Question 5
Domain 2: Design for New SolutionsA company has an application in the AWS Cloud. The application runs on a fleet of 20 Amazon EC2 instances. The EC2 instances are persistent and store data on multiple attached Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. The company must maintain backups in a separate AWS Region. The company must be able to recover the EC2 instances and their configuration within I business day, with loss of no more than I day's worth of dat a. The company has limited staff and needs a backup solution that optimizes operational efficiency and cost. The company already has created an AWS CloudFormation template that can deploy the required network configuration in a secondary Region. Which solution will meet these requirements?
Correct answer: B
Explanation
AWS Backup provides centralized, scheduled backups and cross-Region copy, meeting the need to "maintain backups in a separate AWS Region" with limited staff. A daily backup plan limits data loss to "no more than 1 day's worth of data," and the CloudFormation template can recreate the network while restored EBS volumes and instance configuration support recovery within 1 business day.
Why each option is right or wrong
A. Use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (Amazon DLM) to create daily multivolume snapshots of the EBS volumes. In the event of a failure, launch the CloudFormation template and use Amazon DLM to restore the EBS volumes and transfer usage to the secondary Region.
Amazon DLM focuses on EBS snapshot lifecycle management, not broad EC2 configuration-aware disaster recovery orchestration.
B. Use AWS Backup to create a scheduled daily backup plan for the EC2 instances. Configure the backup task to copy the backups to a vault in the secondary Region. In the event of a failure, launch the CloudFormation template, restore the instance volumes and configurations from the backup vault, and transfer usage to the secondary Region.
AWS Backup is the managed service that supports scheduled backup plans for EC2 and EBS, and it can copy recovery points to a vault in another Region under the same backup plan. A 24-hour schedule matches the stated recovery point objective of no more than 1 day of data loss, while the existing CloudFormation template handles rapid re-creation of the secondary-Region network so the instances and attached EBS volumes can be restored within 1 business day.
C. Deploy EC2 instances of the same size and configuration to the secondary Region. Configure AWS DataSync daily to copy data from the primary Region to the secondary Region. In the event of a failure, launch the CloudFormation template and transfer usage to the secondary Region.
AWS DataSync copies data, but predeploying duplicate instances increases cost and misses backup-centric instance recovery needs.
D. Create a second CloudFormation template that can recreate the EC2 instances in the secondary Region. Run daily multivolume snapshots by using AWS Systems Manager Automation runbooks. Copy the snapshots to the secondary Region. In the event of a failure, launch the CloudFormation templates, restore the EBS volumes from snapshots, and transfer usage to the secondary Region.
Systems Manager runbooks plus snapshots is a more manual custom solution than managed AWS Backup.