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SAA-C03 Practice Question 95: Elastic Disaster Recovery Pilot Light

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) · Test 10 · question 5 of 10

Disaster Recoveryhard

A company runs a critical application on physical servers in its own data center. The business requires a recovery point objective (RPO) of seconds and a recovery time objective (RTO) of minutes if the data center is lost. Leadership wants to keep the ongoing cost of the DR environment as low as possible and does not want to pay for a full duplicate environment that sits idle.

Which solution meets these requirements?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • B. Install the AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery agent on the servers to replicate continuously to a low-cost staging area, and launch recovery instances only during a drill or a real event

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery continuously replicates servers at the block level into a staging area made of low-cost resources such as small replication servers and EBS volumes. Because replication is continuous, the RPO is measured in seconds. Full-size recovery instances are launched only during a drill or a real recovery, and can typically be running within minutes, which meets the RTO. Until then the company pays only for the staging area, which is the pilot-light pattern the question describes.

Option A meets the objectives but violates the cost constraint. Running a full-capacity duplicate is the multi-site active-active strategy, the most expensive of the DR options.

Option C cannot meet the RPO. Nightly backups leave up to 24 hours of data loss, and restoring whole servers from backups takes far longer than minutes.

Option D has an hourly RPO at best, and rebuilding servers from scripts adds hours to the recovery time. It also covers only the data, not the server configuration, unless the scripts are maintained with great care.

Reference: What is AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery?

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