SAA-C03 Design Resilient Architectures Practice Question
A ticket booking system uses Aurora MySQL. The company wants fast cross-Region disaster recovery with low RPO. Which architecture should be considered? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse cross-Region read replicas (which require manual promotion and have higher RPO) with Aurora Global Database, which provides automated failover and lower RPO without custom scripts.
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
✓
Aurora Global Database
Aurora Global Database is designed for cross-Region disaster recovery with a typical RPO of 1 second and RTO of 1 minute, using storage-based replication that does not require custom scripts. It replicates data from a primary Region to up to five secondary Regions with minimal impact on database performance, meeting the low RPO requirement without operational overhead.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Aurora Global Database
Why this is correct
Aurora Global Database is the correct choice because it uses a primary Region plus up to five secondary Regions with dedicated storage-level replication typically under one second. This gives a low recovery point objective (RPO) and fast promoted read replica failover for disaster recovery, unlike snapshot-based or single-Region options. It also allows local reads in secondary Regions for low-latency access, directly meeting the ticket system's requirement for fast access and rapid DR.
- ✗
A single-AZ Aurora cluster
Why it's wrong here
A single-AZ Aurora cluster stores all its data and replicas in one Availability Zone within a single Region. It provides high availability across AZs only if you choose Multi-AZ, but a single-AZ deployment has no cross-Region replication and no mechanism to fail over to another geographic location. Thus it cannot satisfy the requirement for fast remote recovery after a regional outage; all writes and reads remain tied to that one Region.
- ✗
An ElastiCache Redis replica
Why it's wrong here
An ElastiCache Redis replica is an in-memory cache, not a durable or authoritative database, and it is not part of Aurora's replication topology. It can speed up read-heavy workloads by caching frequently accessed data, but it does not replicate Aurora's transactional data or provide a database failover target. Relying on it for DR would lose committed writes and fail to satisfy RPO/RTO requirements for a ticket booking system.
- ✗
Manual snapshots copied monthly
Why it's wrong here
Manual snapshots copied monthly produce a very high RPO — up to a month of lost ticket bookings — and require time-consuming restore operations before the database is usable. Although snapshots can be copied to another Region, recovery would involve restoring a full DB cluster and replaying any subsequent binary logs, which is slow and operationally complex. This approach does not meet the need for fast failover or low data loss, making it unsuitable compared to Aurora Global Database.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
One of 935 original SAA-C03 practice questions on Courseiva, each with a full explanation and wrong-answer analysis — not exam dumps or protected exam content. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SAA-C03 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the SAA-C03 exam.