Redshift RPO/RTO

[Drew861]

Category: CSAP – Design for New Solutions

A data analytics company is running a Redshift data warehouse for one of its major clients. In compliance with the Business Continuity Program of the client, they need to provide a Recovery Point Objective of 24 hours and a Recovery Time Objective of 1 hour. The data warehouse should be available even in the event that the entire AWS Region is down.

Which of the following is the most suitable configuration for this scenario?

The given answer is:

Configure Redshift to have automatic snapshots and do a cross-region snapshot copy to automatically replicate the current production cluster to the disaster recovery region.

— My question here relates to the last portion of the question, namely ‘The data warehouse should be available even in the event that the entire AWS Region is down’

The snapshot may allow you to meet the recovery timelines, but I don’t see how it ensures availability if a region goes down, would there not be downtime? If the requirement is that it be in the threshold of RTO and RPO, I feel the last portion is then misleading since its technically not available during recovery.

[Kenneth-Samonte-Tutorials-Dojo]

Hi Drew861,

Thank you for your feedback.

— My question here relates to the last portion of the question, namely ‘The data warehouse should be available even in the event that the entire AWS Region is down’

The snapshot may allow you to meet the recovery timelines, but I don’t see how it ensures availability if a region goes down, would there not be downtime? If the requirement is that it be in the threshold of RTO and RPO, I feel the last portion is then misleading since it’s technically not available during recovery.

> I think the correct interpretation for the last sentence is that the Redshift data warehouse can be recovered and be available to a backup region when the primary region fails. Given that we have 1 hour RTO – if the primary region fails, we have 1 hour to restore the snapshot copied to the backup region. This means that Redshift will be available in the event that the primary region fails.

I agree that user interpretation can be different based on the wording of the last sentence, but it means that Redshift is available within 1 hour in the event that the primary region is down.

Hope this clarifies it.

Let us know if you need further assistance. The Tutorials Dojo team is dedicated to helping you pass your AWS exam!

Regards,

Kenneth Samonte @ Tutorials Dojo