Question

A financial services company runs a monolithic web application on EC2 behind an ALB in us-east-1, backed by an RDS PostgreSQL Multi-AZ database. Compliance requires an RTO of 15 minutes and an RPO of 5 minutes for a regional disaster in a secondary region (us-west-2). The team wants to minimize steady-state cost while still meeting these targets, and they want failover to be automated as much as possible. Which disaster recovery strategy best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Implement a warm standby: run a scaled-down but always-on copy of the application fleet and an RDS cross-region read replica in us-west-2, with Route 53 health checks and automation to scale up and promote the replica on failover.

Answer

Implement a backup-and-restore strategy: take automated RDS snapshots copied to us-west-2 and store AMIs there, then use a runbook to launch the full stack from scratch during a disaster.

Answer

Implement a pilot light: keep only the RDS cross-region read replica running in us-west-2 with no application servers, and rely on manual invocation of a runbook that boots the fleet and promotes the replica during a disaster.

Answer

Implement a multi-site active/active deployment: run the full-scale application fleet and an Aurora Global Database writer in both regions, serving live traffic from both with Route 53 latency routing.