A company runs an Aurora database supporting a global application and needs the ability to fail over to a secondary AWS region within about a minute of a regional disaster, with typical replication lag measured in low single-digit seconds rather than the minutes-long lag of logical replication. Which Aurora feature is designed for this?
- Aurora Global Database, which replicates at the storage layer across regions with typical lag of about one second and managed failover in about a minute
- A cross-region read replica created through standard binlog-based MySQL replication
- Multi-AZ deployment extended across two AWS regions
- Aurora Serverless v2 configured with a minimum capacity of 0
Why A? And why not the others?
Correct answer: A. Aurora Global Database, which replicates at the storage layer across regions with typical lag of about one second and managed failover in about a minute
Aurora Global Database replicates data to secondary regions at the storage layer rather than through the database engine's logical replication, which is why it achieves typical replication lag of about one second and supports a managed planned failover that promotes a secondary region to primary in roughly a minute, purpose-built for cross-region disaster recovery with a tight recovery point objective. The option describing standard binlog-based replication is wrong because logical, engine-level replication, the mechanism an ordinary cross-region read replica would use, is slower and less predictable than storage-layer replication, and Aurora Global Database specifically avoids it for this reason. The option describing Multi-AZ across two regions is wrong because Multi-AZ standbys are, by design, confined to a single region's Availability Zones for synchronous replication; Multi-AZ is not a mechanism that operates across regions at all. The option describing Aurora Serverless v2 at zero minimum capacity is wrong because Serverless v2 is a compute-scaling feature for a single database, entirely unrelated to cross-region replication or disaster recovery failover.
Source: AWS Aurora documentation: Aurora Global Database disaster recovery