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

A global SaaS provider hosts its primary application in the `us-east-1` region and serves customers worldwide. To improve resilience and reduce latency for users in Europe and Asia, they want to establish a disaster recovery strategy that provides a recovery time objective (RTO) of minutes and a recovery point objective (RPO) of seconds. They need to replicate their Amazon Aurora MySQL-compatible database to a secondary region. Which Aurora feature is best suited for this requirement?

  1. AAurora Multi-AZ Deployment
  2. BAurora Read Replicas
  3. CAurora Global Database
  4. DAurora Backtrack
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: C. Aurora Global Database

Aurora Global Database is specifically designed for global applications, enabling fast disaster recovery across regions with an RTO of minutes and RPO of seconds. It uses storage-based replication to secondary regions with minimal performance impact.

Why the other options are wrong

  • A. Aurora Multi-AZ provides high availability within a single region, not cross-region disaster recovery.
  • B. Aurora Read Replicas improve read performance and can be cross-region but are not designed for disaster recovery with low RTO/RPO for the primary database.
  • D. Aurora Backtrack allows rewinding the database to a previous point in time, useful for accidental data loss but not for cross-region DR with low RTO/RPO.

Aurora Global Database

A feature of Amazon Aurora that allows a single Aurora database to span multiple AWS regions, enabling fast disaster recovery with an RTO of minutes and RPO of seconds, and low-latency global reads.

  • Cross-region disaster recovery
  • Low RTO (minutes) and RPO (seconds)
  • Storage-based replication
  • Supports global reads

Memory trick: Global Database makes your data 'globe-trot' for resilience.

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