SAA-C03 Design Resilient Architectures Practice Question
A trading dashboard 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
Many exam-takers confuse cross-Region read replicas (which require manual promotion and scripting) with Aurora Global Database, which provides automated, low-latency replication without custom operational 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 the correct choice because it provides a fully managed cross-Region disaster recovery solution with a typical RPO of 1 second or less, using storage-based replication that does not require custom scripts. This meets the low RPO requirement while avoiding operational overhead, as replication is handled automatically by the Aurora storage layer.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
A single-AZ Aurora cluster
Why it's wrong here
A single-AZ Aurora cluster confines all cluster resources to one Availability Zone (and one region), so while Aurora's storage engine replicates data locally, there is no data copy or running instance in another Region. In a region-wide outage, the cluster remains unavailable and there is no standby in a different region to fail over to, making it unsuitable for cross-region DR scenarios.
- ✓
Aurora Global Database
Why this is correct
Aurora Global Database is a feature specifically designed for cross-region disaster recovery and low-latency global reads. It replicates data from a primary Region to up to five secondary Regions with typical latency of under a second, using dedicated storage-based replication rather than binlog-based replication. In a regional failure, you can promote one of the secondary regions to become the new primary in as little as one minute, which gives a low RTO, while snapshot-based approaches would take much longer.
- ✗
Manual snapshots copied monthly
Why it's wrong here
Manual snapshots taken monthly and copied to another Region provide an RPO of up to one month, meaning you could lose nearly a month of trading data. Recovery from a snapshot requires restoring an entire DB cluster from the snapshot, then re-configuring applications, which can take tens of minutes or longer, resulting in a high RTO. This does not meet the 'fast' DR requirement since both RPO and RTO are very poor.
- ✗
An ElastiCache Redis replica
Why it's wrong here
ElastiCache Redis is an in-memory data store, not a database replication mechanism for Aurora. It cannot accept writes from Aurora's storage engine, nor can it be promoted to replace an Aurora primary; it serves only as a cache in front of an existing database. Using a Redis replica does not provide any form of Aurora disaster recovery because the cached data is ephemeral and not a durable copy of the Aurora MySQL database.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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