SAP-C03 practice question: DR strategies, RTO/RPO and Elastic Disaster Recovery (2 of 2)
Resilience, Migration, and Business Continuity A free question from our original SAP-C03 practice exam. Try it, then open the answer to see why each option is right or wrong.
A payment processor runs its ledger on an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database in one Region, with the web and API tiers in the same Region. The recovery requirements are a recovery point of about one minute and a recovery time of 15 minutes, and the business wants the second Region ready to take over with a tested, controlled switch.
The operations team does not want to depend on manual steps in a DNS zone, and DNS answers cached by clients must not delay the switch.
Which TWO designs meet these requirements? (Choose two.)
Choose two answers.
AA. Take an Aurora snapshot every day and copy it to the second Region, then restore a new cluster from the latest copy when a disaster is declared.
BB. Use an Aurora Global Database with a secondary cluster in the second Region, and promote the secondary cluster with a global database failover when the primary Region fails.
CC. Replicate the database to the second Region with a self-managed logical replication setup on EC2 instances, and have an engineer promote the replica by hand during an outage.
DD. Put the web and API tiers behind AWS Global Accelerator with an endpoint group in each Region, and switch traffic by setting the primary Region's traffic dial to 0 percent.
EE. Change the DNS record for the application by hand in the public hosted zone when an outage starts, and set the record's time to live to one day to reduce the load on the DNS servers.
Show the answer and explanation
Answers: B, D
A. Wrong: A daily snapshot leaves up to a day of ledger changes at risk, and restoring a cluster takes longer than the 15-minute target. The option misses both recovery objectives.
B. Right: Correct. Aurora Global Database replicates the ledger to the second Region with low replication lag, and managed failover promotes the secondary within the recovery time target. The database side of the switch needs no manual data copy.
C. Wrong: The manual promotion and the self-managed replication add steps and failure modes that the operations team wants to avoid. The option also does not offer a tested, controlled switch.
D. Right: Correct. Global Accelerator gives clients static anycast addresses, so moving traffic between Regions does not depend on DNS records or cached answers. Changing the traffic dial is a deliberate action that the team can test and that takes effect quickly.
E. Wrong: A one-day time to live means clients keep the old answer for up to a day after the change, which breaks the requirement on cached answers. The manual DNS edit is also what the operations team wants to avoid.
Explanation
An Aurora Global Database meets the one-minute recovery point, and its failover promotes the secondary within the recovery time. Global Accelerator traffic dials move clients between Regions without DNS edits or caching delays. Daily snapshots, self-managed replication and a long time-to-live DNS change each miss a requirement.
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