4.2.3. Key Concepts Review: Advanced Patterns (HA/DR, Security, Cost, Migration)

💡 First Principle: Building enterprise-grade solutions requires a holistic design that integrates advanced patterns for resilience, security, cost, and migration, balancing these cross-cutting concerns to meet business objectives.

Scenario: A large enterprise needs to migrate a mission-critical legacy application to AWS. The application requires near-zero downtime, strong data security, and must remain cost-effective while transitioning to a cloud-native architecture over time.

These concepts represent the professional-level depth required for the exam.

• High Availability ("HA") & Disaster Recovery ("DR"):
  • "HA": "Multi-AZ" design, "Load Balancing", "Auto Scaling", Self-healing architectures.
  • "DR": "RTO"/"RPO" objectives, Backup & Restore, "Pilot Light", "Warm Standby", "Multi-Site Active/Active" strategies (often "Multi-Region"). Chaos Engineering ("FIS") for testing.
• Security & Compliance:
  • "IAM": Roles, Policies, "SCPs", "Identity Center", Federation, Least Privilege, "Permissions Boundaries".
  • Data Protection: Encryption at rest ("KMS", "CloudHSM"), encryption in transit ("ACM", "TLS"), data classification ("Macie").
  • Network Security: "VPC" segmentation, "SGs"/"NACLs", "Network Firewall", "WAF", "Shield".
• Monitoring/Auditing: "CloudTrail", "Config", "Security Hub", "GuardDuty", "Detective".
  • Compliance: "Artifact", "Audit Manager", Security by Design.
• Cost Optimization:
  • Strategies: Right-sizing, "RIs", "Savings Plans", "Spot Instances", Data Tiering, Managed Services, Cost Allocation (Tagging), Budgeting ("AWS Budgets"), Analysis ("Cost Explorer").
• Migration & Modernization:
  • "6 Rs": Rehost, Replatform, Refactor (key focus), Repurchase, Retain, Retire.
  • Tools: "DMS" (databases), "Snow Family" (large data), "DataSync" (file transfer), "MGN" (servers).
  • Phased Migration: Cutover strategies ("Blue/Green", "Canary").

Visual: Advanced Architecture Cross-Cutting Concerns

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⚠️ Common Pitfall: Designing a solution that is technically excellent in one area but fails to meet a critical requirement in another (e.g., a highly secure and performant design that is prohibitively expensive).

Key Trade-Offs:

• Holistic Balance: The core of the professional exam is balancing these advanced patterns. A lower "RTO" costs more. Higher security can add complexity. Faster migration may mean less optimization. Your job is to find the optimal balance.

Reflection Question: How would you design a comprehensive solution for migrating a mission-critical legacy application that addresses high availability/disaster recovery, data security, and cost optimization, considering the trade-offs between these pillars to achieve near-zero downtime and remain cost-effective while planning for cloud-native transition?