SAP-C02 Question 273
Single answerA financial services company runs a highly available, mission-critical application that processes real-time transactions. The application is deployed in a single AWS Region using an Auto Scaling group across three Availability Zones with an Application Load Balancer. The company wants to implement a disaster recovery strategy to ensure business continuity in case the entire Region becomes unavailable. Which solution provides the fastest recovery with minimal downtime while maintaining cost efficiency?
- A
Set up a second deployment of the application in a different Region, running at full capacity, and use Route 53 with health checks to route traffic.
- B
Implement a pilot light architecture in a second Region by replicating critical infrastructure and data, and scale up resources in the event of a disaster.
- C
Use AWS Backup to regularly back up application data to a different Region and manually provision infrastructure during a disaster.
- D
Deploy a multi-Region active-active architecture using global load balancing with Amazon Route 53, and synchronize data using Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B
Explanation
The pilot light architecture balances cost efficiency and recovery time. By replicating critical components and data in a secondary Region, it ensures that essential services can be rapidly scaled up during a disaster, minimizing downtime while avoiding the high costs associated with maintaining a fully operational secondary Region. This makes it the ideal solution for the company's requirements.
- A. Incorrect.
This option describes a hot standby approach, which involves running a second deployment at full capacity in another Region. While this ensures minimal downtime, it is not cost-efficient because it incurs high costs by continuously running resources at full capacity.
- B. Correct.
A pilot light architecture is cost-efficient because it replicates only the critical components and data in another Region. In the event of a disaster, resources can be scaled up quickly to support full capacity, providing a balance of fast recovery and cost efficiency.
- C. Incorrect.
Using AWS Backup and manually provisioning infrastructure would result in significant downtime, as the infrastructure isn't pre-provisioned. This option is not suitable for mission-critical applications requiring fast recovery.
- D. Incorrect.
A multi-Region active-active architecture provides high availability but is significantly more expensive due to running multiple active deployments and synchronizing data across Regions. While it minimizes downtime, it is not the most cost-efficient solution for disaster recovery.