An enterprise is designing a disaster recovery strategy for a critical application. The application uses Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and Amazon S3. The business requires a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 4 hours and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 hour. They want to minimize costs while meeting these requirements. Which DR strategy is the MOST cost-effective?

Answer options:

Pilot Light: Replicate data to the DR region. Maintain a minimal version of the core infrastructure (e.g., RDS read replica). Scale up EC2 instances only during a disaster.

Backup and Restore: Take hourly snapshots of RDS and EBS. Copy them to the DR region. Restore everything from snapshots during a disaster.

Warm Standby: Maintain a scaled-down but fully functional version of the application in the DR region. Scale up during a disaster.

Multi-Site Active-Active: Run the full application stack in both regions simultaneously and route traffic using Route 53.

How to approach this question

Match the RTO/RPO requirements to the lowest-cost DR pattern that satisfies them.

Full Answer

A.Pilot Light: Replicate data to the DR region. Maintain a minimal version of the core infrastructure (e.g., RDS read replica). Scale up EC2 instances only during a disaster.✓ Correct

The Pilot Light strategy is the most cost-effective way to meet a 4-hour RTO and 1-hour RPO. You continuously replicate your data (e.g., using an RDS cross-region read replica) to meet the RPO. You do not run the compute layer (EC2) until a disaster occurs. When needed, you provision the EC2 instances using CloudFormation, which easily completes within the 4-hour RTO.

Common mistakes

Choosing Warm Standby, which costs more and is unnecessary for a 4-hour RTO.

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