The company is building an active-active, multi-Region architecture for an ECS-based web application behind ALBs, with shared container images in ECR and a relational database in Aurora MySQL. The goal is to duplicate the setup in a second Region with minimal operational overhead while allowing minor replication latency.
A is required because ACM certificates are Regional for use with Regional resources like an Application Load Balancer. An ALB in the secondary Region needs an ACM certificate that exists in that same Region to terminate HTTPS. Requesting (or importing) a certificate in the secondary Region and attaching it to the ALB HTTPS listener is the standard managed approach with low operational overhead.
B is not correct because ACM certificates are not shared “across Regions” for direct use by a Regional ALB in another Region. Sharing via AWS RAM is used for sharing resources across accounts within a Region (and for supported resource types), but it does not provide a mechanism to use an ACM certificate issued in one Region directly on an ALB in a different Region.
D is required because the application runs in both Regions and must be able to pull container images locally with minimal operational work. Amazon ECR supports cross-Region replication so images pushed in the primary Region can be replicated automatically to the secondary Region’s ECR repositories. This avoids building custom copy pipelines and reduces the chance of drift. Once replication is enabled, updating images in the primary Region can automatically populate the secondary Region repository.
C is not the best fit. A VPC endpoint for ECR is about private connectivity to ECR within a Region. It does not solve the multi-Region image availability problem by itself, and it introduces the idea of pulling images from the primary Region, which is unnecessary and less optimal when cross-Region replication can keep images local to each Region.
E is required because the database must support multi-Region application operation with tolerable replication latency. Aurora Global Database is the managed feature designed to replicate an Aurora cluster to a secondary Region with low-latency replication and minimal operational overhead compared to custom replication. Enabling write forwarding allows applications in the secondary Region to send write requests to the secondary cluster endpoint, with Aurora forwarding those writes to the primary writer. This reduces application changes compared to forcing all writes to go directly to the primary Region endpoints, and it supports an active-active application deployment pattern where both Regions can accept traffic.
F is not correct because “cross-Region writes between DB clusters” and “multiple writer instances in the primary Region” do not provide a managed, multi-Region, multi-writer Aurora design as described. Aurora’s managed multi-Region pattern is Aurora Global Database with a single primary writer in one Region (with the option to promote a secondary Region during failover) and optional write forwarding from a secondary Region to the primary. The option’s described cross-Region multi-writer behavior is not a standard supported Aurora configuration and would not be the least operational overhead approach.
Therefore, the least operational overhead combination that correctly addresses HTTPS termination in the secondary Region, image availability in both Regions, and managed multi-Region database replication is A, D, and E.
[References:AWS documentation on AWS Certificate Manager regional certificates and attaching ACM certificates to Application Load Balancer HTTPS listeners in the same Region.AWS documentation on Amazon ECR cross-Region replication for automatically replicating container images to repositories in another Region.AWS documentation on Amazon Aurora Global Database and write forwarding to support multi-Region application deployments with managed replication and reduced application changes., ]
