AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 350

A solutions architect is designing a company’s disaster recovery (DR) architecture. The company has a MySQL database that runs on an Amazon EC2 instance in a private subnet with scheduled backup. The DR design needs to include multiple AWS Regions.

Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Migrate the MySQL database to multiple EC2 instances. Configure a standby EC2 instance in the DR Region. Turn on replication.
• B. Migrate the MySQL database to Amazon RDS. Use a Multi-AZ deployment. Turn on read replication for the primary DB instance in the different Availability Zones.
• C. Migrate the MySQL database to an Amazon Aurora global database. Host the primary DB cluster in the primary Region. Host the secondary DB cluster in the DR Region.
• D. Store the scheduled backup of the MySQL database in an Amazon S3 bucket that is configured for S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR). Use the data backup to restore the database in the DR Region.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Amazon Aurora global databases offer managed cross-Region replication, providing fast disaster recovery and low-latency reads with minimal operational overhead. Options A and D require significant manual effort to manage EC2 instances or restore database backups during a failover, which increases operational overhead and recovery time. Option B focuses on Multi-AZ deployment, which is a high-availability feature within a single Region rather than a multi-Region disaster recovery solution.