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Hello Alexander Mrudoch
Thank you for your inquiry regarding the AWS practice exam question. I understand your concerns about the expected answers, particularly regarding cost-effectiveness and the impact of manual snapshots. Let me address your points:
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Cost-effectiveness of Aurora vs. RDS: While it’s true that Aurora is generally more expensive than standard RDS, the question asks for the most cost-effective solution that best meets all requirements, including expediting the process for the analytics team and ensuring high resilience. Aurora’s superior performance, especially in cloning large databases quickly, can lead to significant time and resource savings, potentially offsetting its higher upfront costs.
See documentation here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/Aurora.Managing.Clone.html -
Manual snapshots and performance: You’re correct that RDS manual snapshots should not significantly affect performance, especially compared to an on-premises solution. However, for a 1TB database, creating and restoring snapshots could still take considerable time, which doesn’t fully address the requirement to “expedite the process for the analytics team.”
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Resilience and downtime: The question emphasizes the need for high resilience and mentions intermittent downtimes. Aurora’s architecture provides better resilience and faster failover than standard RDS Multi-AZ, which aligns more closely with the stated requirements.
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Cloning efficiency: Aurora’s cloning feature is particularly efficient for creating staging environments quickly without impacting the production database. This directly addresses the issue of the analytics team waiting for hours.
While your choices of manual snapshots and RDS Multi-AZ are valid, the expected answers (Aurora Multi-AZ and Aurora cloning) better address all aspects of the question, including speed, resilience, and overall efficiency.
Thank you for bringing this up, as it highlights the complexity of architectural decisions in cloud environments. I hope this helps.
Best regards,
Neil @ Tutorials Dojo
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