AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional · Free Practice Question Hard
Question 27
A company requires multi-Region availability for an application that runs on Amazon EC2 instances with an Amazon RDS for MySQL database. The solution must offer the highest availability.
Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?
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A
Enable automated backups for the RDS database instance. In the case of an outage, promote the automated backup to be a standalone DB instance. Point applications to the new DB endpoint and create a read replica to maintain high availability.
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B
Enable a cross-Region read replica for the RDS database. In the case of an outage, promote the replica to be a standalone DB instance. Point applications to the new DB endpoint and create a read replica to maintain high availability.
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C
Enable global tables for the RDS database instance across multiple Regions. Store the DB endpoint in AWS Secrets Manager. In the case of an outage, update the DB endpoint in Secrets Manager to the cross-Region table endpoint.
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D
Enable a multi-master cluster configuration across multiple Regions. Store the DB endpoint in AWS Secrets Manager. In the case of an outage, use AWS Lambda to update the endpoint address used by the applications.
Reveal correct answer
Correct answer: B
Explanation
You can promote a read replica to a standalone instance as a disaster recovery solution if the primary DB instance fails. This is a fairly quick and easy process. Applications will then need to be redirected to point to the endpoint of the newly promoted DB instance. To maintain availability a new read replica can then be created.
CORRECT: "Enable a cross-Region read replica for the RDS database. In the case of an outage, promote the replica to be a standalone DB instance. Point applications to the new DB endpoint and create a read replica to maintain high availability" is the correct answer (as explained above.)
INCORRECT: "Enable automated backups for the RDS database instance. In the case of an outage, promote the automated backup to be a standalone DB instance. Point applications to the new DB endpoint and create a read replica to maintain high availability" is incorrect.
You cannot promote automated backups. You can use them to restore databases to a specific point in time or create a new DB instance. This will not be useful if a regional outage occurs as the automated backup is stored within the same Region by default.
INCORRECT: "Enable global tables for the RDS database instance across multiple Regions. Store the DB endpoint in AWS Secrets Manager. In the case of an outage, update the DB endpoint in Secrets Manager to the cross-Region table endpoint" is incorrect.
Global tables is a feature of Amazon DynamoDB and is not available for Amazon RDS.
INCORRECT: "Enable a multi-master cluster configuration across multiple Regions. Store the DB endpoint in AWS Secrets Manager. In the case of an outage, use AWS Lambda to update the endpoint address used by the applications" is incorrect.
Multi-master configurations are only available for Amazon Aurora and only within a Region.
References:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_ReadRepl.html
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