ARA-C01 Question 239
Single answerAvailabilityA global financial services company runs a business-critical Snowflake workload in AWS us-east-1. The platform supports customer-facing dashboards with a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than 5 minutes and a recovery point objective (RPO) of less than 5 minutes, even if an entire cloud region becomes unavailable. The company also wants to minimize application changes during a failover event. Which architecture best meets these requirements?
- A
Enable Time Travel and Fail-safe on the primary database, and rely on zero-copy cloning to recreate the environment in another region when needed
- B
Create database replication from the primary account to a secondary account in another AWS region, promote the secondary database during a regional outage, and use client connectivity that can be redirected to the secondary account
- C
Configure Tri-Secret Secure and network policies in the primary account, and use account usage views to reconstruct data objects in a second region after an outage
- D
Use Snowpipe Streaming with a larger multi-cluster warehouse in the primary region so that ingestion and query workloads continue automatically during a regional outage
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B
Explanation
For Snowflake availability requirements involving a full cloud-region outage, architects should use cross-region replication and failover patterns rather than relying on intra-region protection features. Time Travel and Fail-safe are important for data recovery scenarios such as user error or object restoration, but they do not address regional disaster recovery. Similarly, warehouse scaling, Snowpipe Streaming, security features, and governance controls do not provide continuity if the region itself is down. Snowflake best practices for business continuity emphasize replicating data and relevant objects to a secondary account/region and planning operational failover procedures, including client connection redirection and validation of what objects are replicated. To meet strict RTO/RPO targets, teams should validate replication schedules, failover runbooks, and application connection strategies in advance.
- A. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Time Travel and Fail-safe help recover historical data within the same Snowflake deployment, but they do not provide cross-region business continuity for a full regional outage. Zero-copy cloning also requires the source objects to be available in the same Snowflake environment; it is not a regional disaster recovery strategy by itself. This option reflects a common misconception that data protection features alone satisfy availability requirements.
- B. Correct.
Correct. Cross-region database replication to a secondary account, followed by failover/promotion of the secondary during a regional outage, is the appropriate Snowflake availability pattern for disaster recovery across regions. This approach is designed to support low RPO/RTO objectives, subject to replication frequency and operational readiness. Redirectable client connectivity helps minimize application changes by allowing applications to reconnect to the DR environment with limited reconfiguration.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Tri-Secret Secure improves key management and security posture, and network policies control access, but neither provides high availability or disaster recovery across regions. Account usage views are metadata/reporting sources and are not intended to rebuild a production environment after a regional outage. This option confuses security/governance controls with availability architecture.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Snowpipe Streaming and multi-cluster warehouses improve ingestion performance and concurrency within a region, but they do not protect against a complete regional failure. If the entire region is unavailable, compute scaling in that same region cannot restore service. This is a common misunderstanding between performance/scalability features and true disaster recovery capabilities.