Question

A financial services company runs a monolithic order-processing application on Amazon EC2 (Auto Scaling group behind an ALB) with an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Multi-AZ database in us-east-1. Regulatory requirements mandate a cross-region disaster recovery strategy with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 minute. During a regional failure, the business cannot tolerate the time needed to launch and warm up a full fleet from scratch, but leadership also wants to minimize steady-state running costs in the DR region. Which disaster recovery strategy best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Implement a warm standby strategy: run a scaled-down but always-on version of the full stack in us-west-2 with an RDS cross-region read replica, and scale up compute during failover.

Answer

Implement a backup and restore strategy using automated RDS snapshots copied to us-west-2 and AMIs, restoring the environment on demand during a disaster.

Answer

Implement a pilot light strategy: keep an RDS cross-region read replica running in us-west-2 and pre-create the Auto Scaling group and ALB configuration with zero running instances, scaling out only during failover.

Answer

Implement a multi-region active-active strategy using an Application Load Balancer with weighted routing across both regions and a globally distributed database.