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?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is that candidates might choose manual snapshots (Option C) thinking they are sufficient for DR, but they overlook the critical requirement of low RPO, which snapshots copied monthly cannot satisfy.
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 less than 1 minute, using storage-based replication that does not impact database performance. This meets the low RPO requirement for a trading dashboard, where data loss must be minimized.
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 cluster places all data in one Availability Zone, so an AZ failure causes an outage and no cross-Region recovery exists. A single-AZ deployment suits development or non-critical workloads where resilience is not required; here it fails the cross-Region, low-RPO objective outright.
- ✓
Aurora Global Database
Why this is correct
Aurora Global Database replicates storage across Regions with typical lag under one second, giving low RPO and rapid promotion of a secondary Region to primary during disaster recovery. Single-Region Aurora replicas cannot deliver cross-Region failover at that recovery speed.
- ✗
Manual snapshots copied monthly
Why it's wrong here
Monthly snapshot copies give an RPO measured in weeks, far exceeding a low-RPO requirement, and restoring cross-Region takes considerable time. Snapshots suit periodic backup retention rather than fast failover. They would be correct where cost matters more than recovery speed and data loss tolerance is generous.
- ✗
An ElastiCache Redis replica
Why it's wrong here
ElastiCache Redis caches query results; it holds no authoritative copy of the Aurora data and cannot serve as a cross-Region recovery target. A cache replica would be correct for reducing read latency on the dashboard, not for disaster recovery with low RPO.
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