Design for New Solutions

A financial services company runs a mission-critical transaction processing application on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL in the us-east-1 Region. Regulatory requirements mandate a disaster recovery strategy in eu-west-1 with an RPO of no more than 1 second and an RTO of under 5 minutes. The primary workload sustains heavy write traffic, and the solution must not introduce write latency to the primary database. Cross-region promotion must be fast during a regional failure. Which approach best meets these requirements?

A financial services company runs a customer-facing API on Amazon ECS behind an Application Load Balancer. The API calls a downstream third-party payment provider that occasionally becomes slow or unresponsive during peak periods. When the payment provider degrades, threads in the API tier become blocked waiting for responses, cascading failures consume all available connections, and the entire API becomes unavailable — even for endpoints that do not depend on payments. The architecture team must improve resilience so that a slow downstream dependency cannot take down the whole service. Which approach BEST addresses this requirement?

A financial services company must implement a centralized backup strategy across dozens of AWS accounts for EBS volumes, RDS databases, and DynamoDB tables. Regulatory auditors require that backups be immutable and cannot be deleted or have their retention shortened by anyone — including account administrators and the root user — for a mandatory 7-year retention period. The solution must minimize custom operational tooling and enforce this centrally. Which approach best meets these requirements?

A biotech company is designing a new genomics analysis platform. Thousands of parallel batch jobs must read from and write to a large shared dataset (hundreds of TB) with extremely high aggregate throughput and sub-millisecond latency during compute-intensive alignment steps. Jobs are containerized and run in bursts of up to 5,000 vCPUs, then the cluster scales to zero when idle. The dataset originates in an Amazon S3 bucket, and results must be written back to S3 for long-term retention. The team wants a fully managed solution that minimizes idle cost. Which storage and compute design best meets these requirements?

A media analytics company runs a nightly batch job that transcodes and analyzes user-uploaded video. The workload is highly parallelizable, fault-tolerant (individual tasks can be retried), and must complete within a 6-hour window each night. The rest of the day the compute fleet sits idle. Job volume varies significantly from night to night. The finance team wants to minimize compute cost while ensuring the batch reliably finishes within its window. Which compute strategy should the solutions architect recommend?

A payments company is building a new order-settlement platform. Each account's transactions must be processed in strict chronological order, and duplicate transaction submissions from retrying upstream systems must not be double-processed. Throughput is expected to reach roughly 2,000 transactions per second at peak, spread across hundreds of thousands of distinct account IDs. Multiple independent downstream services (fraud scoring, ledger update, notification) must each receive every transaction. Which architecture best meets ordering, deduplication, and fan-out requirements while scaling elastically?

A gaming company is launching a new mobile leaderboard service expected to reach 50 million users across North America, Europe, and Asia. Player scores must be readable with single-digit millisecond latency from any region, and score writes made in one region should become visible in other regions within a couple of seconds. The workload is highly spiky, with traffic surging 20x during tournaments. The team wants a fully managed solution that minimizes operational overhead and scales automatically without pre-provisioning capacity for peak. Which design best meets these requirements?

A company operates a public REST API used by mobile clients worldwide. The API is served by an Application Load Balancer in front of Amazon ECS tasks in the us-east-1 Region. Approximately 80% of the requests are idempotent GET calls that return catalog data changing only a few times per day, while the remaining 20% are writes. International users report high and inconsistent latency, and the ECS fleet scales aggressively during peak hours to serve repetitive read traffic. The architecture team wants to reduce global read latency and offload repetitive reads from the origin while keeping the write path unchanged, with minimal application code changes. Which approach best meets these requirements?

A software company is launching a new multi-tenant SaaS analytics platform. Each tenant generates unpredictable, spiky query loads, and the number of tenants is expected to grow from dozens to thousands over 18 months. Tenants require strong data isolation for compliance, and the platform must scale storage and compute independently while minimizing idle capacity costs during off-peak hours. The team wants a relational data store that supports SQL analytics with automatic scaling and near-zero administrative overhead. Which design best meets these requirements?

A media company is building a new product catalog API for a global streaming service. The backend uses Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, and product metadata is read extremely frequently but updated only when editors publish changes (roughly a few hundred times per day). The team adds an Amazon ElastiCache for Redis cluster to reduce database load. They require that reads served from the cache always reflect the most recent published metadata immediately after an editor saves a change, while minimizing unnecessary cache writes for products that are rarely read. Which caching strategy best meets these requirements?

A media company stores original video assets in an S3 bucket in us-east-1, encrypted with a customer managed AWS KMS key. For disaster recovery, they must replicate all objects to a bucket in eu-west-1, and the replicated objects must remain encrypted at rest in the destination region. A compliance requirement states that KMS key material must never leave the region in which it was created. The solution must minimize operational overhead and avoid decryption failures in the destination region. Which approach meets these requirements?

A software company wants to provide each of its 200 developers with an isolated, on-demand development environment that includes an EC2 instance, an RDS PostgreSQL database, and a small VPC. Environments are used intermittently and should be created quickly when a developer starts work and fully torn down when idle to minimize cost. The platform team wants a repeatable, self-service provisioning mechanism that enforces tagging, budget limits, and a curated set of approved configurations, without giving developers direct IAM permissions to create the underlying resources. Which approach best meets these requirements?

A media company is designing a new content-processing platform. Every night at 2 AM, a scheduled job must trigger the processing of up to 50,000 newly uploaded articles. Each article requires an independent enrichment task that calls a third-party API with strict rate limits, and processing may take anywhere from 30 seconds to 8 minutes per article. The solution must gracefully handle third-party throttling, automatically retry failed tasks, and be fully managed with minimal operational overhead. The company wants to avoid maintaining any always-on compute. Which architecture best meets these requirements?

A financial services company is building a new transaction ledger system for a regulated banking product. The system must record every transaction as an immutable, cryptographically verifiable entry so that auditors can prove no records were altered or deleted after the fact. The team also needs the ability to run SQL-style analytical queries against the full history of transactions. They want a fully managed service and minimal operational overhead. Which approach best meets these requirements?

A gaming company is launching a new mobile title expected to reach millions of concurrent players globally. The backend must record a continuous stream of player score updates and serve near-real-time leaderboard rankings. Write volume is extremely spiky and unpredictable, spiking 20x during tournaments. The team wants a fully managed data store that scales writes seamlessly without capacity planning, delivers single-digit millisecond latency, and minimizes operational overhead. Sorted top-N leaderboard reads must remain fast even at peak. Which design best meets these requirements?

A SaaS company runs a stateless, latency-sensitive REST API on a fleet of x86 On-Demand EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Traffic is predictable during business hours but spikes unpredictably during marketing campaigns. The application is written in Go and can be recompiled for any architecture. Leadership wants to reduce compute cost by at least 30% while maintaining consistent p99 latency during spikes and requiring no manual intervention when load changes. Which approach best meets these requirements?

A healthcare SaaS company is building a new patient-records platform on AWS. Regulatory requirements mandate that Protected Health Information (PHI) fields such as Social Security Numbers must be encrypted, but the application must still be able to perform exact-match lookups on these values (for example, to find a patient by SSN) without decrypting the entire dataset. The team wants to minimize the exposure of raw PHI in the primary application database, which runs on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. Which design best meets these requirements?

A manufacturing company is building a new platform to ingest telemetry from 500,000 factory sensors, each sending a small reading every 5 seconds. Dashboards must display the last 24 hours of data with sub-second query latency, while readings older than 90 days are queried only occasionally for compliance audits and must be retained for 7 years at the lowest possible cost. The team wants a fully managed, purpose-built solution that minimizes operational overhead. Which architecture best meets these requirements?

A media company is building a new real-time clickstream analytics platform. During major live events, ingestion spikes from 2,000 to over 400,000 events per second within minutes, then drops back down. The analytics team requires that events from the same user session be processed in strict order, and the platform must retain raw events for 7 days so they can be reprocessed if a downstream bug is discovered. The solution must scale automatically without manual capacity planning and minimize operational overhead. Which approach best meets these requirements?

A financial services company is deploying a new payments platform as dozens of microservices on Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate across multiple Availability Zones. Compliance requires that all service-to-service traffic be encrypted in transit with mutual authentication (mTLS), that certificates rotate automatically without redeploying containers, and that the security team can centrally observe and enforce which services may communicate. The team wants to minimize custom code inside each service. Which approach best meets these requirements?