A healthcare provider operates a critical patient record application on-premises. The application experiences frequent downtime due to hardware failures and requires significant manual effort for patching and maintenance. The provider wants to migrate this application to AWS to improve availability, reduce operational burden, and meet strict compliance requirements (e.g., HIPAA). The solution must ensure high availability across multiple Availability Zones, automated patching, and robust data encryption at rest and in transit. Which combination of AWS services should a solutions architect recommend?
- AAWS Lambda functions with Amazon SQS and Amazon Redshift.
- BAmazon EC2 instances with a single EBS volume, manually managed OS, and S3 for backups.
- CAWS Elastic Beanstalk with an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ instance, AWS Certificate Manager, and AWS KMS.
- DAWS Fargate with Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables and AWS WAF.
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: C. AWS Elastic Beanstalk with an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ instance, AWS Certificate Manager, and AWS KMS.
Elastic Beanstalk offers automated deployment, scaling, and patching for applications. RDS Multi-AZ provides high availability for the database. ACM manages SSL/TLS certificates for in-transit encryption, and KMS handles encryption keys for data at rest, addressing all key requirements for availability, reduced operations, and compliance.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. AWS Lambda and SQS are suitable for event-driven, serverless architectures, but the scenario describes migrating an 'application' which usually implies a more traditional server-based or container-based application. Redshift is a data warehouse, not an operational database for a patient record application.
- B. This option describes a basic, manually managed EC2 setup which does not inherently provide high availability, automated patching, or robust encryption mechanisms required for a critical healthcare application.
- D. While AWS Fargate offers serverless compute for containers, DynamoDB Global Tables are a NoSQL database (not suitable if the application requires a relational database) and AWS WAF is a web application firewall, which helps with security but doesn't directly address automated patching or database high availability in the same way RDS Multi-AZ does.
Managed Application & Database on AWS
Leveraging fully managed AWS services like Elastic Beanstalk for applications and Amazon RDS for databases significantly reduces operational overhead, enhances availability, and simplifies compliance efforts by offloading infrastructure management to AWS.
- Elastic Beanstalk automates application deployment, scaling, and health monitoring.
- Amazon RDS offers managed relational databases with Multi-AZ for high availability.
- AWS KMS and ACM provide robust encryption for data at rest and in transit.
- Managed services help meet compliance requirements through built-in features and shared responsibility model.
Memory trick: Elastic Beanstalk is the 'Beanstalk' growing your app, while RDS Multi-AZ is the 'Red Dragon' guarding your data.