Question

A financial services company runs a critical application in us-east-1 backed by an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance. Compliance requires a documented disaster recovery strategy with an RTO of 30 minutes and an RPO of 5 minutes, while keeping standby costs minimal. The DevOps team wants to automate failover to us-west-2 with the least possible ongoing infrastructure cost that still meets these targets. Which approach BEST satisfies these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Implement a pilot light architecture: maintain a cross-region RDS read replica in us-west-2, keep the application infrastructure defined as CloudFormation templates (not running), and use an automation runbook to promote the replica and deploy the app stack on failover.

Answer

Deploy a full active-active multi-region setup with RDS instances in both regions synchronized via a custom logical replication script and Route 53 weighted routing.

Answer

Rely solely on automated RDS snapshots copied to us-west-2 every 6 hours, and restore a new database and launch infrastructure via CloudFormation only when a disaster is declared.

Answer

Enable Multi-AZ for the RDS instance in us-east-1 and configure an EventBridge rule to trigger a Lambda that redeploys the stack in us-west-2 during a regional outage.