AWS Certified Database Specialty Practice Exams Question doubts

[TazDaGuy]

Hello,

In the “AWS Certified Database Specialty Practice Exam” course by Jon-Bonso, the correct answer for the following question is marked as;

Q :Due to regulatory compliance, a financial services company has to archive three years of monthly database backups of a 4 TB Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance and present it to auditors within the day the request was made.

Which is the most operationally efficient solution that will meet these requirements?

A: Write a Lambda function that takes a manual RDS snapshot every first of the month. Move the snapshot to an Amazon S3 bucket.

According to the RDS docs, you cannot copy snapshots of RDS managed service to customer S3 buckets. So, I am wondering how above answer is correct.

Under the explanation, it says;

“..However, the bucket used to store manual RDS snapshots is located within the AWS infrastructure and cannot be configured. However, you can configure retention policies for S3 buckets that you own…”

So, it’s contradicting. Configuring retention policies for our buckets will not help in retaining RDS snapshots because we cannot copy them to our own. (” Move the snapshot to an Amazon S3 bucket.” statement is not possible unless you use snapshot export to S3 functionality in RDS, which is not the case explained in this answer)

Since RDS manual snapshots are retained until manual deletion, below answer sounds more accurate;

“Write a Lambda function that takes a manual RDS snapshot every first of the month”

Appreciate any thoughts on this.

Cheers

[JM-TutorialsDojo]

Hi TazDaGuy,

Thank you for your question. You cannot directly “copy” snapshots to S3 buckets, but you can “export” them. Take note that you can export DB snapshot data to an Amazon S3 bucket that you own.

You can verify this by creating a manual DB snapshot and using the <b data-stringify-type=”bold”>Export to Amazon S3 option in the Amazon RDS console:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_ExportSnapshot.html#USER_ExportSnapshot.Exporting

Best Regards,

JM @ Tutorials Dojo