Review Mode Set 3 – Question 28 – Backups for Stateless Instances

[Justin Stewart]

Would you mind explaining why we need to take a snapshot of EC2 EBS volumes when it is clearly stated that the EC2 instances are stateless?

It seems like a more valid solution would be to ensure that you have AMI’s for deployed EC2 instances available in your backup region. That would allow you to easily spin up your Auto-scaling groups for the application and web tiers within the specified RTO of 30 minutes.

[Kenneth-Samonte-Tutorials-Dojo]

Hi Justin,

Thanks for the feedback.

Since the questions are shuffled, you Set 3, question 28 is different from mine.
Is this the question you are referring to?

A company is hosting its three-tier web application on the us-east-1 region of AWS. The web and application tiers are stateless and both are running on their own fleet of On-Demand Amazon EC2 instances, each with its respective Auto Scaling group. The database tier is running on an Amazon Aurora database with about 40 TB of data. As part of the business continuity strategy of the company, the Solutions Architect must design a disaster recovery plan in case the primary region fails. The application requires an RTO of 30 minutes and the data tier requires an RPO of 5 minutes.

Which of the following options should the Solution Architect implement to achieve the company requirements in a cost-effective manner? (Select TWO.)

This has 2 correct options, and one of them is:

Schedule a daily snapshot of the Amazon EC2 instances for the web and application tier. Copy the snapshot to the backup region. Restore the backups in case of a disaster in the primary region.

I understand that using AMI on another regions can provide a faster solution for deployment. In AWS cloud there are several ways to achieve a solution. We’d like to present other approaches or solutions to problem. Using AMIs copied to another region has been a topic for other question as well, even in the Associate level practice exam. So we choose to add the EBS snapshot and restoration on this question to add complexity and offer non-default answers to question.

Hope this helps.

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