A company has a critical application in which the data tier is deployed in a single AWS Region. The data tier uses an Amazon DynamoDB table and an…

The core requirement is to establish a multi-region data tier for both Amazon Aurora and Amazon DynamoDB with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of only a few minutes. Amazon Aurora Global Database is the feature designed for this exact use case. By adding another AWS Region to the existing Aurora MySQL DB cluster, you create a secondary, read-only cluster that continuously replicates from the primary. This provides an RPO of typically less than one second and an RTO of less than one minute for failover, meeting the requirements. Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables provide a fully managed, multi-region, multi-active database. Converting the existing table to a global table by adding a new Region enables low-latency data access and automatic replication, ensuring business continuity with minimal RTO and RPO.

B. Regions are added to the entire Aurora DB cluster to create a global database, not to individual tables within the cluster.
C. Scheduled cross-Region backups result in an RPO that is at least as long as the backup interval (e.g., hours), which does not meet the "few minutes" requirement.
E. Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller is used to orchestrate and manage failover, but it does not provide the underlying data replication mechanism required for the databases.

1. Amazon Aurora User Guide: "Working with Amazon Aurora Global Databases" - An Aurora global database consists of one primary AWS Region and one or more secondary AWS Regions. It uses dedicated infrastructure to replicate your data across Regions, with typical latency of under a second. In a disaster recovery situation, you can promote a secondary Region to take read/write responsibilities in under a minute. This directly supports option A.

2. Amazon DynamoDB Developer Guide: "Global Tables: Multi-Region Replication" - This section explains that you can enable multi-region replication by converting an existing table into a global table. It states, "Global tables provide business continuity and disaster recovery. They enable you to achieve a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of single-digit seconds." This directly supports option D.

3. AWS Documentation: "Disaster recovery options in the cloud" - This whitepaper discusses RTO/RPO and various strategies. For low RPO/RTO scenarios like this, it recommends "hot standby" or "multi-site active/active" approaches, which are implemented by Aurora Global Database and DynamoDB Global Tables, respectively, rather than backup and restore methods (Option C).

4. Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller Developer Guide: "What is Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller?" - The documentation describes ARC as a tool to "continuously monitor resource readiness and helps you manage and coordinate failover." This clarifies that its role is in failover management, not data replication (refuting Option E's relevance as a primary solution).