AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 621

A solutions architect is designing a customer-facing application for a company. The application's database will have a clearly defined access pattern throughout the year and will have a variable number of reads and writes that depend on the time of year. The company must retain audit records for the database for 7 days.
The recovery point objective (RPO) must be less than 5 hours.
Which solution meets these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Use Amazon DynamoDB with auto scaling Use on-demand backups and Amazon DynamoDB Streams
• B. Use Amazon Redshift. Configure concurrency scaling. Activate audit logging. Perform database snapshots every 4 hours
• C. Use Amazon RDS with Provisioned IOPS Activate the database auditing parameter. Perform database snapshots every 5 hours
• D. Use Amazon Aurora MySQL with auto scaling. Activate the database auditing parameter

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Amazon RDS with Provisioned IOPS is the ideal choice for this transactional application because it handles predictable, seasonal read/write fluctuations while offering robust administrative controls. Enabling the database auditing parameter satisfies the 7-day audit retention requirement, and scheduling snapshots every 5 hours, combined with RDS's continuous transaction log backups, guarantees a recovery point objective (RPO) of less than 5 hours. Other options fail because Amazon Redshift is designed for analytical warehousing rather than transactional workloads, and the DynamoDB and Aurora options do not specify a backup strategy that ensures the required RPO.