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 team wants the control to be enforceable during normal operations.
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Aurora Global Database with cross-Region read replicas or manual snapshot copy strategies, underestimating the RPO and failover speed requirements for disaster recovery.
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 or less, using storage-based replication that does not impact database performance. It provides fast failover to a secondary Region and allows the primary Region to enforce write control during normal operations, meeting the low RPO and enforceable control requirements.
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 replicates data at the storage layer to secondary Regions with typical latency under one second, using an asynchronous but dedicated replication channel. It supports both planned switchover and unplanned failover promotion, achieving RPO of seconds and RTO of minutes, which far exceeds the ticket system's need for fast failover. Secondary Regions can also serve local reads, improving both availability and recovery performance.
- ✗
A single-AZ Aurora cluster
Why it's wrong here
A single-AZ Aurora cluster confines all database instances to one Availability Zone within a single Region, providing no cross-Region redundancy. Although Aurora's distributed storage maintains six copies across three AZs, those copies all reside in the same Region, so a regional outage takes the entire database offline. This design offers local high availability but cannot meet the requirement for fast cross-Region disaster recovery.
- ✗
An ElastiCache Redis replica
Why it's wrong here
An ElastiCache Redis replica is an in-memory data store, not a persistent replica of Aurora's transactional data. It does not receive Aurora's binlog or storage-level updates, and it cannot be promoted to a database writer, so it provides no failover or data recovery capability. While it can cache reads and improve performance, it is entirely irrelevant as a disaster recovery mechanism for Aurora MySQL.
- ✗
Manual snapshots copied monthly
Why it's wrong here
Manually copying snapshots monthly means the most recent recoverable data is up to 30 days old, resulting in an RPO of up to a month, which is unacceptable for a ticket booking system. Restoring a snapshot to a new cluster involves provisioning and warm-up delays that commonly take tens of minutes or more, yielding a poor RTO. Furthermore, manual snapshot restore requires manual orchestration and traffic redirection, so it cannot deliver the fast, automated failover the requirement demands.
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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.