AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 316

A company hosts a web application on AWS in the us-east-1 Region. The application servers are distributed across three Availability Zones behind an Application
Load Balancer. The database is hosted in MySQL database on an Amazon EC2 instance. A solutions architect needs to design a cross-Region data recovery solution using AWS services with an RTO of less than 5 minutes and an RPO of less than 1 minute. The solutions architect is deploying application servers in us- west-2, and has configured Amazon Route 53 health checks and DNS failover to us-west-2.
Which additional step should the solutions architect take?

Answer options

• A. Migrate the database to an Amazon RDS for MySQL instance with a cross-Region read replica in us-west-2.
• B. Migrate the database to an Amazon Aurora global database with the primary in us-east-1 and the secondary in us-west-2.
• C. Migrate the database to an Amazon RDS for MySQL instance with a Multi-AZ deployment.
• D. Create a MySQL standby database on an Amazon EC2 instance in us-west-2.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Amazon Aurora global databases provide fast cross-Region replication with a typical RPO of less than 1 second and an RTO of under 1 minute, which perfectly satisfies the strict recovery objectives. Amazon RDS for MySQL cross-Region read replicas and EC2-based standby databases cannot reliably guarantee a failover time (RTO) of less than 5 minutes. Multi-AZ deployments only provide high availability within a single Region and do not address cross-Region disaster recovery needs.