AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 474

A company runs applications on Amazon EC2 instances in one AWS Region. The company wants to back up the EC2 instances to a second Region. The company also wants to provision EC2 resources in the second Region and manage the EC2 instances centrally from one AWS account.

Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Create a disaster recovery (DR) plan that has a similar number of EC2 instances in the second Region. Configure data replication.
• B. Create point-in-time Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots of the EC2 instances. Copy the snapshots to the second Region periodically.
• C. Create a backup plan by using AWS Backup. Configure cross-Region backup to the second Region for the EC2 instances.
• D. Deploy a similar number of EC2 instances in the second Region. Use AWS DataSync to transfer the data from the source Region to the second Region.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

AWS Backup provides a fully managed, centralized backup service that natively supports cross-Region backup for Amazon EC2, making it the most cost-effective and operationally efficient solution. Options A and D are not cost-effective because they require continuously running idle EC2 instances in the destination Region. Option B is less efficient and harder to manage centrally compared to the automated scheduling and cross-Region policies provided by AWS Backup.