AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 330

A solutions architect is designing a disaster recovery strategy for a three-tier application. The application has an RTO of 30 minutes and an RPO of 5 minutes for the data tier. The application and web tiers are stateless and leverage a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances. The data tier consists of a 50 TB Amazon Aurora database.
Which combination of steps satisfies the RTO and RPO requirements while optimizing costs? (Choose two.)

Answer options

• A. Create daily snapshots of the EC2 instances and replicate the snapshots to another Region.
• B. Deploy a hot standby of the application to another Region.
• C. Create snapshots of the Aurora database every 5 minutes.
• D. Create a cross-Region Aurora Replica of the database.
• E. Create an AWS Backup job to replicate data to another Region.

Correct answer: A, D

Explanation

To meet the 5-minute RPO for a 50 TB Amazon Aurora database, a cross-Region Aurora Replica is required as it replicates data asynchronously with sub-second lag. For the stateless application and web tiers, copying daily EC2 snapshots to another Region is the most cost-effective way to meet the 30-minute RTO, as they can be quickly redeployed without the ongoing costs of keeping a hot standby running.