Question

A media company runs a monolithic internal reporting application on a single EC2 instance backed by an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database in the us-east-1 Region. The application is used only during business hours by a small internal team. Leadership has defined a disaster recovery requirement: in the event of a full Region outage, the application must be recoverable in us-west-2 within 8 hours (RTO), and up to 4 hours of data loss is acceptable (RPO). The team wants the lowest possible ongoing cost while still meeting these targets. Which disaster recovery strategy best fits these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Implement a backup and restore strategy: enable automated RDS snapshots copied to us-west-2 on a schedule and store AMIs in us-west-2, then provision the EC2 instance and restore the database only when a disaster is declared.

Answer

Deploy a pilot light strategy: keep an RDS read replica continuously running in us-west-2 and a stopped EC2 instance ready to start on failover.

Answer

Deploy a warm standby strategy: run a scaled-down but always-on copy of the EC2 instance and RDS instance in us-west-2 that receives continuous replication.

Answer

Deploy a multi-region active-active architecture using an Application Load Balancer and Aurora Global Database with writes accepted in both Regions.