AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 235

A company receives inconsistent service from its data center provider because the company is headquartered in an area affected by natural disasters. The company is not ready to fully migrate to the AWS Cloud, but it wants a failure environment on AWS in case the on-premises data center fails.
The company runs web servers that connect to external vendors. The data available on AWS and on premises must be uniform.
Which solution should a solutions architect recommend that has the LEAST amount of downtime?

Answer options

• A. Configure an Amazon Route 53 failover record. Run application servers on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer in an Auto Scaling group. Set up AWS Storage Gateway with stored volumes to back up data to Amazon S3.
• B. Configure an Amazon Route 53 failover record. Execute an AWS CloudFormation template from a script to create Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Set up AWS Storage Gateway with stored volumes to back up data to Amazon S3.
• C. Configure an Amazon Route 53 failover record. Set up an AWS Direct Connect connection between a VPC and the data center. Run application servers on Amazon EC2 in an Auto Scaling group. Run an AWS Lambda function to execute an AWS CloudFormation template to create an Application Load Balancer.
• D. Configure an Amazon Route 53 failover record. Run an AWS Lambda function to execute an AWS CloudFormation template to launch two Amazon EC2 instances. Set up AWS Storage Gateway with stored volumes to back up data to Amazon S3. Set up an AWS Direct Connect connection between a VPC and the data center.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Option A is the best choice because it provides a robust failover solution with minimal downtime by utilizing Amazon Route 53 for DNS failover, Application Load Balancer, and Auto Scaling for quick recovery. The other options involve additional complexities or components that may delay the recovery process, such as AWS Direct Connect or unnecessary Lambda functions, which are not required for a straightforward failover setup.