AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 208

A solutions architect is designing a multi-Region disaster recovery solution for an application that will provide public API access. The application will use Amazon
EC2 instances with a userdata script to load application code and an Amazon RDS for MySQL database. The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is 3 hours and the
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is 24 hours.
Which architecture would meet these requirements at the LOWEST cost?

Answer options

• A. Use an Application Load Balancer for Region failover. Deploy new EC2 instances with the userdata script. Deploy separate RDS instances in each Region.
• B. Use Amazon Route 53 for Region failover. Deploy new EC2 instances with the userdata script. Create a read replica of the RDS instance in a backup Region.
• C. Use Amazon API Gateway for the public APIs and Region failover. Deploy new EC2 instances with the userdata script. Create a MySQL read replica of the RDS instance in a backup Region.
• D. Use Amazon Route 53 for Region failover. Deploy new EC2 instances with the userdata script for APIs, and create a snapshot of the RDS instance daily for a backup. Replicate the snapshot to a backup Region.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Option D is correct because it allows for a cost-effective backup strategy by using daily snapshots of the RDS instance, which can be replicated to a secondary Region, meeting the RPO requirement. The other options involve deploying additional RDS instances or read replicas, which would incur higher costs and may not align with the specified requirements for RTO and RPO.