AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)Design Resilient ArchitecturesMedium
A company is running a mission-critical, multi-tier application on AWS. The application requires high availability and must be able to recover quickly from an outage in a single Availability Zone (AZ) without manual intervention. Data consistency across all tiers is paramount. Which disaster recovery strategy should the company implement?
- APilot Light
- BMulti-site Active/Active
- CWarm Standby
- DBackup and Restore
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: B. Multi-site Active/Active
Multi-site Active/Active provides the highest level of availability and the lowest recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) by running identical, active environments in multiple AWS Regions simultaneously. This allows for immediate failover with no data loss.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Pilot Light involves a minimal, always-on core, requiring significant spin-up time for full recovery.
- C. Warm Standby has a fully functional but scaled-down environment, requiring some time to scale up.
- D. Backup and Restore has the highest RTO/RPO and requires manual intervention.
Multi-site Active/Active
A disaster recovery strategy where identical, fully operational environments run simultaneously in multiple AWS Regions, distributing traffic across them. In case of an outage in one region, traffic is seamlessly redirected to the other active region(s).
- Highest availability and resilience.
- Lowest RTO and RPO (near zero).
- Most complex and expensive to implement.
Memory trick: Active-Active: Always On, Always Ready, Anywhere.