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SAA-C03 Practice Question 6: Aurora Global Database DR

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) · Test 1 · question 6 of 10

Disaster Recoveryhard

A trading platform runs an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL cluster in eu-west-1. Regulators now require that the workload survive the loss of the entire eu-west-1 Region with a recovery point objective of roughly one second, and that a writable database be available in us-east-1 within minutes.

Separately, analysts in North America run read-only reports against the cluster and currently see around 90 ms of query latency. Which design satisfies the DR mandate and improves the analysts' read latency?

Select one answer
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Answer:

  • A. Convert the cluster to an Aurora global database with a secondary cluster in us-east-1 and fail over to it during a Regional outage

An Aurora global database has one primary Region that takes writes and up to 10 read-only secondary Regions. Replication happens at the storage layer over dedicated infrastructure with latency typically under a second, which is what produces the ~1-second RPO the regulator is asking for, and it does so without consuming primary-instance resources. For a Regional outage you perform a cross-Region failover to promote the us-east-1 cluster to primary, giving a low RTO. The same secondary cluster serves the North American analysts locally, so it solves both stated problems with one construct.

Option B fails on both counts. Backtrack is an Aurora MySQL feature (and is explicitly unsupported on global databases), and even where it applies it rewinds a cluster *in place within one Region*; it is an "undo a bad change" tool, not a DR mechanism. Scheduled snapshot copies give an RPO measured in hours, not seconds, and restoring one takes far longer than minutes.

Option C improves availability *inside* eu-west-1 only. Aurora Replicas in other Availability Zones protect against instance and AZ failure, but every copy of the data is still in the failed Region, so the mandate is not met, and it does nothing for the analysts' latency.

Option D can be made to work, but it is the wrong tool for a regulated RPO. A DMS CDC task is a self-managed pipeline: replication lag varies with task and instance sizing, schema and DDL changes need attention, there is no managed promotion of the target, and you now operate a separate RDS instance instead of an Aurora cluster. Compared with a purpose-built managed feature that gives sub-second replication and a supported failover path, it is more operational risk for a worse guarantee.

Reference: Using Amazon Aurora Global Database

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