A finance team's critical Redshift reporting cluster must return to service with the smallest possible recovery time after a hardware or Availability Zone failure. Which option gives the lowest RTO?
Show answer and explanation
Answer: A
Multi-AZ deployments for Amazon Redshift keep compute and data available in a second Availability Zone and fail over automatically, so the cluster can return quickly without rebuilding storage from a backup. Snapshot restores must rehydrate data before queries run at full speed, and that time grows with data size. Cross-Region restores add copy and transfer time, and a full reload is the slowest path of all.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Restoring a snapshot in the same Region is faster than a rebuild, but the cluster must be provisioned and the data restored before it is usable. That time scales with data size.
- C. A cross-Region restore protects against losing a whole Region, but it adds copy and transfer steps. It usually gives a longer RTO than an automatic failover within the Region.
- D. Rebuilding and reloading from S3 requires provisioning, loading and validating every table. This path has the longest recovery time of the options.