AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 791

A company is running a distributed application on a set of Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The application stores large amounts of data on an
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system, and new data is generated monthly. The company needs to back up the data in a secondary AWS Region to restore from in case of a performance problem in its primary Region. The company has an RTO of 1 hour. A solutions architect needs to create a backup strategy while minimizing the extra cost.
Which backup strategy should the solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create a pipeline in AWS Data Pipeline. Copy the data to an EFS file system in the secondary Region. Create a lifecycle policy to move files to the EFS One Zone-Infrequent Access storage class.
• B. Set up automatic backups by using AWS Backup. Create a copy rule to copy backups to an Amazon S3 bucket in the secondary Region. Create a lifecycle policy to move backups to the S3 Glacier storage class.
• C. Set up AWS DataSync and continuously copy the files to an Amazon S3 bucket in the secondary Region. Create a lifecycle policy to move files to the S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage class.
• D. Turn on EFS Cross-Region Replication and set the secondary Region as the target. Create a lifecycle policy to move files to the EFS Infrequent Access storage class in the secondary Region.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Amazon EFS Cross-Region Replication provides a native, continuous replication mechanism that keeps a secondary file system ready for immediate use, easily meeting the 1-hour RTO requirement. Utilizing a lifecycle policy to transition replicated files to the EFS Infrequent Access (IA) storage class in the secondary Region significantly reduces storage costs. Other solutions using Amazon S3 or Glacier would require additional data restoration steps, making it difficult to guarantee a 1-hour RTO.