What architectural pattern has the highest recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO)?

The architectural pattern with the highest recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) is the multi-site active-active setup. This architecture is designed for critical applications requiring high availability and minimal downtime. In a multi-site active-active configuration, multiple active instances of the application run concurrently across different geographic locations.

This means that if one site encounters an outage, the other site(s) can continue to provide service with no disruption to the end users, resulting in a very low RTO as there is no need to switch over to a backup system; services remain available. This setup also typically involves real-time data replication between sites, which ensures that the data loss is minimal, thus achieving a low RPO.

In contrast, other options like backup and restore, single-site active-passive, and pilot light architectures usually involve some time delay in restoring services or recovering data, leading to higher RTOs and RPOs. The backup and restore method can have significant downtime and potential data loss since it relies on restoring from backup, while active-passive configurations require a failover process to activate the backup systems. Pilot light setups are designed to minimize cost and operational complexity but still involve starting up services, which also contributes to higher recovery objectives