HashiCorp Vault Associate (003) Question 221
Single answer8d Explain the uses of disaster recovery and performance replicationA company runs Vault Enterprise in a single primary datacenter and has two new requirements: 1) if the primary datacenter becomes unavailable, they need a standby Vault cluster in another region that can be promoted to continue operations with the same data, and 2) users in a distant region are experiencing high latency on read-heavy requests and need faster local access without creating a second independent source of truth. Which combination best meets these requirements?
- A
Configure disaster recovery replication for the secondary-region standby cluster, and configure performance replication for the distant region serving read-heavy traffic.
- B
Configure performance replication for the secondary-region standby cluster, and configure disaster recovery replication for the distant region serving read-heavy traffic.
- C
Use only disaster recovery replication for both regions, because DR secondaries can directly serve all client traffic with low latency.
- D
Use only performance replication for both regions, because performance secondaries are intended to replace the primary during an outage without any promotion step.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
Vault Enterprise supports multiple replication modes with different operational goals. Disaster recovery replication is used to maintain a secondary cluster that can be promoted when the primary cluster becomes unavailable, making it suitable for business continuity and site failure scenarios. Performance replication is used to distribute read traffic and reduce latency for clients in other regions while preserving a single source of truth for writes on the primary. In practice, organizations often use DR replication for resilience and performance replication for scale and geographic responsiveness. This aligns with HashiCorp documentation and best practices distinguishing DR replication for failover preparedness from performance replication for improved read scalability and regional access.
- A. Correct.
Correct. Disaster recovery (DR) replication is intended to maintain a warm standby cluster that can be promoted if the primary cluster is lost. Performance replication is intended to improve scale and reduce latency by placing a performance secondary closer to clients, especially for read-heavy or latency-sensitive access patterns, while still keeping a single authoritative primary for writes.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. This reverses the intended use cases. Performance replication is not primarily the mechanism for a standby failover target, while DR replication is not designed as the solution for serving nearby client traffic to reduce latency. A candidate might choose this if they confuse the names of the replication modes.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. DR secondaries are designed for failover readiness, not for routine client-serving in the same way performance secondaries are used to scale reads and reduce geographic latency. This option reflects the misconception that DR replication is a general-purpose multi-region traffic distribution feature.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Performance replication helps with scale and local access, but a performance secondary is not simply a hot replacement for the primary in the same way a DR secondary is used for disaster recovery promotion. This option reflects a common misunderstanding that all replication modes are interchangeable for failover.