AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 990

A company recently started hosting new application workloads in the AWS Cloud. The company is using Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon Elastic File System
(Amazon EFS) file systems, and Amazon RDS DB instances.
To meet regulatory and business requirements, the company must make the following changes for data backups:
* Backups must be retained based on custom daily, weekly, and monthly requirements.
* Backups must be replicated to at least one other AWS Region immediately after capture.
* The backup solution must provide a single source of backup status across the AWS environment.
* The backup solution must send immediate notifications upon failure of any resource backup.
Which combination of steps will meet these requirements with the LEAST amount of operational overhead? (Choose three.)

Answer options

• A. Create an AWS Backup plan with a backup rule for each of the retention requirements
• B. Configure an AWS Backup plan to copy backups to another Region.
• C. Create an AWS Lambda function to replicate backups to another Region and send notification if a failure occurs.
• D. Add an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic to the backup plan to send a notification for finished jobs that have any status except BACKUP_JOB_COMPLETED.
• E. Create an Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (Amazon DLM) snapshot lifecycle policy for each of the retention requirements.
• F. Setup RDS snapshots on each database.

Correct answer: A, B, D

Explanation

AWS Backup is a fully managed service that centralizes and automates data protection across AWS services including Amazon EC2, EFS, and RDS, meeting the single-source status requirement. Creating a backup plan with custom rules (A) and configuring cross-Region replication directly in the plan (B) satisfies the retention and replication requirements natively with minimal operational overhead. Additionally, integrating AWS Backup with Amazon SNS (D) allows for automated failure notifications without writing custom code, unlike using Lambda (C) or managing separate tools like Amazon DLM (E) and native RDS snapshots (F) which do not support EFS.