AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 806

A company runs an application on several Amazon EC2 instances that store persistent data on an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system. The company needs to replicate the data to another AWS Region by using an AWS managed service solution.

Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Use the EFS-to-EFS backup solution to replicate the data to an EFS file system in another Region.
• B. Run a nightly script to copy data from the EFS file system to an Amazon S3 bucket. Enable S3 Cross-Region Replication on the S3 bucket.
• C. Create a VPC in another Region. Establish a cross-Region VPC peer. Run a nightly rsync to copy data from the original Region to the new Region.
• D. Use AWS Backup to create a backup plan with a rule that takes a daily backup and replicates it to another Region. Assign the EFS file system resource to the backup plan.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

AWS Backup is a fully managed service that natively supports cross-Region replication of Amazon EFS backups, making it the most cost-effective and operationally efficient managed solution. Options B and C require manual scripting, scheduling, and custom infrastructure management, which increases operational overhead and does not qualify as a fully managed service solution. Option A (the EFS-to-EFS backup solution) is a legacy architecture that is more complex and costly to maintain compared to native AWS Backup.