AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 749

A company has deployed a business-critical application in the AWS Cloud. The application uses Amazon EC2 instances that run in the us-east-1 Region. The application uses Amazon S3 for storage of all critical data.
To meet compliance requirements, the company must create a disaster recovery (DR) plan that provides the capability of a full failover to another AWS Region.
What should a solutions architect recommend for this DR plan?

Answer options

• A. Deploy the application to multiple Availability Zones in us-east-1. Create a resource group in AWS Resource Groups. Turn on automatic failover for the application to use a predefined recovery Region.
• B. Perform a virtual machine (VM) export by using AWS Import/Export on the existing EC2 instances. Copy the exported instances to the destination Region. In the event of a disaster, provision new EC2 instances from the exported EC2 instances.
• C. Create snapshots of all Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes that are attached to the EC2 instances in us-east-1. Copy the snapshots to the destination Region. In the event of a disaster, provision new EC2 instances from the EBS snapshots.
• D. Use S3 Cross-Region Replication for the data that is stored in Amazon S3. Create an AWS CloudFormation template for the application with an S3 bucket parameter. In the event of a disaster, deploy the template to the destination Region and specify the local S3 bucket as the parameter.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

To recover the application servers in a secondary AWS Region, taking snapshots of the Amazon EBS volumes and copying them to the destination Region is the standard method to preserve and restore the EC2 state. Option A only provides high availability within the primary region, and Option B is incorrect because AWS Import/Export is not intended for continuous EC2 cross-region disaster recovery. Option D fails to address the recovery of the data and operating systems stored on the EC2 instances' EBS volumes.