Disaster Recovery Strategy Design — AWS SysOps Administrator (SOA-C03)
DR Strategy Names Map to Predictable RTO Ranges
The four AWS DR tiers have predictable exam signatures. "Lowest cost, highest RTO" maps to backup and restore. "Minimal running footprint with fast scale-up" maps to pilot light. "Partial capacity always running" maps to warm standby. "Near-zero RTO and RPO" maps to multi-site active/active. When the scenario provides a concrete RTO or RPO target, eliminate every strategy whose inherent characteristics cannot meet that number — regardless of how familiar or well-regarded the pattern is.
What This Pattern Tests
The exam gives RPO and RTO targets and tests which DR tier matches. Backup/Restore stores snapshots in S3 cross-region — RPO = time since last backup, RTO = hours (restore + warm up). Pilot Light runs minimum infrastructure in DR region (database replica, no compute) — RTO = minutes (scale up compute). Warm Standby runs a scaled-down copy of production — RTO = seconds (scale up to full capacity). Multi-Site Active-Active runs full production in both regions — RTO ≈ 0 (Route 53 health check failover). The trap is choosing Multi-Site for RTO of 1 hour (Warm Standby suffices at 1/4 the cost) or Backup/Restore for RTO of 15 minutes (restore takes hours).
Decision Axis
RPO/RTO targets determine DR tier. Cost scales inversely with recovery time. Do not over-buy or under-buy.
Associated Traps
More Top Traps on This Exam
Decision Rules
Whether to use AWS Backup cross-region copy jobs with a destination vault in the target region as the unified mechanism, versus enabling S3 Cross-Region Replication plus service-specific controls — where the latter is a scope-overreach distractor that covers only S3 objects and leaves EBS and DynamoDB outside the cross-region backup boundary.
Whether configuring a cross-region copy rule inside an AWS Backup plan is alone sufficient to satisfy cross-region DR compliance, or whether a destination backup vault must be independently pre-provisioned in the target region as a non-optional prerequisite before copy jobs can succeed.
Domain Coverage
Difficulty Breakdown