AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)Design Resilient ArchitecturesHard

A data analytics company uses Amazon Redshift for its data warehousing needs. They have a primary Redshift cluster in `us-west-2` and need to ensure business continuity and disaster recovery with minimal data loss in case of a regional outage. The recovery point objective (RPO) must be near zero, and the recovery time objective (RTO) should be as low as possible. Which Redshift feature should be implemented?

  1. ARedshift Enhanced VPC Routing for secure cross-region connectivity.
  2. BRedshift data sharing to a secondary cluster in a different region.
  3. CRedshift cross-region snapshots with automated restore to a new cluster.
  4. DRedshift Serverless for automatic scaling and high availability across AZs.
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: B. Redshift data sharing to a secondary cluster in a different region.

Redshift data sharing allows sharing live, transactionally consistent data from one Redshift cluster to one or more other Redshift clusters, including those in different AWS regions. This enables a near-zero RPO as data is immediately available in the secondary region without complex ETL or snapshot restore processes, leading to a very low RTO for disaster recovery.

Why the other options are wrong

  • A. Enhanced VPC Routing forces all COPY and UNLOAD traffic to route through your VPC, which is a networking feature for security and network management, not a disaster recovery solution for data replication.
  • C. Cross-region snapshots provide disaster recovery, but restoring a cluster from a snapshot takes time (RTO is not near zero), and the RPO depends on the snapshot frequency (not near zero for continuous replication).
  • D. Redshift Serverless provides automatic scaling and high availability within a region (across AZs), but it does not inherently offer cross-region disaster recovery with near-zero RPO.

Redshift Data Sharing for DR

Allows sharing live, transactionally consistent data from a Redshift cluster to other clusters, including those in different regions, for near-zero RPO disaster recovery.

  • Enables real-time data access across regions.
  • Achieves near-zero RPO.
  • Simplifies cross-region disaster recovery and analytics.

Memory trick: Share your Redshift data live across regions, so outages won't stop the insights.

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