Final answer:
To achieve a 5-minute RTO with minimal costs, the company can use a Pilot Light strategy with key components ready in AWS or a Warm Standby approach with a scaled-down but functional environment ready to be scaled up.
Step-by-step explanation:
The question is about designing a disaster recovery (DR) architecture on AWS with a specific Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and a requirement to minimize costs while maintaining minimal instance capacity for an application. To meet an RTO of 5 minutes while minimizing costs, the company could opt for a Pilot Light or Warm Standby approach.
In the Pilot Light scenario, the DR site would maintain a minimal version of the environment, ideally with the critical data replicated to the DR site and a scaled-down version of the application running.
Alternatively, a Warm Standby solution would have a scaled-down but fully functional version of the application stack running in AWS which can be quickly scaled up in the event of a disaster. The choice between these two should be based on the acceptable trade-off between cost and how quickly the application needs to be fully operational after disaster recovery is initiated.