Lesson 4: Resilience, Backup, Disaster Recovery, Cost Optimization, and SAA-C03 Architecture Review

Topics Covered

• High availability, fault tolerance, Multi-AZ design, multi-Region considerations, health checks, and failure isolation
• Recovery time objective, recovery point objective, data replication, backup policies, AWS Backup, and restore testing
• Disaster-recovery strategies: backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site active-active
• Secure architecture review covering access, data protection, network controls, encryption, logging, and incident readiness
• Performance-efficiency review covering compute, storage, database, network, scaling, and managed-service selection
• Cost-optimization review covering pricing models, right sizing, elasticity, storage lifecycle, data transfer, and governance
• SAA-C03 domains: secure, resilient, high-performing, and cost-optimized architecture decisions and improvement planning

Practical Activity

• Review a multi-tier architecture and identify security, resilience, performance, cost, and operational risks.
• Define RTO and RPO targets and select an appropriate backup and disaster-recovery strategy.
• Complete a final architecture decision record with service choices, alternatives, assumptions, validation evidence, and recommended improvements.

Lesson Outcome

Learners can review and improve AWS architectures and justify secure, resilient, high-performing, and cost-optimized decisions aligned with SAA-C03 expectations.