Question

A CloudOps engineer manages a single-AZ Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database supporting a payment application. During a recent AZ disruption, the database was unavailable for over an hour while the team manually restored from the latest automated snapshot, resulting in both extended downtime and roughly 20 minutes of lost transactions. Leadership now requires that database recovery from an infrastructure failure complete automatically within a few minutes with no data loss for committed transactions. Which change should the engineer implement?

Accepted Answer

Convert the DB instance to a Multi-AZ deployment so Amazon RDS maintains a synchronous standby in a second Availability Zone and fails over automatically.

Answer

Create a cross-Region read replica and promote it manually whenever the primary Availability Zone becomes unavailable.

Answer

Increase the automated backup retention period to 35 days and enable more frequent manual snapshots throughout the day.

Answer

Add an in-Region read replica in a second Availability Zone and route write traffic to it during an outage.