Direct Connect gateway attachment for all spoke VPCs, and associate a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone with the Transit Gateway attachment to handle failover resolution.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: Associate the Transit Gateway with the Direct Connect gateway, create a Transit Gateway VPN attachment, and enable BGP propagation for both attachments.; Configure the on-premises customer gateway device to assign a higher BGP local preference to the routes received from the Direct Connect gateway compared to the routes received from the VPN connection.

Answer

Associate the Transit Gateway with the Direct Connect gateway and create a Transit Gateway VPN attachment while enabling BGP propagation, and configure the on-premises customer gateway device to assign a higher BGP local preference to the routes received from the Direct Connect gateway.

To route traffic from AWS to on-premises, AWS Transit Gateway automatically prefers Direct Connect gateway attachments over VPN attachments for identical prefixes. To route traffic from on-premises to AWS, the customer gateway device must be configured to prefer the Direct Connect path, which is typically achieved by setting a higher BGP local preference for routes received via Direct Connect.

Step-by-Step Solution

Configure the AWS-side network attachments.

Transit Gateway is associated with the Direct Connect gateway via a Transit VIF, and an IPsec VPN is attached to the same Transit Gateway.

This establishes both the primary and backup physical pathways to the AWS Transit Gateway.

Enable BGP route propagation on the Transit Gateway route table.

The Transit Gateway automatically prefers the Direct Connect gateway attachment path over the VPN path for traffic going to the data center.

AWS Transit Gateway evaluates propagated routes and prioritizes Direct Connect gateway attachments over VPN attachments when the advertised prefixes are identical.

Adjust the BGP attributes on the customer gateway.

The on-premises router sets a higher local preference for prefixes learned from the Direct Connect gateway.

This guarantees that on-premises to AWS traffic chooses the Direct Connect path over the backup VPN link during normal operations.

Key Concept

Asymmetrical routing prevention and path preference control in Transit Gateway hybrid architectures

Estimated Time:2m 0s

Question 163Question →

A SaaS company is designing a critical online booking application on AWS. The application must be deployed across two AWS Regions: us-east-1 (Primary) and us-west-2 (Secondary). The database layer requires a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 1 second and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 1 minute. The application tier instances in both Regions need outbound internet access to communicate with external payment gateways, but they must remain private. The architecture must minimize single points of failure while optimizing for high availability.

Which two configuration options should the Solutions Architect implement to meet these requirements?

Select all that apply

Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary database cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary database cluster in us-west-2 to replicate data with typical latency of less than 1 second.

Provision a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone utilized by the application in both us-east-1 and us-west-2, and configure Route 53 Failover routing records with health checks pointing to the Application Load Balancer in each Region.

Deploy a single NAT Gateway in a single Availability Zone in each Region to route outbound internet traffic for the application tier, reducing hourly running costs.

Configure a multi-Region active-active configuration using Route 53 Weighted routing without health checks, relying on dynamic client-side DNS retries to route traffic away from a degraded Region.

Implement daily cross-Region Amazon Aurora database snapshot copies from us-east-1 to us-west-2, and configure an AWS Lambda function to automate snapshot restoration during a disaster event.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary database cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary database cluster in us-west-2 to replicate data with typical latency of less than 1 second.; Provision a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone utilized by the application in both us-east-1 and us-west-2, and configure Route 53 Failover routing records with health checks pointing to the Application Load Balancer in each Region.

Answer

The Solutions Architect should implement Amazon Aurora Global Database for multi-region replication and deploy NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone alongside Route 53 Failover routing records with health checks.

To meet the RPO of less than 1 second and RTO of less than 1 minute, the database must use physical replication with sub-second latency. Amazon Aurora Global Database uses storage-level replication to achieve this. Promoting a secondary cluster takes less than a minute. For network high availability, deploying NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone avoids single points of failure. For multi-region DNS failover, Route 53 Failover records combined with active health checks are required to automatically redirect traffic to the standby Region during a primary Region outage.

Step-by-Step Solution

Select the database replication strategy that matches the recovery objectives.

Amazon Aurora Global Database is chosen because it replicates data storage-level across Regions under 1 second (RPO) and allows promotion in less than 1 minute (RTO).

Alternative methods such as cross-region snapshot copies have RPOs up to 24 hours and RTOs of several minutes or hours, which fail the targets.

Select the NAT Gateway design that satisfies the high availability requirement without single points of failure.

NAT Gateways are provisioned in each Availability Zone in both Regions.

A single NAT Gateway per Region introduces an AZ-level single point of failure, risking outbound connection drops for the entire Region if that AZ fails.

Select the DNS routing configuration for multi-region failover.

Route 53 Failover routing policy is configured with active health checks pointing to the ALBs.

Active health checks are necessary for Route 53 to automatically detect a regional endpoint outage and perform failover routing within the required RTO.

Key Concept

Multi-region high availability and disaster recovery design using Aurora Global Database storage replication, Route 53 active-passive DNS failover, and multi-AZ NAT gateway redundancy.

Question 164Question →

An energy trading company is designing a disaster recovery (DR) architecture for its core trade execution platform on AWS. The primary workload runs in the us-east-1 Region, and the secondary DR site is in the us-west-2 Region. The business requires a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 15 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 1 minute. The architecture must satisfy the following:
- Within each region, the infrastructure must be highly available across multiple Availability Zones.
- The application tier runs on Amazon EC2 instances in private subnets behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB).
- Private microservices within the VPC communicate using a Route 53 private hosted zone named trading.internal.
- The application requires outbound internet connectivity to communicate with external clearinghouses.
- The database backend is Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.

Which design meets the business requirements while minimizing cost and operational complexity?

Configure an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2 containing a single db.r6g.large instance. Associate the trading.internal private hosted zone with the VPCs in both us-east-1 and us-west-2. Deploy a single NAT Gateway in one Availability Zone in each region's VPC. Configure an Amazon Route 53 failover routing policy with health checks associated with the ALBs to route client traffic.

Configure an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2 containing a single db.r6g.large instance. Create the trading.internal private hosted zone in the us-east-1 VPC but do not associate it with the us-west-2 VPC. Deploy NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone within both regions' VPCs. Configure an Amazon Route 53 failover routing policy with health checks associated with the ALBs to route client traffic.

Configure an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2 containing a single db.r6g.large instance. Associate the trading.internal private hosted zone with the VPCs in both us-east-1 and us-west-2. Deploy NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone within both regions' VPCs. Configure an Amazon Route 53 failover routing policy with health checks associated with the ALBs to route client traffic.

Configure hourly Amazon Aurora database snapshot exports in us-east-1 and copy them to us-west-2 using AWS Backup. Associate the trading.internal private hosted zone with the VPCs in both us-east-1 and us-west-2. Deploy NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone within both regions' VPCs. Configure an Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing policy to route client traffic to the lowest-latency region.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: Configure an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2 containing a single db.r6g.large instance. Associate the trading.internal private hosted zone with the VPCs in both us-east-1 and us-west-2. Deploy NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone within both regions' VPCs. Configure an Amazon Route 53 failover routing policy with health checks associated with the ALBs to route client traffic.

Answer

Configure an Amazon Aurora Global Database with a single instance in the secondary region, associate the private hosted zone with both VPCs, deploy NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone, and use Route 53 failover routing.

The correct design uses Amazon Aurora Global Database to achieve replication times of less than 1 second, meeting the RPO of less than 1 minute. It allows promotion of the secondary cluster in minutes, meeting the RTO of less than 15 minutes. To keep cost low, the secondary region has a single database instance (pilot light/warm standby footprint). Outbound traffic is kept highly available within each region by placing a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone. Finally, internal DNS resolution functions correctly after failover because the private hosted zone is associated with both the primary and secondary VPCs.

Step-by-Step Solution

Analyze database replication and disaster recovery limits.

Amazon Aurora Global Database provides storage-level, physical replication across regions with typical lag of less than one second, satisfying the RPO requirement of less than 1 minute. The secondary cluster can be promoted to write mode within minutes, satisfying the RTO requirement of less than 15 minutes.

Choosing the correct replication technology is critical to meet tight RTO and RPO requirements.

Determine private DNS requirements for multi-region failover.

A Route 53 Private Hosted Zone is only resolvable within VPCs that are explicitly associated with it. Therefore, the trading.internal zone must be associated with both the us-east-1 and us-west-2 VPCs.

Without this association, microservices in the secondary region will face DNS resolution failures during a disaster recovery event.

Evaluate intra-region high availability requirements for outbound traffic.

Deploying a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone ensures that an outage in a single Availability Zone does not impact outbound traffic from instances in other zones.

A single NAT Gateway per VPC creates a single point of failure, violating the multi-AZ high availability requirement.

Establish external traffic routing and failover mechanics.

Configure a Route 53 failover routing policy referencing health checks on the regional Application Load Balancers.

This setup automates client redirection when the primary region becomes completely unreachable.

Key Concept

Multi-region disaster recovery pattern design matching RTO and RPO objectives, database replication, and network dependencies.

Question 165Question →

A global digital publishing company is designing a high-availability and disaster recovery architecture for its core content management application on AWS. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances in private subnets across multiple Availability Zones in the `us-east-1` Region. The application requires outbound internet access to synchronize syndication feeds with external partners. The database layer uses Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. The business requires a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 5 minutes, with a disaster recovery target in the `us-west-2` Region. The solutions architect must also ensure that the architecture has no single points of failure within a Region. Which two options should the Solutions Architect implement to meet these requirements?

Select all that apply

Set up an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in `us-east-1` and a secondary cluster in `us-west-2` for database replication. Use Amazon Route 53 with active-passive failover routing and associated health checks to manage DNS resolution for the application's public endpoint.

Deploy a NAT Gateway in each public Availability Zone in both Regions, and configure the route tables of the private subnets to route internet-bound traffic through the local NAT Gateway in their respective Availability Zone.

Implement a Backup and Restore strategy by scheduling daily Aurora snapshots, copying them to `us-west-2`, and restoring the database cluster in `us-west-2` upon disaster declaration to minimize active database running costs.

Deploy a single NAT Gateway in one public Availability Zone in each Region, and point the route tables of all private subnets across all Availability Zones to this single NAT Gateway to reduce deployment costs.

Configure a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone for database endpoint resolution in the primary VPC, and establish a cross-region VPC peering connection to allow the secondary VPC to resolve the endpoint without associating the Private Hosted Zone with the secondary VPC.

Use an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Multi-AZ deployment in the primary Region, and configure the application to route read-intensive syndication queries to the standby instance in the secondary Availability Zone to scale read capacity.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: Set up an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in `us-east-1` and a secondary cluster in `us-west-2` for database replication. Use Amazon Route 53 with active-passive failover routing and associated health checks to manage DNS resolution for the application's public endpoint.; Deploy a NAT Gateway in each public Availability Zone in both Regions, and configure the route tables of the private subnets to route internet-bound traffic through the local NAT Gateway in their respective Availability Zone.

Answer

Setting up Amazon Aurora Global Database with Route 53 active-passive failover, and deploying a NAT Gateway in each public Availability Zone in both Regions.

To satisfy the RTO of 15 minutes and RPO of 5 minutes, database replication must be low-latency and failover must be rapid. Amazon Aurora Global Database uses asynchronous replication with latency of less than one second, satisfying the RPO. Promoting the secondary cluster in the recovery region takes less than a minute, satisfying the RTO. Redirection of public traffic is managed dynamically by Amazon Route 53 active-passive failover routing policies using health checks. Furthermore, to avoid single points of failure within a Region for outbound content syndication, NAT Gateways must be deployed in each Availability Zone where the application operates.

Step-by-Step Solution

Evaluate the disaster recovery requirements (RTO of 15 minutes and RPO of 5 minutes) against the database replication strategies.

Identify that Aurora Global Database is required due to sub-second replication latency and sub-minute recovery time, whereas backup-and-restore strategies fail these requirements.

Ensures the database layer architecture aligns with recovery objectives.

Determine the routing mechanism to handle regional failover for the public application endpoint.

Select Amazon Route 53 active-passive failover routing policy combined with health checks.

Enables automatic routing of user traffic to the backup region when the primary region is determined to be unhealthy.

Address internal high availability requirements for outbound internet access across multiple Availability Zones.

Deploy a NAT Gateway in each public Availability Zone and configure subnet routing accordingly.

Eliminates the single point of failure that a single NAT Gateway would introduce across zones.

Key Concept

High Availability and Disaster Recovery Design

Question 166Question →

A media streaming company is migrating its operations to AWS and establishing a multi-account structure with 8 spoke VPCs in the ap-northeast-1 Region. The company needs to design a hybrid connectivity solution to connect these VPCs to an on-premises data center. The design must support direct VPC-to-VPC communication, enable secure access to shared on-premises resources with automatic failover, and resolve internal DNS names hosted in a centralized private hosted zone. Which of the following architectures meets these requirements with the least operational complexity?

Associate a Virtual Private Gateway (VGW) in each spoke VPC to a shared Direct Connect Gateway (DXGW) to route both hybrid traffic and inter-VPC traffic transitively through the DXGW, bypassing Transit Gateway deployment.

Deploy an AWS Transit Gateway (TGW) to connect the spoke VPCs and attach it to a Direct Connect Gateway. Create a centralized Route 53 Private Hosted Zone in a shared services VPC and rely on default VPC DNS resolution without associating the private hosted zone with the other spoke VPCs.

Deploy an AWS Transit Gateway (TGW) to interconnect the spoke VPCs. Connect the TGW to a Direct Connect Gateway associated with an AWS Direct Connect connection for primary hybrid connectivity, and set up an AWS Site-to-Site VPN to the TGW as a backup. Associate the centralized Route 53 Private Hosted Zone with all spoke VPCs across the accounts.

Deploy an AWS Transit Gateway (TGW) to connect the spoke VPCs. Route all outbound traffic through a single, centralized egress VPC containing one NAT Gateway deployed in a single Availability Zone to route internet-bound traffic, while using a backup AWS Site-to-Site VPN as the primary path.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: Deploy an AWS Transit Gateway (TGW) to interconnect the spoke VPCs. Connect the TGW to a Direct Connect Gateway associated with an AWS Direct Connect connection for primary hybrid connectivity, and set up an AWS Site-to-Site VPN to the TGW as a backup. Associate the centralized Route 53 Private Hosted Zone with all spoke VPCs across the accounts.

Answer

Deploy an AWS Transit Gateway to interconnect the spoke VPCs, connect it to a Direct Connect Gateway with a backup Site-to-Site VPN, and associate the centralized Private Hosted Zone with all spoke VPCs.

The correct design utilizes an AWS Transit Gateway to act as a centralized hub for inter-VPC and hybrid traffic. A Direct Connect Gateway connected to the Transit Gateway provides high-bandwidth primary connectivity to the data center, while a Site-to-Site VPN connected directly to the Transit Gateway serves as an automated backup. Associating the centralized Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) with all VPCs ensures seamless cross-account DNS resolution.

Step-by-Step Solution

Evaluate routing requirements for inter-VPC and hybrid network traffic.

Identify that AWS Transit Gateway is required to act as the central hub to support both VPC-to-VPC and VPC-to-on-premises transitive routing.

Direct Connect Gateway alone does not support routing between attached VPCs, making a Transit Gateway necessary.

Configure the primary and backup hybrid connections with automated failover.

Connect the Transit Gateway to a Direct Connect Gateway for high-speed primary access, and attach a Site-to-Site VPN to the Transit Gateway for backup path failover.

This establishes physical redundancy and path failover using industry-standard BGP routing.

Address DNS resolution requirements for the multi-account structure.

Associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) in the central account with all consumer spoke VPCs in the organization.

Private Hosted Zones must be explicitly associated with each VPC in order to resolve queries across different accounts.

Key Concept

AWS Transit Gateway acts as a cloud router to support transitive routing between multiple VPCs and on-premises networks, integrated with Direct Connect Gateway and Site-to-Site VPN for high availability.

Question 167Question →

A global telecommunications provider is deploying a critical SIM card provisioning platform on AWS. The application layer runs on Amazon EC2 instances in Auto Scaling groups behind Application Load Balancers (ALBs) across multiple Availability Zones in the primary region (us-east-1) and a recovery region (us-west-2). The application queries and updates customer provisioning profiles stored in an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Global Database, which has its primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2. The application servers must periodically make outbound calls to external carrier networks via NAT Gateways. The architecture must achieve a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 10 minutes, a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 1 minute, mitigate against single Availability Zone failures within either region, and automate user traffic redirection to the secondary region if the primary region experiences a complete service disruption. Which two of the following configuration options should the solutions architect implement to meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)

Select all that apply

Configure Route 53 Failover routing records with health checks pointing to the regional Application Load Balancers. During a disaster event in the primary region, perform an unplanned managed failover of the Aurora Global Database to the recovery region to promote the secondary database cluster.

Deploy a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone utilized by the application in both regions, and configure the route tables of the private subnets to direct outbound traffic to the NAT Gateway within their respective Availability Zone.

Deploy a single NAT Gateway in a single public subnet in us-east-1 and another in us-west-2, and configure private subnet route tables across all Availability Zones in each region to route outbound traffic through these single entry points to minimize provisioning costs.

Associate the internal Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) used for service discovery with the VPC in us-east-1, and rely on inter-region VPC peering to resolve local service hostnames from the us-west-2 VPC without local hosted zone association.

Configure Route 53 Geolocation routing to distribute user traffic evenly between both regions, and implement a pilot light disaster recovery strategy by replicating database snapshots once every hour to the recovery region.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: Configure Route 53 Failover routing records with health checks pointing to the regional Application Load Balancers. During a disaster event in the primary region, perform an unplanned managed failover of the Aurora Global Database to the recovery region to promote the secondary database cluster.; Deploy a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone utilized by the application in both regions, and configure the route tables of the private subnets to direct outbound traffic to the NAT Gateway within their respective Availability Zone.

Answer

Configure Route 53 Failover routing records with health checks pointing to the regional Application Load Balancers and perform an unplanned managed failover of the Aurora Global Database during a regional disaster; deploy a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone utilized by the application in both regions, and configure private subnet route tables to direct outbound traffic to the local NAT Gateway in the same Availability Zone.

Implementing Route 53 Failover routing records ensures that traffic is automatically redirected to the secondary region if the primary region's ALB health checks fail. Performing an unplanned managed failover of the Aurora Global Database promotes the secondary cluster to primary while preserving the replication topology, satisfying the low RTO and RPO limits. Additionally, placing a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone in both regions avoids a single point of failure for outbound carrier API connections, ensuring high availability within each region.

Step-by-Step Solution

Evaluate the disaster recovery requirements (RTO of less than 10 minutes, RPO of less than 1 minute) against database replication strategies.

Identify that Aurora Global Database storage-level replication is necessary to meet the sub-minute RPO, and a managed unplanned failover is required to meet the low RTO.

Traditional backup and restore or pilot light architectures using snapshots cannot guarantee data loss of less than a minute.

Analyze regional failover routing mechanisms for external client applications.

Determine that Route 53 Failover routing records combined with ALB health checks must be used to redirect public traffic to the recovery region during a disaster.

Active-passive failover routing automatically routes user traffic to the secondary region when the primary region is down, whereas geolocation routing distributes traffic without active health-based redirection.

Assess the outbound network path high availability requirements.

Determine that NAT Gateways must be deployed in every Availability Zone of the VPCs in both regions, with corresponding subnet route tables mapping to their local NAT Gateways.

A single NAT Gateway in one AZ creates a single point of failure that breaks outbound traffic for all other AZs if that specific AZ experiences an outage.

Verify internal DNS resolution requirements for the multi-region failover architecture.

Confirm the internal Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) is associated with all VPCs across both regions.

VPC peering does not automatically share PHZ DNS resolution; explicit association is required to prevent cross-region internal DNS failures.

Key Concept

Designing high availability and disaster recovery architectures with multi-region DNS failover, database replication, and AZ-redundant networking.

Estimated Time:3m 0s

Question 168Question →

An enterprise is designing a deployment pipeline for a web application running on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The deployment strategy must meet the following requirements:

* Shift exactly $10\%$ of live traffic to the new version of the application.
* Validate the performance of the new version for $15$ minutes using Amazon CloudWatch alarms.
* Immediately roll back $100\%$ of traffic to the current version if any alarms are triggered.
* Shift the remaining $90\%$ of traffic to the new version if no alarms are triggered.

Which combination of actions should the Solutions Architect recommend to achieve these requirements? (Select TWO.)

Select all that apply

Configure the Application Load Balancer (ALB) listener to route traffic to

2

separate target groups (representing the current and new Auto Scaling groups) using weighted routing rules.

Implement a pipeline workflow using an AWS Lambda function to update the ALB listener rule weights from

100:0

90:10

, monitor the CloudWatch alarms for

15

minutes, and then shift the weights to

0:100

or revert to

100:0

if an alarm is triggered.

Configure an AWS CodeDeploy deployment group with a Blue/Green deployment type, select the Auto Scaling group, and use the `CodeDeployDefault.EC2Canary10Percent15Minutes` deployment configuration.

Configure the Auto Scaling group with an AWS CloudFormation `UpdatePolicy` using `AutoScalingRollingUpdate` with `MinInstancesInService` set to

90\%

of the capacity, and configure CloudWatch alarm rollbacks.

Deploy

2

separate Application Load Balancers (one for each Auto Scaling group), and configure an Amazon Route 53 weighted routing policy with a weight split of

90

and

10

to route traffic.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: Configure the Application Load Balancer (ALB) listener to route traffic to $2$ separate target groups (representing the current and new Auto Scaling groups) using weighted routing rules.; Implement a pipeline workflow using an AWS Lambda function to update the ALB listener rule weights from $100:0$ to $90:10$ , monitor the CloudWatch alarms for $15$ minutes, and then shift the weights to $0:100$ or revert to $100:0$ if an alarm is triggered.

Answer

Configure the Application Load Balancer listener to route traffic using weighted routing rules to two separate target groups, and implement a pipeline workflow using an AWS Lambda function to adjust the listener weights, monitor CloudWatch alarms, and execute rollbacks.

To achieve the deployment objectives, you must split traffic at the Application Load Balancer level using weighted target groups and separate Auto Scaling groups. A programmatic orchestrator, such as an AWS Lambda function, must manage the transition of target group weights, monitor CloudWatch alarms during the validation window, and revert the weights to the original configuration if an alarm is triggered. This combination allows for precise traffic management, validation, and instantaneous rollback without relying on DNS changes or facing CodeDeploy limitations on EC2.

Step-by-Step Solution

Provision a new Auto Scaling group for the new application version and attach it to a new ALB target group, while the current Auto Scaling group remains attached to the original target group.

Two separate target groups are configured under the same ALB: one containing the current instances and one containing the updated instances.

This isolates the two environments so they can receive independent traffic weights.

Modify the ALB listener rule to use weighted target group routing, initially directing

10\%

of traffic to the new target group and

90\%

to the current target group.

Exactly

10\%

of live application traffic is routed to the new version, while the remaining

90\%

remains on the old version.

This initiates the canary release phase to evaluate the new version under real production load.

Monitor metrics using Amazon CloudWatch alarms for

15

minutes. If alarms trigger, invoke an AWS Lambda function to immediately set the old target group weight to

100\%

. If no alarms trigger, update the weights to route

100\%

of traffic to the new target group.

The deployment is either rolled back instantly to the old version or fully promoted to the new version.

This validates the deployment before committing all traffic, and ensures a zero-downtime rollback if anomalies are detected.

Key Concept

Orchestrating canary deployments on EC2 using Application Load Balancer weighted target groups when CodeDeploy limitations apply.

Estimated Time:2m 0s

Question 169Question →

A healthcare technology company is building a patient telemetry monitoring system on AWS. The architecture consists of an application tier running on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones, and a database tier running on an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition cluster. The system must ingest real-time telemetry data from local hospital gateways. The company requires a high-availability design in the primary region of us-east-1, and a disaster recovery (DR) setup in us-west-2 that achieves a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 minute. The EC2 instances must be able to securely access external APIs on the internet to retrieve patient metadata. Additionally, the application tier uses a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone for internal database endpoint resolution. Which configuration meets these requirements while minimizing cost and operational complexity?

Deploy the EC2 Auto Scaling group in us-east-1 across three Availability Zones (AZs) with a NAT Gateway in each AZ. Configure hourly snapshots of the Amazon Aurora cluster, copy them to us-west-2, and configure a script to restore the database from the latest snapshot in us-west-2 during a failover event. Configure a Route 53 Failover routing policy with health checks pointing to the public ALBs in both regions.

Deploy the EC2 Auto Scaling group in us-east-1 across three Availability Zones (AZs) with a NAT Gateway in each AZ. Implement Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster with a read replica in us-west-2. Configure a Route 53 Failover routing policy with health checks pointing to the public Application Load Balancers (ALBs) in both regions, and associate the internal Route 53 Private Hosted Zone with both the us-east-1 and us-west-2 VPCs.

Deploy the EC2 Auto Scaling group in us-east-1 across three Availability Zones (AZs) with a single NAT Gateway in one of the AZs. Implement Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2. Configure a Route 53 Latency routing policy with health checks pointing to the public ALBs in both regions, and associate the internal Route 53 Private Hosted Zone only with the us-east-1 VPC.

Deploy the EC2 Auto Scaling group in us-east-1 across three Availability Zones (AZs) with a NAT Gateway in each AZ. Set up a standard Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL cluster in us-east-1 and a separate cluster in us-west-2. Configure Aurora Replica Auto Scaling to automatically replicate data across regions and promote the us-west-2 cluster in the event of an outage in us-east-1. Configure a Route 53 Failover routing policy with health checks pointing to the public ALBs.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: Deploy the EC2 Auto Scaling group in us-east-1 across three Availability Zones (AZs) with a NAT Gateway in each AZ. Implement Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster with a read replica in us-west-2. Configure a Route 53 Failover routing policy with health checks pointing to the public Application Load Balancers (ALBs) in both regions, and associate the internal Route 53 Private Hosted Zone with both the us-east-1 and us-west-2 VPCs.

Answer

The correct configuration deploys the EC2 Auto Scaling group in us-east-1 across three Availability Zones with a NAT Gateway in each AZ, implements Amazon Aurora Global Database with a secondary cluster in the failover region, configures a Route 53 Failover routing policy with health checks pointing to the public ALBs, and associates the internal Route 53 Private Hosted Zone with the VPCs in both regions.

The correct configuration uses a redundant multi-AZ networking setup in the primary region (with a NAT Gateway in each AZ to avoid a single point of failure) and implements Amazon Aurora Global Database for sub-second cross-region replication to meet the 1-minute RPO and 15-minute RTO. A Route 53 Failover routing policy uses health checks to automatically direct public ingress traffic to the secondary region. Finally, associating the internal Route 53 Private Hosted Zone with both regional VPCs ensures internal DNS name resolution continues to work seamlessly after failover.

Step-by-Step Solution

Evaluate the database tier against the RTO of 15 minutes and RPO of 1 minute.

Amazon Aurora Global Database provides sub-second replication (meeting the 1-minute RPO) and can be promoted to a primary writer cluster in less than a minute (meeting the 15-minute RTO). Traditional cross-region snapshot backup and restore violates both RPO (limited by snapshot frequency) and RTO (restore time is too slow).

This rules out options that rely on backup-and-restore or standard configurations that do not support cross-region failover automation.

Assess the high-availability networking requirement for external API access in the primary region.

To ensure that outbound connectivity does not have a single point of failure, a NAT Gateway must be deployed in each Availability Zone where the application EC2 instances reside.

This eliminates configurations using a single NAT Gateway across multiple Availability Zones, which would lead to an outage if that specific zone failed.

Determine the DNS routing and Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) association requirements.

Route 53 Failover routing correctly sends public client traffic to the secondary region if the primary region goes down. To ensure internal name resolution works for application components in us-west-2 during a failover, the Route 53 PHZ must be associated with the VPCs in both regions.

Without cross-VPC association, the application servers in the secondary region would be unable to resolve internal database endpoints.

Key Concept

Designing a highly available multi-AZ architecture with cross-region active-passive disaster recovery using Route 53 failover routing, Aurora Global Database, and cross-VPC private hosted zone associations.

Estimated Time:2m 0s

Question 170Question →

A company is designing a deployment pipeline for a payment processing API running on Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The business requires that any new release must minimize the blast radius by initially directing 10% of production traffic to the new version. If the system remains healthy, the pipeline must increase traffic to the new version by 10% every 10 minutes until 100% is reached. If an Amazon CloudWatch alarm for HTTP 5xx errors is triggered at any point, the deployment must automatically roll back to the previous version with zero downtime. Which deployment configuration and strategy will meet these requirements?

Amazon ECS rolling update deployment with the minimum healthy percent set to 90% and maximum percent set to 100%, relying on ECS deployment circuit breaker to trigger automatic rollback.

AWS CodeDeploy blue/green deployment with the CodeDeployDefault.ECSCanary10Percent10Minutes traffic-routing configuration, using CloudWatch alarms configured for the deployment group to trigger automatic rollback.

AWS CodeDeploy blue/green deployment with the CodeDeployDefault.ECSLinear10PercentEvery10Minutes traffic-routing configuration, using CloudWatch alarms configured for the deployment group to trigger automatic rollback.

AWS CodeDeploy blue/green deployment with the CodeDeployDefault.ECSAllAtOnce traffic-routing configuration, using Application Load Balancer target group health checks to trigger automatic rollback.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: AWS CodeDeploy blue/green deployment with the CodeDeployDefault.ECSLinear10PercentEvery10Minutes traffic-routing configuration, using CloudWatch alarms configured for the deployment group to trigger automatic rollback.

Answer

AWS CodeDeploy blue/green deployment using the CodeDeployDefault.ECSLinear10PercentEvery10Minutes traffic-routing configuration with CloudWatch alarms configured for automatic rollback.

The correct option is the one specifying the AWS CodeDeploy blue/green deployment with the linear routing configuration. Under this configuration, CodeDeploy shifts 10% of traffic to the new target group, and then adds 10% more every 10 minutes until the full shift is complete. Using CloudWatch alarms attached to the deployment group ensures that if HTTP 5xx errors increase, the deployment is immediately halted and rolled back to the original task set without causing downtime.

Step-by-Step Solution

Analyze the traffic shifting pattern requirement.

The requirement demands starting at 10% traffic and increasing by 10% every 10 minutes, which represents a linear, incremental progression rather than a two-phase canary shift.

This rules out Canary and AllAtOnce routing configurations.

Evaluate the capabilities of Amazon ECS rolling updates.

Rolling updates replace tasks but do not support fine-grained ALB-weighted traffic routing or automated rollbacks triggered directly by application HTTP 5xx metrics.

This rules out standard ECS rolling updates for granular traffic routing needs.

Confirm the CodeDeploy blue/green linear configuration and rollback integration.

The CodeDeployDefault.ECSLinear10PercentEvery10Minutes configuration shifts traffic in equal 10% increments. Integrating CloudWatch alarms with the CodeDeploy deployment group enables automated, zero-downtime rollbacks when threshold-based errors occur.

This satisfies all business constraints, including the rollback criteria.

Key Concept

Selecting and configuring AWS CodeDeploy linear traffic routing configurations for ECS Fargate services to control blast radius and automate rollbacks.

Estimated Time:2m 0s

Question 171Question →

An enterprise is designing a hybrid network architecture to connect $30$ VPCs in a multi-account AWS environment to an on-premises data center. The AWS environment uses an AWS Transit Gateway in the `us-east-1` Region to interconnect all VPCs. The primary connection to the data center is a $10\text{ Gbps}$ AWS Direct Connect connection using a Transit Virtual Interface (VIF) connected to a Direct Connect Gateway. To ensure high availability, the solutions architect is deploying an IPsec AWS Site-to-Site VPN over the Internet as a backup connection. Both connections must support dynamic routing and automatically failover, but the Direct Connect path must be preferred for both inbound and outbound traffic under normal operating conditions. Which two configurations must the solutions architect implement to achieve these routing requirements? (Select TWO.)

Select all that apply

Configure the on-premises router to assign a higher BGP local preference attribute to the AWS routes received over the Direct Connect connection than those received over the VPN connection.

Configure the on-premises router to advertise its local network prefixes over the VPN connection with Autonomous System (AS) path prepending.

Configure static routes on the Transit Gateway route table pointing to the VPN attachment, ensuring they have a higher metric than the dynamic routes propagated by the Direct Connect Gateway.

Configure a Private Hosted Zone in Route 53 with failover routing policies pointing to the Direct Connect Gateway and Site-to-Site VPN endpoints.

Deploy a single NAT Gateway in a shared services VPC and route all hybrid traffic through it to allow the Transit Gateway to prioritize the Direct Connect path.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: Configure the on-premises router to assign a higher BGP local preference attribute to the AWS routes received over the Direct Connect connection than those received over the VPN connection.; Configure the on-premises router to advertise its local network prefixes over the VPN connection with Autonomous System (AS) path prepending.

Answer

Configure the on-premises router to assign a higher BGP local preference attribute to the AWS routes received over the Direct Connect connection, and configure the on-premises router to advertise its local prefixes over the VPN connection using AS path prepending.

To achieve a preferred primary path over Direct Connect and an active-backup dynamic failover via Site-to-Site VPN, path preferences must be configured for both inbound and outbound traffic. Configuring the on-premises router to assign a higher BGP local preference attribute to routes received over the Direct Connect connection ensures that outbound traffic from the data center to AWS utilizes Direct Connect. Advertising the local network prefixes over the VPN connection with AS path prepending increases the path length for the VPN route, prompting AWS Transit Gateway to prefer the shorter Direct Connect path for inbound traffic.

Step-by-Step Solution

Influence outbound traffic (on-premises to AWS) by configuring BGP local preference on the customer gateway.

The on-premises router prefers the Direct Connect link for all traffic destined for the AWS VPCs.

BGP local preference is a non-transitive attribute used to control outbound traffic routing policies within a local Autonomous System.

Influence inbound traffic (AWS to on-premises) by prepending the Autonomous System (AS) path on the customer gateway BGP advertisements over the VPN.

AWS Transit Gateway sees a longer AS path for routes learned via the VPN and prefers the shorter AS path via the Direct Connect Gateway.

AWS Transit Gateway uses BGP AS path length to evaluate dynamic routing paths. Prepending the AS path makes the VPN backup connection less preferred.

Key Concept

BGP routing policy optimization for hybrid network paths utilizing AS path prepending and local preference to establish primary and backup connectivity.

Question 172Question →

A global aviation logistics company is designing a high-availability crew bidding and scheduling platform across two AWS Regions: us-east-1 (Primary) and us-west-2 (Secondary). The platform has a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of $15$ minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of $2$ minutes. Under normal operations, global flight crews must be routed to the Region with the lowest network latency. In the event of a regional outage, traffic must automatically failover to the healthy Region. The application tier requires outbound internet connectivity to sync with external aviation authorities and must be resilient to Availability Zone (AZ) failures. Which architecture meets these requirements while minimizing operational complexity and cost?

Configure Amazon Route 53 with Latency-based routing policies associated with health checks pointing to Application Load Balancers in both Regions. Deploy the application across multiple Availability Zones in each Region, routing outbound traffic through a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone. Use Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2, executing a managed failover during a regional disaster.

Configure Amazon Route 53 with Latency-based routing policies associated with health checks pointing to Application Load Balancers in both Regions. Deploy the application across multiple Availability Zones in each Region, routing outbound traffic through a single NAT Gateway deployed in the primary Availability Zone of each Region to minimize costs. Use Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2, executing a managed failover during a regional disaster.

Configure Amazon Route 53 with Failover routing policies pointing to Application Load Balancers in both Regions. Deploy the application across multiple Availability Zones in each Region, routing outbound traffic through a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone. Deploy Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL in us-east-1 with daily snapshot sharing to us-west-2, restoring the database in the secondary Region from the latest shared snapshot during a failover.

Configure Amazon Route 53 with Latency-based routing policies associated with health checks pointing to Application Load Balancers in both Regions. Deploy the application across multiple Availability Zones in each Region, routing outbound traffic through a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone. Deploy Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL in a Multi-AZ configuration in us-east-1, configuring the application tier in us-west-2 to route read-heavy database traffic directly to the RDS standby instance in the secondary Availability Zone to reduce cross-region latency.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: Configure Amazon Route 53 with Latency-based routing policies associated with health checks pointing to Application Load Balancers in both Regions. Deploy the application across multiple Availability Zones in each Region, routing outbound traffic through a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone. Use Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2, executing a managed failover during a regional disaster.

Answer

The correct architecture uses Route 53 Latency-based routing with health checks, a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone in both Regions, and Amazon Aurora Global Database with managed failover.

The correct architecture meets all constraints: Route 53 Latency-based routing routes users to the lowest-latency Region and automatically redirects traffic to the secondary Region during a disaster when health checks fail. Deploying a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone avoids single points of failure for outbound traffic. Using Amazon Aurora Global Database satisfies the

RPO

2

minutes (since replication lag is typically sub-second) and the

RTO

15

minutes (since a managed failover can be completed within a minute).

Step-by-Step Solution

Analyze the RTO and RPO requirements (

RTO = 15

minutes,

RPO = 2

minutes) to determine the database disaster recovery strategy.

Amazon Aurora Global Database is selected because its asynchronous replication lag is typically less than

1

second (satisfying the

2

-minute RPO) and its managed failover can be completed in less than

1

minute (satisfying the

15

-minute RTO).

Standard RDS snapshot restoration is too slow and has too high of an RPO, whereas Aurora Global Database replication meets both criteria.

Evaluate the routing requirement to send users to the lowest-latency Region under normal operations and automatically failover during an outage.

Configure Amazon Route 53 with Latency-based routing and associate health checks with each record.

Latency-based routing ensures optimal user experience, and the associated health checks allow Route 53 to stop routing traffic to a degraded Region and shift it to the healthy Region automatically.

Determine the high-availability design for the application tier's outbound internet connectivity.

Deploy a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone where the application instances are running.

A single NAT Gateway per Region represents a single point of failure; deploying one per AZ ensures that an AZ outage does not disrupt outbound internet connectivity for the remaining healthy zones.

Key Concept

Designing multi-Region architectures using Route 53 routing policies, NAT Gateway redundancy, and Amazon Aurora Global Database to achieve low RTO/RPO and high availability.

Question 173Question →

A public transit authority is designing a contactless ticketing system on AWS. The application tier runs on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in the primary AWS Region. The database tier uses an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster. The application must communicate with external payment processors via the internet. The solution must be highly available within the primary AWS Region and have a cross-region disaster recovery (DR) plan with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 5 minutes. Compute costs in the DR region should be minimized during normal operations. Which combination of actions will meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)

Select all that apply

Configure Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in the primary region and a secondary cluster in the DR region. Pre-create the Application Load Balancer and an Auto Scaling group in the DR region with desired capacity set to 0, scaling it up to handle traffic only during a failover event.

In both the primary and DR regions, deploy the subnet architecture across multiple Availability Zones, provision a NAT gateway in each public subnet, and configure the private subnet route tables to route outbound internet traffic to the local NAT gateway in the same Availability Zone.

Configure multi-region database replication by deploying an Amazon Aurora DB cluster in the primary region and setting up Amazon RDS Multi-AZ standby instances in the DR region, configuring Aurora Auto Scaling on the standby instances to dynamically handle write workloads during failover.

Deploy a single NAT gateway in a public subnet in the primary region, and update the route tables of the DR region's private subnets to route outbound traffic through an inter-region VPC peering connection to this single NAT gateway.

Use Route 53 Geolocation routing to direct traffic, and associate a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone with the VPCs in both regions, relying on external Route 53 health checks to automatically fail over the internal DNS records to the DR region during an outage.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: Configure Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in the primary region and a secondary cluster in the DR region. Pre-create the Application Load Balancer and an Auto Scaling group in the DR region with desired capacity set to 0, scaling it up to handle traffic only during a failover event.; In both the primary and DR regions, deploy the subnet architecture across multiple Availability Zones, provision a NAT gateway in each public subnet, and configure the private subnet route tables to route outbound internet traffic to the local NAT gateway in the same Availability Zone.

Answer

Configure Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in the primary region and a secondary cluster in the DR region, pre-creating the Application Load Balancer and an Auto Scaling group in the DR region with desired capacity set to 0. Additionally, deploy the subnet architecture across multiple Availability Zones in both regions, provisioning a NAT gateway in each public subnet, and configure the private subnet route tables to route outbound internet traffic to the local NAT gateway in the same Availability Zone.

The correct architecture uses Amazon Aurora Global Database to achieve cross-region disaster recovery with near-zero replication lag, satisfying the RPO and RTO requirements. To minimize compute costs in the disaster recovery region, the Auto Scaling group capacity is set to 0 and only scaled up when a failover is initiated. For high availability of outbound internet traffic to external payment processors, deploying a NAT gateway in each Availability Zone in both regions prevents a single Availability Zone outage from disrupting outbound communication.

Step-by-Step Solution

Determine the database replication strategy that satisfies the RPO of 5 minutes and RTO of 15 minutes.

Amazon Aurora Global Database provides sub-second replication and quick failover capabilities, which easily meets the RPO and RTO requirements.

An active-passive replication model using Aurora Global Database keeps the secondary cluster synchronized with minimal lag.

Address the requirement to minimize compute costs in the disaster recovery region.

Set the EC2 Auto Scaling group desired capacity to 0 in the secondary region during normal operations.

This avoids paying for EC2 instances while the secondary region is passive, and allows scaling up only during a failover event.

Design the outbound internet connectivity for external payment processing to ensure high availability.

Deploy NAT gateways in multiple Availability Zones in the primary and secondary regions, pointing the private subnet route tables to the NAT gateway in the same Availability Zone.

Deploying a NAT gateway per Availability Zone ensures that an outage in one zone does not impact the outbound connectivity of instances running in other zones.

Key Concept

High Availability and Multi-Region Active-Passive Disaster Recovery Design

Question 174Question →

A pharmaceutical company has deployed 12 VPCs in a single AWS region under a multi-account organization. The company needs to establish hybrid connectivity between all 12 VPCs and its on-premises data center. The connectivity design must use a 2 Gbps AWS Direct Connect connection as the primary path and an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection over the public internet as a backup path. The failover between the primary and backup paths must be automatic, and the network team wants to minimize the administrative overhead of managing route tables. Which configuration meets these requirements with the least administrative effort?

Configure VPC peering between a central transit VPC and the other 11 spoke VPCs. Deploy a pair of software VPN appliances in the transit VPC, and establish the Direct Connect and Site-to-Site VPN connections to these appliances. Configure the routing tables in the spoke VPCs to route on-premises traffic through the peering connections to the transit VPC.

Create an AWS Transit Gateway and attach all 12 VPCs. Connect the Transit Gateway to a Direct Connect Gateway using a transit virtual interface. Create a Transit Gateway VPN attachment for the Site-to-Site VPN. Add a static route in the Transit Gateway route table pointing to the Direct Connect Gateway attachment, and add a backup static route with a higher administrative distance pointing to the VPN attachment.

Create an AWS Transit Gateway and attach all 12 VPCs. Connect the Transit Gateway to a Direct Connect Gateway using a transit virtual interface. Create a Transit Gateway VPN attachment for the Site-to-Site VPN. Configure BGP on both the Direct Connect and VPN connections to advertise the same on-premises prefixes. On the on-premises router, use BGP local preference to prefer the Direct Connect path for outbound traffic to AWS.

Create a Virtual Private Gateway in each of the 12 VPCs. Configure a private virtual interface on the Direct Connect connection and a Site-to-Site VPN connection for each Virtual Private Gateway. Configure BGP routing on each connection to advertise the same prefixes, and configure the on-premises router to prefer the Direct Connect path.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: Create an AWS Transit Gateway and attach all 12 VPCs. Connect the Transit Gateway to a Direct Connect Gateway using a transit virtual interface. Create a Transit Gateway VPN attachment for the Site-to-Site VPN. Configure BGP on both the Direct Connect and VPN connections to advertise the same on-premises prefixes. On the on-premises router, use BGP local preference to prefer the Direct Connect path for outbound traffic to AWS.

Answer

The correct architecture uses AWS Transit Gateway to centralize VPC attachments, connects it to a Direct Connect Gateway using a transit virtual interface, and creates a Transit Gateway VPN attachment. By using BGP on both paths to advertise identical on-premises prefixes, Transit Gateway naturally prefers the Direct Connect path over the VPN path for AWS-to-on-premises traffic. Configuring BGP local preference on the customer gateway ensures that on-premises-to-AWS traffic also prefers the Direct Connect path.

The correct design uses AWS Transit Gateway to centralize VPC connections. Connecting the Transit Gateway to a Direct Connect Gateway via a transit virtual interface and establishing a Site-to-Site VPN attachment allows both paths to run BGP. When identical prefixes are advertised, AWS Transit Gateway naturally prioritizes the Direct Connect Gateway path over the VPN path for AWS-to-on-premises traffic. Setting BGP local preference on the customer gateway router ensures that on-premises-to-AWS traffic also prefers the Direct Connect path, ensuring symmetric routing and automatic failover with minimal administration.

Step-by-Step Solution

Centralize VPC connectivity using AWS Transit Gateway.

All 12 spoke VPCs are attached to a single Transit Gateway hub, eliminating the need to manage direct VPN or Direct Connect connections to individual VPCs.

This minimizes administrative overhead and scales routing management.

Configure the primary and backup connections to the Transit Gateway.

Connect the Transit Gateway to a Direct Connect Gateway using a transit virtual interface (Transit VIF) for the primary path, and create a Site-to-Site VPN attachment on the Transit Gateway for the backup path.

This establishes redundant physical paths to the on-premises network.

Configure dynamic BGP routing for identical prefix advertisements.

Advertise the same on-premises prefixes over both BGP sessions. AWS Transit Gateway automatically selects the Direct Connect Gateway path over the Site-to-Site VPN path for outbound traffic because of its built-in path preference order for identical prefix advertisements.

This ensures automated outbound failover from AWS to on-premises without manual route table manipulation.

Configure BGP local preference on the customer gateway router.

The customer gateway router assigns a higher local preference to BGP advertisements received from AWS via the Direct Connect path compared to the VPN path.

This ensures symmetric routing, forcing on-premises-to-AWS traffic to prefer the Direct Connect link.

Key Concept

AWS Transit Gateway automatically prioritizes routes propagated from a Direct Connect Gateway over those from a Site-to-Site VPN when identical prefixes are advertised. Symmetrical routing is completed by configuring BGP attributes (such as local preference) on the on-premises customer gateway.

Estimated Time:2m 0s

Question 175Question →

A company is designing a new regional supply chain inventory forecasting application on AWS. The application tier runs on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The database tier uses Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. The business requires a Disaster Recovery (DR) solution with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 5 minutes. The architecture must minimize cost while ensuring high availability and redundancy for all outbound internet dependencies. Which design strategy meets these requirements?

Configure daily Amazon Aurora database snapshots and copy them to the recovery region. Deploy the application tier on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in the primary region only. Use AWS CloudFormation to deploy the application tier in the recovery region and restore the database from the latest snapshot during a disaster. Configure Amazon Route 53 Latency routing to manage client traffic.

Configure Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in the primary region and a secondary cluster in the recovery region, maintaining an active, minimum-size Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 reader instance in the secondary cluster. Deploy the application tier on Amazon EC2 instances in Auto Scaling groups behind Application Load Balancers (ALBs) in both regions, keeping the recovery region's Auto Scaling group at minimum capacity. Configure Amazon Route 53 Failover routing with health checks on the primary ALB. Deploy NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone utilized by the application in both regions.

Configure Amazon Aurora Global Database with a secondary cluster in the recovery region. Deploy the application tier on Amazon EC2 instances in Auto Scaling groups behind Application Load Balancers (ALBs) in both regions, keeping the recovery region's Auto Scaling group at minimum capacity. Configure Amazon Route 53 Failover routing with health checks on the primary ALB. Deploy a single NAT Gateway in the primary Availability Zone of each region to route outbound internet traffic for all application instances.

Deploy an Amazon Aurora cluster in the primary region. Create a standard Aurora Replica in the recovery region and configure Amazon Aurora Auto Scaling to dynamically spin up additional reader instances in the recovery region during failover. Configure Amazon Route 53 Geolocation routing to distribute client traffic. Deploy NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone utilized by the application in both regions.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: Configure Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in the primary region and a secondary cluster in the recovery region, maintaining an active, minimum-size Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 reader instance in the secondary cluster. Deploy the application tier on Amazon EC2 instances in Auto Scaling groups behind Application Load Balancers (ALBs) in both regions, keeping the recovery region's Auto Scaling group at minimum capacity. Configure Amazon Route 53 Failover routing with health checks on the primary ALB. Deploy NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone utilized by the application in both regions.

Answer

The correct strategy leverages Amazon Aurora Global Database to achieve sub-second cross-region replication, keeping data loss well under the 5-minute RPO. Maintaining a minimum-size Aurora Serverless v2 reader instance in the secondary region ensures a warm database target at minimal standby cost. Deploying the application tier to both regions with the secondary region's Auto Scaling group at minimum capacity ensures a warm standby that can scale out quickly, meeting the 15-minute RTO. Route 53 Failover routing with health checks automates traffic redirection when the primary endpoint is unhealthy. Finally, deploying NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone utilized in both regions ensures high availability for outbound traffic.

Step-by-Step Solution

Select a replication strategy that meets the 5-minute RPO.

Amazon Aurora Global Database provides sub-second replication, satisfying the RPO.

Standard daily snapshots are insufficient as they introduce up to 24 hours of potential data loss.

Select a failover and application deployment strategy that meets the 15-minute RTO.

Use a Warm Standby configuration with active EC2 instances at minimum capacity in the recovery region, and automate DNS failover with Route 53 health checks.

Rebuilding infrastructure from scratch or restoring backups during an outage exceeds the 15-minute RTO window.

Design for high availability and redundancy of outbound internet connections.

Deploy dedicated NAT Gateways in each Availability Zone used by the application workloads.

Using a single NAT Gateway per region introduces an AZ-level single point of failure, violating the redundancy requirement.

Key Concept

Disaster Recovery strategies (Warm Standby) combined with cross-region database replication and network path redundancy.

Question 176Question →

A financial services company is designing a multi-account architecture in AWS for its applications across $10$ spoke VPCs in the us-east-1 region. The security team requires all outbound internet traffic to be routed through a centralized egress VPC for inspection, and all internal DNS queries for private resources to be resolved using a shared Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) hosted in a Central Services account. The architecture must minimize cost, avoid single points of failure, and minimize administrative overhead. Which combination of actions should the network architect perform to meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)

Select all that apply

Deploy NAT Gateways in multiple Availability Zones within the centralized egress VPC, and configure a default route of

0.0.0.0/0

in the spoke Transit Gateway route table pointing to the egress VPC attachment.

Authorize and associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone from the Central Services account with each of the spoke VPCs across the different AWS accounts.

Deploy a single NAT Gateway in the centralized egress VPC to reduce NAT Gateway hourly charges, and route all spoke VPC outbound traffic to it.

Deploy Route 53 Resolver inbound and outbound endpoints in each spoke VPC to forward all DNS queries to the Central Services account for resolution.

Establish VPC peering connections between the Central Services VPC and all spoke VPCs to allow the spokes to resolve DNS queries directly over the peering links.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: Deploy NAT Gateways in multiple Availability Zones within the centralized egress VPC, and configure a default route of $0.0.0.0/0$ in the spoke Transit Gateway route table pointing to the egress VPC attachment.; Authorize and associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone from the Central Services account with each of the spoke VPCs across the different AWS accounts.

Answer

Deploy NAT Gateways in multiple Availability Zones in the egress VPC with Transit Gateway routing, and associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone directly with all spoke VPCs.

Deploying NAT Gateways in multiple Availability Zones ensures high availability and eliminates a single point of failure for outbound traffic. Setting a default route (

0.0.0.0/0

) in the Transit Gateway route table directing traffic to the centralized egress VPC correctly routes all outbound internet traffic. Authorizing and associating the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone from the Central Services account directly with the spoke VPCs allows for cross-account DNS resolution of private records with minimal cost and administrative overhead.

Step-by-Step Solution

Deploy NAT Gateways in multiple Availability Zones within the centralized egress VPC and configure a default route pointing to them in the public subnet route tables.

Highly available outbound path is established in the egress VPC, preventing any single Availability Zone outage from disabling internet access for the spokes.

NAT Gateways are required to translate private IPs to public IPs for outbound traffic, and distributing them across Availability Zones ensures redundancy.

Attach the spoke VPCs and the egress VPC to the Transit Gateway, and configure a default route (

0.0.0.0/0

) in the spoke Transit Gateway route table targeting the egress VPC attachment.

Outbound traffic from all spoke VPCs is consolidated and forwarded to the egress VPC through the Transit Gateway.

This centralizes outbound traffic routing, enabling security inspection and reducing the cost of running NAT Gateways in every spoke VPC.

Authorize the cross-account association of the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone from the Central Services account using the AWS CLI or SDK, and then associate the zone with the spoke VPCs in the application accounts.

All spoke VPCs can directly resolve private DNS records defined in the shared hosted zone.

Direct association is the most cost-effective and operationally simple method to share a Private Hosted Zone across multiple AWS accounts, avoiding the cost of DNS Resolver endpoints.

Key Concept

Centralized egress network design with high availability NAT Gateways and multi-account Route 53 Private Hosted Zone sharing.

Question 177Question →

A multinational legal services firm is designing a new document e-discovery platform on AWS. The application tier will run on Amazon EC2 instances in private subnets across three Availability Zones in both the primary Region (eu-west-1) and the disaster recovery Region (us-east-1). The EC2 instances must query external court deposition APIs over the public internet to validate filing metadata. The database layer will run on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.

The system must meet the following business requirements:
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO) must be less than 10 minutes.
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO) must be less than 1 minute.
- Internal microservices in both Regions must resolve internal database endpoints using a single private hosted zone named corp.discovery.local.
- External user traffic should target the primary Region by default, but fail over automatically to the disaster recovery Region if the primary Region's application tier experiences degraded health.
- Outbound network traffic in each Region must be highly available and resilient to Availability Zone failures.

Which architecture should a solutions architect select to meet these requirements with the lowest operational complexity?

Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in eu-west-1 and a secondary cluster in us-east-1. Deploy a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone in both Regions to handle outbound traffic. Associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone corp.discovery.local with the VPCs in both Regions. Configure Route 53 Failover routing for external traffic, pointing the primary record to the eu-west-1 Application Load Balancer (ALB) with an active health check, and the secondary record to the us-east-1 ALB.

Deploy an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL DB instance in eu-west-1 and configure cross-Region snapshot copies to us-east-1 every 12 hours. Deploy a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone in both Regions to handle outbound traffic. Associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone corp.discovery.local with the VPCs in both Regions. Configure Route 53 Failover routing for external traffic, pointing the primary record to the eu-west-1 Application Load Balancer (ALB) with an active health check, and the secondary record to the us-east-1 ALB.

Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in eu-west-1 and a secondary cluster in us-east-1. Deploy a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone in both Regions to handle outbound traffic. Create the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone corp.discovery.local and associate it only with the VPC in eu-west-1. Configure Route 53 Failover routing for external traffic, pointing the primary record to the eu-west-1 Application Load Balancer (ALB) with an active health check, and the secondary record to the us-east-1 ALB.

Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in eu-west-1 and a secondary cluster in us-east-1. Deploy a single NAT Gateway in the primary Availability Zone of each Region's VPC to route outbound traffic. Associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone corp.discovery.local with the VPCs in both Regions. Configure Route 53 Failover routing for external traffic, pointing the primary record to the eu-west-1 Application Load Balancer (ALB) with an active health check, and the secondary record to the us-east-1 ALB.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in eu-west-1 and a secondary cluster in us-east-1. Deploy a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone in both Regions to handle outbound traffic. Associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone corp.discovery.local with the VPCs in both Regions. Configure Route 53 Failover routing for external traffic, pointing the primary record to the eu-west-1 Application Load Balancer (ALB) with an active health check, and the secondary record to the us-east-1 ALB.

Answer

The architecture that deploys an Amazon Aurora Global Database across both Regions, provisions a NAT Gateway in each Availability Zone of both VPCs, associates the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone corp.discovery.local with both VPCs, and configures Route 53 Failover routing with health checks on the primary Application Load Balancer.

The correct architecture uses Amazon Aurora Global Database to achieve the required sub-second replication lag, fitting within the 1-minute RPO. It deploys multiple NAT Gateways (one per Availability Zone) in both Regions to ensure that outbound traffic is highly available and immune to AZ-level failures. It associates the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone with the VPCs in both Regions, ensuring that internal microservices can resolve the database endpoint locally in both the primary and standby environments. Finally, it uses Route 53 Failover routing with active health checks to ensure that user traffic is automatically redirected to the disaster recovery Region in the event of an outage in the primary Region.

Step-by-Step Solution

Evaluate the database replication strategy against RTO and RPO constraints.

Amazon Aurora Global Database provides sub-second cross-Region replication, which meets the 1-minute RPO, and allows quick promotion of the secondary cluster to primary within minutes, meeting the 10-minute RTO.

Traditional backup and restore methods like snapshot replication have recovery times and data loss risks that exceed the strict RPO/RTO envelope.

Ensure outbound network high availability in private subnets.

Provision one NAT Gateway per Availability Zone within each Region's VPC.

Deploying a single NAT Gateway introduces a single point of failure; if the hosting Availability Zone suffers an outage, the other zones lose outbound connectivity.

Set up private name resolution across Regions.

Associate the Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) with the VPCs in both eu-west-1 and us-east-1.

Route 53 Private Hosted Zones do not automatically resolve queries from other VPCs unless they are explicitly associated with those VPCs.

Configure external user routing and automatic failover.

Implement Route 53 Failover routing pointing the primary record to eu-west-1 and the secondary record to us-east-1, with an active health check configured on the primary ALB.

This configuration ensures that user requests are sent to the primary Region by default, but fail over to the standby Region if the primary Region becomes unhealthy.

Key Concept

Designing multi-Region disaster recovery architectures utilizing Amazon Aurora Global Database, multi-AZ NAT Gateways, and Route 53 Private Hosted Zone VPC association.

Estimated Time:3m 0s

Question 178Question →

A gaming company has deployed $15$ VPCs in the `us-west-2` Region across multiple AWS accounts managed under AWS Organizations. The company requires hybrid connectivity to its on-premises data center using an existing $10\text{ Gbps}$ AWS Direct Connect connection. The architecture must support VPC-to-VPC routing, provide a highly available backup path over the public internet, and minimize administrative overhead. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?

Deploy an AWS Transit Gateway in the region, attach the

15

VPCs, and connect it to a Direct Connect Gateway using a transit virtual interface (VIF). Establish an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection to the Transit Gateway over the public internet to serve as the redundant path, using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for dynamic routing.

Associate all

15

VPCs directly with a single Direct Connect Gateway using private virtual interfaces (VIFs). Establish an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection directly from the on-premises data center to each of the

15

VPCs over the public internet to serve as the backup path.

Deploy an AWS Transit Gateway in the region, attach the

15

VPCs, and connect it to a Direct Connect Gateway using a private virtual interface (VIF). Establish an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection to a single NAT Gateway deployed in a central transit VPC to route backup traffic over the public internet.

Establish VPC peering connections in a full-mesh configuration across all

15

VPCs. Configure a central VPC with a Direct Connect connection using a private virtual interface (VIF) and associate a Route

53

Private Hosted Zone with the central VPC to handle all hybrid DNS and traffic routing without associating it with the other VPCs.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: Deploy an AWS Transit Gateway in the region, attach the $15$ VPCs, and connect it to a Direct Connect Gateway using a transit virtual interface (VIF). Establish an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection to the Transit Gateway over the public internet to serve as the redundant path, using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for dynamic routing.

Answer

Deploy an AWS Transit Gateway in the region, attach the

15

The correct solution leverages AWS Transit Gateway to connect the

15

VPCs and route traffic transitively. Connecting the Transit Gateway to a Direct Connect Gateway via a transit virtual interface (VIF) allows high-throughput hybrid connectivity. Configuring an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection to the Transit Gateway over the public internet provides a dynamically routed backup path that can automatically failover using BGP routing.

Step-by-Step Solution

Consolidate multi-account networking using AWS Transit Gateway.

Creates a centralized hub that can attach all

15

spoke VPCs, enabling spoke-to-spoke routing and reducing point-to-point connections.

Managing individual peerings or VPNs for

15

VPCs creates excessive administrative overhead.

Configure AWS Direct Connect Gateway with a Transit VIF.

Allows the Transit Gateway to connect to the

10\text{ Gbps}

Direct Connect connection.

Transit VIF is the required virtual interface type for connecting Direct Connect to an AWS Transit Gateway.

Create an AWS Site-to-Site VPN attachment on the Transit Gateway.

Establishes a backup path over the public internet to the same centralized hub.

Attaching the VPN to the Transit Gateway ensures all

15

VPCs can failover to the VPN backup seamlessly.

Configure BGP dynamic routing.

Ensures automatic failover to the VPN connection if the Direct Connect link goes down.

Dynamic routing enables path selection and automatic failover without manual route table updates.

Key Concept

AWS Transit Gateway serves as a regional network transit hub to interconnect VPCs and on-premises networks, integrating with Direct Connect Gateway via Transit VIFs and supporting VPN failover via dynamic BGP routing.

Question 179Question →

A financial services company is designing a new multi-region disaster recovery (DR) architecture for a mission-critical billing application. The primary workload runs in a VPC in us-east-1, and the secondary disaster recovery site is located in us-west-2. The application utilizes Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. The business requires a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 10 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 minute. Client application servers in both regions must access the database using a single, consistent private DNS name. Which two database and routing configurations should a Solutions Architect implement to meet these requirements?

Select all that apply

Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2, utilizing physical replication to meet the 1-minute RPO target.

Create a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) containing a CNAME record pointing to the active database endpoint, and associate this PHZ with the VPCs in both us-east-1 and us-west-2.

Configure Route 53 with a Geolocation routing policy using public DNS records to resolve the database endpoint, without associating the Private Hosted Zone with the us-west-2 VPC.

Set up a standard Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster in us-east-1 with cross-region read replicas in us-west-2, and configure a scheduled AWS Backup job to replicate DB snapshots every 4 hours to meet the RPO target.

Deploy Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL in us-east-1 and deploy RDS Multi-AZ replica standby instances in us-west-2 to serve read requests and scale dynamic workloads automatically during normal operation.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2, utilizing physical replication to meet the 1-minute RPO target.; Create a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) containing a CNAME record pointing to the active database endpoint, and associate this PHZ with the VPCs in both us-east-1 and us-west-2.

Answer

Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with the primary cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary cluster in us-west-2, and create a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) containing a CNAME record pointing to the active database endpoint, associating this PHZ with the VPCs in both us-east-1 and us-west-2.

To meet the RPO of 1 minute and RTO of 10 minutes, deploying an Amazon Aurora Global Database is the most suitable strategy. It replicates data cross-region with latency typically under a second and allows quick promotion of the secondary cluster during a failover. Additionally, to allow client application servers in both regions to resolve a single database private DNS name, a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone must be associated with the VPCs in both us-east-1 and us-west-2.

Step-by-Step Solution

Analyze RTO and RPO requirements.

The RPO is 1 minute, which requires near real-time data replication between us-east-1 and us-west-2. The RTO is 10 minutes, which demands a fast failover mechanism.

Choosing the replication strategy depends on how much data loss (RPO) and downtime (RTO) the business can tolerate.

Select the database replication topology.

Amazon Aurora Global Database provides physical, sub-second cross-region replication, which easily satisfies the 1-minute RPO. It also allows the secondary cluster to be promoted to primary in minutes, meeting the 10-minute RTO.

Standard snapshot replication fails the RPO target, and RDS Multi-AZ standby instances do not support cross-region failover or read workload scaling.

Configure DNS routing for private resolution across VPCs.

Create a single Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) and associate it with both the primary VPC in us-east-1 and the secondary VPC in us-west-2.

Without associating the PHZ with the secondary VPC, the clients in us-west-2 will not be able to resolve the database DNS name privately.

Key Concept

Multi-region disaster recovery design using Amazon Aurora Global Database and Route 53 Private Hosted Zone cross-VPC association.

Question 180Question →

A media company is launching a live voting application for a popular television show finale. During the $10$ -minute voting window, concurrent user connections are expected to spike instantaneously from a baseline of $100$ requests per second to $120,000$ requests per second. The application must perform a read-heavy database query to verify a voter's eligibility before recording their vote. The application runs on Amazon ECS with Amazon Aurora MySQL as the database. Which architectural design will meet these scalability requirements with the lowest latency?

Rely on the default Application Load Balancer auto-scaling to dynamically handle the traffic spike. Configure the Amazon Aurora database with Multi-AZ deployment and route the eligibility checks to the standby instance to distribute the load.

Rely on the default Application Load Balancer auto-scaling to scale out as traffic increases. Pre-provision the required number of Aurora Replicas before the voting window opens and configure the application to query the reader endpoint.

Submit a support request to AWS to pre-warm the Application Load Balancers (ALBs) to the expected traffic volume before the event. Manually provision the required number of Aurora Replicas prior to the voting window and use the reader endpoint for eligibility checks.

Submit a support request to AWS to pre-warm the Application Load Balancers (ALBs) to the expected traffic volume before the event. Route eligibility checks to the Aurora primary instance and rely on Multi-AZ standby instances to dynamically scale read capacity during peak load.

Show answer & explanation

Answer: Submit a support request to AWS to pre-warm the Application Load Balancers (ALBs) to the expected traffic volume before the event. Manually provision the required number of Aurora Replicas prior to the voting window and use the reader endpoint for eligibility checks.

Answer

The correct answer recommends pre-warming the Application Load Balancers (ALBs) and manually pre-provisioning Aurora Replicas. An instantaneous traffic spike from

100

120,000

requests per second exceeds the default scaling rate of ALBs, leading to dropped requests unless they are pre-warmed by AWS Support. Furthermore, database auto-scaling is too slow to react to an instantaneous surge, meaning database replicas must be manually provisioned in advance. Using the reader endpoint properly distributes the read-heavy query load across these replicas.

Step-by-Step Solution

Identify the scaling limits of Application Load Balancers during instantaneous traffic spikes.

Recognize that ALBs scale gradually and cannot handle a sudden jump from

100

120,000

requests per second without dropping requests, necessitating ELB pre-warming.

Pre-warming configures the load balancer's capacity beforehand to absorb the immediate surge.

Determine how to handle the read-heavy database workload under rapid scaling constraints.

Identify that dynamic Auto Scaling for database replicas is too slow for instantaneous spikes, so pre-provisioning Aurora Replicas is required.

Manually scaling the database replicas before the window opens ensures the capacity is available immediately.

Evaluate the role of standby instances in high availability configurations.

Recognize that Multi-AZ standby instances do not serve read traffic or scale dynamic query loads in Aurora or standard RDS, and only reader replicas can be used for read scaling.

Routing read traffic to a standby instance fails because standby instances are reserved for failover and cannot accept read queries.

Key Concept

Handling flash traffic surges and scaling database read capacity in AWS require pre-provisioning and pre-warming because automated scaling mechanisms have a startup latency.

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