SAP-C02 Question 182
Single answerA financial services company operates a critical trading application in a single AWS Region. Regulatory requirements mandate that the application must achieve a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1 hour and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 5 minutes in the event of a regional failure. You are tasked with designing a business continuity solution that meets these requirements. Which solution should you implement?
- A
Deploy the application in a second AWS Region using an active-passive strategy with Amazon RDS cross-Region read replicas and S3 cross-Region replication.
- B
Use AWS CloudFormation to create a cross-Region failover stack on-demand during a disaster to recreate the infrastructure in the secondary Region.
- C
Implement Amazon Aurora Global Database across two AWS Regions with Aurora replicas and enable a pilot-light architecture.
- D
Use AWS Backup to create cross-Region backups of all resources and restore them in the secondary Region during a failure.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C
Explanation
The correct answer is to use Amazon Aurora Global Database with a pilot-light architecture. Aurora Global Database provides a highly available, low-latency solution with near real-time replication between Regions. The pilot-light approach ensures that minimal infrastructure is pre-provisioned in the secondary Region, keeping costs low while meeting the stringent RTO and RPO requirements. Other options either fail to meet the RTO/RPO requirements or involve significant downtime and manual intervention in the event of a disaster.
- A. Incorrect.
This option meets the RPO requirement by using S3 cross-Region replication and RDS cross-Region read replicas, but it does not meet the RTO requirement of 1 hour as failover would require significant manual intervention and time.
- B. Incorrect.
This option relies on creating the infrastructure during a disaster, which is not suitable to meet the RTO of 1 hour. This approach may lead to extended downtime and does not address the RPO requirement effectively.
- C. Correct.
Amazon Aurora Global Database provides a low-latency, cross-Region replication mechanism that meets both the RTO of 1 hour and the RPO of 5 minutes. Aurora replicas in the secondary Region can be promoted to primary quickly, making this the correct solution.
- D. Incorrect.
Using AWS Backup for cross-Region backups introduces significant delays in both recovery time and data loss, which do not meet the RTO or RPO requirements. This solution is not suitable for critical applications requiring high availability.