AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 417

A company's database is hosted on an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster in the us-east-1 Region. The database is 4 TB in size. The company needs to expand its disaster recovery strategy to the us-west-2 Region. The company must have the ability to fail over to us-west-2 with a recovery time objective (RTO) of 15 minutes.
What should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create a Multi-Region Aurora MySQL DB cluster in us-east-1 and use-west-2. Use an Amazon Route 53 health check to monitor us-east-1 and fail over to us- west-2 upon failure.
• B. Take a snapshot of the DB cluster in us-east-1. Configure an Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) rule that invokes an AWS Lambda function upon receipt of resource events. Configure the Lambda function to copy the snapshot to us-west-2 and restore the snapshot in us-west-2 when failure is detected.
• C. Create an AWS CloudFormation script to create another Aurora MySQL DB cluster in us-west-2 in case of failure. Configure an Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) rule that invokes an AWS Lambda function upon receipt of resource events. Configure the Lambda function to deploy the AWS CloudFormation stack in us-west-2 when failure is detected.
• D. Recreate the database as an Aurora global database with the primary DB cluster in us-east-1 and a secondary DB cluster in us-west-2. Configure an Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) rule that invokes an AWS Lambda function upon receipt of resource events. Configure the Lambda function to promote the DB cluster in us-west-2 when failure is detected.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Amazon Aurora global databases provide low-latency global reads and rapid disaster recovery across multiple AWS Regions, allowing a secondary cluster to be promoted to primary in less than 1 minute to easily meet the 15-minute RTO. Copying and restoring a 4 TB snapshot (Option B) or deploying a new cluster from scratch (Option C) would take significantly longer than 15 minutes, failing the RTO requirement. Option A is incorrect because Aurora does not support native multi-Region active-active write configurations in the way described.