Question

Difficulty: HardDatabase High Availability

A company is running a critical e-commerce platform that uses a single-instance Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance. During a recent infrastructure event in the primary Availability Zone, the database became unavailable, resulting in a three-hour outage while the operations team restored the database from a backup. To prevent a recurrence, a SysOps Administrator is tasked with implementing a highly available architecture that supports automatic, synchronous failover and also offloads read-heavy reporting queries. Which combination of actions should the SysOps Administrator take to meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)

  1. Modify the RDS DB instance to enable a Multi-AZ deployment.Answer
  2. Create an Amazon RDS Read Replica and configure the reporting application to use the Read Replica endpoint.Answer
  3. C
    Configure an Amazon Route 53 active-passive failover routing policy to redirect write queries from the primary instance endpoint to the Read Replica endpoint.
  4. D
    Enable cross-Region replication on the primary DB instance to automate database failover to a standby DB instance in a secondary AWS Region.

Answer

Modify the RDS DB instance to enable a Multi-AZ deployment, and create an Amazon RDS Read Replica and configure the reporting application to use the Read Replica endpoint.
To achieve high availability with automatic, synchronous failover and zero data loss, a Multi-AZ deployment is required. Multi-AZ creates a synchronous standby instance in a different Availability Zone and automatically updates DNS records during a failover event. To offload read-heavy reporting queries, a separate Read Replica should be deployed, and the reporting application should connect to the replica's endpoint.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the high availability and failover requirements.
Identify that automatic, synchronous failover with zero data loss within the Region requires an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployment.
Multi-AZ configurations replicate data synchronously to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone and handle failover automatically via DNS updates.
2
Analyze the performance offloading requirements.
Identify that read-heavy queries must be directed away from the write database.
An Amazon RDS Read Replica provides a read-only endpoint that offloads query performance from the primary DB instance.
3
Evaluate the incorrect options regarding DNS and replication routing.
Eliminate options involving Route 53 active-passive routing to replicas and cross-Region replication.
Route 53 cannot automatically promote a read-only replica to accept write traffic, and cross-Region replication is asynchronous and requires manual promotion.

Key Concept

AWS Database High Availability and Read Scaling
Estimated Time:2m 30s
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