SAP-C02 Practice Question 78: Aurora Blue Green Major Version Upgrade
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) · Test 8 · question 8 of 10
A payments company runs a production Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL cluster whose major engine version is nearing the end of standard support. The upgrade must be rehearsed on a production-like copy of the data before it is applied, application connection strings must not change, no committed transaction may be lost, and the downtime for the final cutover must be limited to about a minute. The team also wants the previous production cluster to remain available for a while after the cutover for regression testing.
Which approach should the solutions architect recommend?
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Answer:
An Aurora blue/green deployment *"creates a staging environment that copies the production environment"*; the blue environment is production, and *"the green environment is the staging environment and stays in sync with the current production environment."* You can specify a higher DB engine version for the green cluster and *"thoroughly test changes in the green environment."* When ready, *"the switchover typically takes under a minute with no data loss and no need for application changes,"* because the production names and endpoints move to the green environment. The old environment is renamed with an -old suffix and is not deleted, *"so that you can use it for regression testing"* (option D).
- A is wrong because a replica cannot run a different major engine version than its source, so the higher version cannot be tested this way. - B is wrong because an in-place major upgrade takes the production cluster offline for the whole upgrade, gives no rehearsal on a copy, and offers no quick way back. - C is wrong because a snapshot restore is a point-in-time copy. Transactions committed after the snapshot are lost unless extra replication is built, and the connection strings must change.