AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 626

A company is implementing new data retention policies for all databases that run on Amazon RDS DB instances. The company must retain daily backups for a minimum period of 2 years. The backups must be consistent and restorable.
Which solution should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create a backup vault in AWS Backup to retain RDS backups. Create a new backup plan with a daily schedule and an expiration period of 2 years after creation. Assign the RDS DB instances to the backup plan.
• B. Configure a backup window for the RDS DB instances for daily snapshots. Assign a snapshot retention policy of 2 years to each RDS DB instance. Use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (Amazon DLM) to schedule snapshot deletions.
• C. Configure database transaction logs to be automatically backed up to Amazon CloudWatch Logs with an expiration period of 2 years.
• D. Configure an AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) replication task. Deploy a replication instance, and configure a change data capture (CDC) task to stream database changes to Amazon S3 as the target. Configure S3 Lifecycle policies to delete the snapshots after 2 years.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

AWS Backup is the correct service for centralized backup management and can easily orchestrate daily RDS backups with a retention period of 2 years, overcoming the 35-day limitation of native RDS automated backups. Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (Amazon DLM) does not manage Amazon RDS snapshots. Using CloudWatch Logs or AWS DMS CDC to Amazon S3 are not viable methods for creating easily restorable and consistent daily database backups.