AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 308

A company has an application that runs on several Amazon EC2 instances. Each EC2 instance has multiple Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) data volumes attached to it. The application’s EC2 instance configuration and data need to be backed up nightly. The application also needs to be recoverable in a different AWS Region.

Which solution will meet these requirements in the MOST operationally efficient way?

Answer options

• A. Write an AWS Lambda function that schedules nightly snapshots of the application’s EBS volumes and copies the snapshots to a different Region.
• B. Create a backup plan by using AWS Backup to perform nightly backups. Copy the backups to another Region. Add the application’s EC2 instances as resources.
• C. Create a backup plan by using AWS Backup to perform nightly backups. Copy the backups to another Region. Add the application’s EBS volumes as resources.
• D. Write an AWS Lambda function that schedules nightly snapshots of the application's EBS volumes and copies the snapshots to a different Availability Zone.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

AWS Backup is a fully managed service that is more operationally efficient than creating and maintaining custom AWS Lambda scripts. By configuring AWS Backup to target the Amazon EC2 instances, it automatically backs up both the instance configuration (creating an AMI) and all attached Amazon EBS volumes. Targeting only the EBS volumes would fail to capture the instance configurations required for full recovery, and copying to another Availability Zone does not meet the multi-Region recovery requirement.