These questions are independently created for study purposes. They are not official AWS exam questions, actual exam questions, leaked questions, or exam dumps.
SAA-013
For a globally used application, you want to fail over to another Region if the primary Region fails. When low-latency cross-region replication of a relational database is critical, which choice is the most appropriate?
Choices
Explanation and answer
Read the explanation and correct answer (spoiler — try answering first)
Correct answer: D. Amazon Aurora Global Database
Explanation
Aurora Global Database provides multi-region configuration and low-latency replication for globally distributed applications.
Per-choice explanations
A. Only take manual Amazon EBS snapshots
Incorrect. Manual snapshots alone struggle to meet low RPO and RTO requirements.
B. Amazon SQS Standard Queue
Incorrect. SQS is a message queue, not cross-region replication for a relational database.
C. Single-AZ RDS MySQL
Incorrect. A single AZ is weak against Region or AZ failures.
D. Amazon Aurora Global Database
Correct. It suits cross-region DR and global reads.
Practical Use
Aurora Global Database deploys Aurora MySQL or Aurora PostgreSQL across multiple Regions and replicates writes from the primary Region to other Regions in under a second. You can configure up to five secondary Regions, each running as a read-only DB cluster. If the primary Region becomes entirely unavailable, you can promote a secondary Region to the new primary, typically within a minute, via a managed planned failover or an unplanned detach. This makes it suitable for strict DR requirements with tight RTO and RPO targets. Alternatives include RDS cross-region read replicas, DynamoDB Global Tables, and manual DMS replication. When you need both low-latency cross-region replication and short failover times for a relational database, Aurora Global Database is the first candidate. The cost is higher than single-region Aurora because each Region needs a DB cluster and inter-region data transfer is billed, so adoption is justified only when the RPO of under a second and RTO around a minute are actually required. On SAA-C03, when keywords such as multi-region, disaster recovery, globally distributed application, or cross-region reads appear, Aurora Global Database is the correct answer candidate. Distractors include Multi-AZ (intra-Region availability), a read replica alone (weaker failover automation), and DynamoDB Global Tables (NoSQL, not relational).