SAA-C03 Design Resilient Architectures Practice Question
A payments platform requires disaster recovery across Regions. Requirements: RPO of 15 minutes and RTO of about 1 hour. The business cannot afford full duplicate capacity in both Regions all the time, but the team wants automated readiness so failover is mostly operationally guided rather than a slow rebuild. Which DR strategy is the best fit?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse pilot light with warm standby, assuming minimal infrastructure is sufficient for a 1-hour RTO, but pilot light requires provisioning compute resources after failover, which adds significant time, whereas warm standby already has compute running and only needs scaling.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Warm standby, keeping core infrastructure and a partially provisioned environment ready in the secondary Region with frequent data replication.
Warm standby is the best fit because it maintains a partially provisioned environment in the secondary Region with core infrastructure (e.g., a smaller EC2 instance fleet, a replicated database) and uses frequent data replication (e.g., Amazon RDS cross-Region replication or DynamoDB global tables) to achieve an RPO of 15 minutes. The RTO of about 1 hour is achievable by scaling up the standby environment and redirecting traffic, which is faster than a full rebuild but avoids the cost of full duplicate capacity. This balances the business constraint of not affording active/active with the need for automated readiness and guided failover.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Backup and restore only, relying on scheduled snapshots and manual restores during incidents.
Why it's wrong here
Backup/restore can meet data-loss tolerance in some cases, but RTO of 1 hour is often too aggressive for manual restores.
- ✗
Pilot light, keeping only minimal infrastructure in the secondary Region and starting full services after failover.
Why it's wrong here
Pilot light is cheaper, but RTO of 1 hour may not be achievable if full compute/services must be brought up from near-zero.
- ✓
Warm standby, keeping core infrastructure and a partially provisioned environment ready in the secondary Region with frequent data replication.
Why this is correct
Warm standby balances cost and readiness by keeping enough capacity and services running to shorten recovery time while meeting RPO needs.
- ✗
Active/active, routing production traffic to both Regions continuously and accepting dual-region complexity.
Why it's wrong here
Active/active best fits very low RTO and high availability, but it usually costs more than the stated budget constraints.
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