Backup, Disaster Recovery and Migration Resilience
DR questions test RTO, RPO, AWS Backup, snapshots, pilot light, warm standby, active-active, Elastic Disaster Recovery, and migration cutover risk.
How to study for AWS Solutions Architect Associate
Treat each question as an architecture tradeoff: identify security boundaries, failure modes, performance needs, data paths, and cost constraints before choosing services.
Core concepts
Concept 1
Backup, Disaster Recovery and Migration Resilience questions reward architecture tradeoff reasoning rather than picking the most familiar AWS service.
Exam cue: Identify the workload requirement, failure mode, data path, access boundary, and operational constraint.
Concept 2
The best answer maps requirements to security, resilience, performance, and cost constraints before choosing services.
Exam cue: Match the AWS service to the Well-Architected pillar the scenario is testing.
Concept 3
Eliminate answers that ignore shared responsibility, single points of failure, data movement, scaling behavior, or total cost.
Exam cue: Prefer managed, durable, least-privilege, multi-AZ, and right-sized designs when requirements call for them.
Risk pitfalls and guardrails
Choosing the most powerful service when a simpler managed service satisfies the requirement.
Guardrail: Avoid answers that use broad permissions, public data paths, single-AZ state, overbuilt compute, or commitment pricing without predictable usage.
Solving performance while ignoring security, availability, or cost constraints stated in the scenario.
Guardrail: Avoid answers that use broad permissions, public data paths, single-AZ state, overbuilt compute, or commitment pricing without predictable usage.
Assuming one Availability Zone, public access, or manual operations are acceptable without justification.
Guardrail: Avoid answers that use broad permissions, public data paths, single-AZ state, overbuilt compute, or commitment pricing without predictable usage.
Memory anchors
RTO
Recovery time objective is the maximum acceptable time to restore service.
RPO
Recovery point objective is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time.
AWS Backup
AWS Backup centralizes backup policy and management across supported AWS services.
Snapshot
A snapshot captures point-in-time data for supported storage resources.
Pilot Light
Pilot light keeps critical core components ready and scales the rest during recovery.
Warm Standby
Warm standby runs a scaled-down environment that can scale up during failover.
Active Active
Active-active runs production traffic in multiple environments or Regions.
Elastic Disaster Recovery
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery supports recovery of applications with continuous replication.
Backup Vault
A backup vault stores and organizes backups under policy controls.
Cutover
Cutover is the controlled transition from one environment to another during migration or recovery.
Checkpoint rule
Do the check-up only after you can summarize each concept in one sentence and identify one dangerous pitfall from memory.
Knowledge Check (after reading)
Short check-up to confirm understanding of this module.
Check-up Questions
A business can lose up to 15 minutes of transaction data after a disaster and requires service restored within four hours. Which terms describe these limits?
A noncritical application has a 24-hour RTO and 12-hour RPO. Cost must be minimized. Which DR strategy is most appropriate?
Answer all questions to submit.
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