Question #1292
An e-commerce platform is hosting its infrastructure in a single AWS Region and needs to implement a disaster recovery solution using another Region. The company's primary database must be replicated to the DR Region with the lowest possible replication lag. The DR environment should maintain minimal running resources but be capable of rapid scaling during a failover.
Which DR strategy will provide the lowest recovery time objective (RTO) while meeting these requirements?
Deploy an Amazon Aurora global database with a pilot light architecture.
Deploy an Amazon Aurora global database with a warm standby setup.
Configure Amazon RDS Multi-AZ instances with a pilot light architecture.
Configure Amazon RDS Multi-AZ instances with a warm standby setup.
Explanation
Answer B is correct because:
1. Aurora Global Database replicates data across regions with low latency, ensuring minimal replication lag.
2. Warm Standby maintains scaled-down but running resources in the DR Region, enabling rapid scaling during failover (lower RTO than pilot light).
Why other options are incorrect:
- A: Pilot light uses minimal resources (only core services), requiring time to scale up, increasing RTO.
- C/D: RDS Multi-AZ is intra-region (not cross-region), failing the DR requirement. Multi-AZ ensures high availability within a single Region, not across Regions.
Key Points:
- Aurora Global Database supports cross-region replication with low lag.
- Warm standby balances cost (minimal running resources) and readiness (faster scaling than pilot light).
- RTO is minimized by having pre-initialized resources in the DR Region.
Answer
The correct answer is: B