SOA-C02 Question 101
Single answerA company runs a production workload on Amazon RDS and has strict compliance requirements mandating that backups must be retained for 7 years. The company wants to automate snapshot creation and retention while ensuring the recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) are met. Which solution should the SysOps Administrator implement to meet these requirements?
- A
Use AWS Backup to create a backup plan with a 7-year retention policy and assign the RDS resource to the plan.
- B
Manually create RDS snapshots every month and store them in Amazon S3 Glacier for 7 years.
- C
Use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) to automate the creation and expiration of RDS snapshots based on the retention policy.
- D
Enable automated backups in RDS and configure a custom CloudWatch Event Rule to delete snapshots older than 7 years.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
The most effective and compliant solution is to use AWS Backup, which provides a centralized and automated way to manage backups and retention policies across AWS services, including RDS. It ensures that backups are created and retained for the required duration while meeting the recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). Other options are either not applicable or introduce unnecessary complexity.
- A. Correct.
This is the correct solution. AWS Backup provides a centralized way to manage backup plans with retention policies for services like RDS. It simplifies compliance requirements and ensures backups are automated and retained for the required duration.
- B. Incorrect.
This is not a recommended approach. Manually creating snapshots is error-prone and does not ensure compliance. Furthermore, transferring snapshots to Amazon S3 Glacier is not natively supported for RDS snapshots.
- C. Incorrect.
Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) is specific to EBS snapshots and cannot be used for RDS snapshots. Therefore, this option is not applicable.
- D. Incorrect.
While automated RDS backups can be enabled, using a custom CloudWatch Event Rule to delete snapshots is not a native or scalable solution for long-term retention and compliance.