SOA-C02 Practice Test 21 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A SysOps administrator is designing a highly available architecture for a web application using an Application Load Balancer and an Auto Scaling group across three Availability Zones. The application must be able to withstand the loss of an entire AZ. Which THREE components are necessary to meet this requirement? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Launch EC2 instances in at least two Availability Zones.. Options A, C, and E are correct. Option A: Multi-AZ deployment ensures instances are in multiple AZs. Option C: Cross-zone load balancing ensures ALB can route to instances in any AZ. Option E: Health checks ensure only healthy instances receive traffic. Option B is wrong because a single NAT gateway in one AZ is a single point of failure. Option D is wrong because placement groups are for low latency within a single AZ, not high availability across AZs.

Answer

Use a single NAT gateway to provide internet access.

Answer

Use a cluster placement group for EC2 instances.

Question 2

A SysOps administrator is designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical RDS MySQL database. The database must be available with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 1 hour and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 2 hours. The primary region is us-east-1. Which solution meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Create a cross-Region read replica in us-west-2 and promote it during a disaster. Correct answer is C. Cross-Region read replicas provide asynchronous replication with RPO typically seconds to minutes, and promoting a replica can be done in minutes, meeting both RPO and RTO. Option A is wrong because automated backups have RPO of up to 5 minutes but restoring in another region takes longer than 2 hours. Option B is wrong because Multi-AZ is for high availability within a region, not cross-region DR. Option D is wrong because manual snapshots require manual intervention and restore time is unpredictable.

Answer

Enable Multi-AZ deployment in the primary region

Answer

Enable automated backups and restore to a new region when needed

Answer

Take daily manual snapshots and copy them to another region

Question 3

A company runs a critical application on EC2 instances with EBS volumes. The SysOps administrator must ensure that EBS snapshots are taken every hour and retained for 7 days. Which THREE steps should be taken to achieve this? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Create an IAM role for DLM with permissions to create and delete snapshots. Correct answers are A, C, and D. Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) can automate EBS snapshot creation and retention. IAM roles are needed for DLM to manage snapshots. Tags can be used to select volumes. Option B is wrong because AWS Backup can also manage EBS snapshots, but it is not required if DLM is used; the question asks for steps to achieve the goal, and DLM is sufficient. However, AWS Backup is also a valid service, but the question expects DLM as primary. Option E is wrong because CloudWatch Events can trigger Lambda, but DLM is the managed solution.

Answer

Create a CloudWatch Events rule to trigger a Lambda function that creates snapshots

Answer

Use AWS Backup to create a backup plan with hourly frequency

Question 4

A company runs a stateful application on EC2 instances behind a Network Load Balancer (NLB). The application uses sticky sessions (session affinity) to maintain client state. During a deployment, the SysOps administrator needs to replace instances without disrupting active sessions. Which approach should be used?

Accepted Answer

Deregister the old instances from the target group with connection draining enabled, then register new instances. Correct answer is A. By deregistering instances with a connection draining timeout, the NLB will stop sending new traffic but allow existing connections to complete. Then new instances can be registered. Option B is wrong because terminating instances immediately will drop active sessions. Option C is wrong because stopping the NLB would affect all traffic. Option D is wrong because sticky sessions are not configured on target group health checks; health checks are separate.

Answer

Stop the NLB, replace instances, and restart the NLB

Answer

Update the target group health check to remove old instances faster

Answer

Terminate the old instances immediately and launch new ones

Question 5

A company runs a microservices architecture on Amazon ECS with Fargate. They need to ensure that if a task fails, it is automatically restarted. Which configuration is required?

Accepted Answer

Create an ECS service with a desired count and task definition. Correct answer is B. ECS services with a desired count maintain the number of tasks; if a task fails, the service scheduler replaces it. Option A is wrong because ECS tasks launched standalone are not automatically restarted. Option C is wrong because CloudWatch alarms can trigger actions but not directly restart tasks. Option D is wrong because Auto Scaling groups are for EC2, not Fargate tasks.

Answer

Configure a CloudWatch alarm to restart the task

Answer

Define tasks using the ECS RunTask API

Answer

Use an Auto Scaling group for the Fargate tasks

Question 6

A SysOps administrator is designing a highly available architecture for a web application using an Application Load Balancer (ALB) with EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. Which TWO configurations are required to ensure high availability? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Configure the ALB with health checks for the target group. Correct answers are A and C. Spreading instances across multiple Availability Zones ensures zone failure doesn't take down the application. Using an ALB with health checks ensures that unhealthy instances are removed from rotation. Option B is wrong because placing instances in the same AZ creates a single point of failure. Option D is wrong because disabling health checks prevents the ALB from detecting failures. Option E is wrong because using t2.micro instances is not a high availability consideration.

Answer

Launch all EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone to reduce latency

Answer

Use t2.micro instances to reduce cost

Answer

Disable health checks to reduce load on the ALB

Question 7

A company runs a web application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. The application stores session data in an in-memory cache on the EC2 instances. During an instance refresh, users lose their session data. Which action should be taken to improve reliability without major application changes?

Accepted Answer

Move session state to Amazon ElastiCache for Redis.. Option B is correct because ElastiCache provides a managed, external caching layer that preserves session data independently of EC2 instance lifecycle. Option A is incorrect because sticky sessions (session affinity) still lose data when instances are terminated. Option C is incorrect because ElastiCache for Redis is more appropriate than Memcached for session persistence with replication. Option D is incorrect because increasing instance count does not address session data loss.

Answer

Use ElastiCache for Memcached with auto-discovery.

Answer

Increase the minimum size of the Auto Scaling group.

Answer

Enable sticky sessions (session affinity) on the ALB target group.

Question 8

Which THREE measures can be used to improve the recovery time objective (RTO) for a database running on Amazon RDS? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Use a read replica and promote it during a failure.. Options A, B, and D are correct. Multi-AZ provides automatic failover, reducing RTO. Automated backups with point-in-time recovery allow quick restore to a specific time. Read replicas can be promoted to primary quickly. Option C is incorrect because manual snapshots require manual restore, which is slower. Option E is incorrect because deletion protection is about preventing deletion, not recovery.

Answer

Enable deletion protection.

Answer

Create manual snapshots daily.

Question 9

A company has an application that runs on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application uses an RDS Multi-AZ database. The company wants to ensure that the application remains available during a database failover. What should the SysOps administrator do?

Accepted Answer

Ensure the application retries database connections during failover.. Option A is correct because Multi-AZ automatically fails over to a standby in another AZ, minimizing downtime. Option B is wrong because creating a read replica does not help with failover for writes. Option C is wrong because increasing instance size does not affect database failover. Option D is wrong because enabling termination protection is for EC2, not database failover.

Answer

Create a read replica of the database to offload read traffic.

Answer

Increase the EC2 instance size to handle the load.

Answer

Enable termination protection on the EC2 instances.

Question 10

A SysOps administrator is designing a disaster recovery strategy for a production RDS MySQL database. The database must be recoverable within 15 minutes with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 5 seconds. Which TWO actions should the administrator take? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Enable Multi-AZ deployment for the RDS instance.. Options B and C are correct. Enabling Multi-AZ provides automatic failover to a standby in a different AZ, and using a cross-Region read replica allows replication to a different region for disaster recovery. Option A is wrong because automated backups have an RPO of up to 5 minutes, not <5 seconds. Option D is wrong because a single-Region read replica does not protect against regional failure. Option E is wrong because manual snapshots are not automated and have higher RPO.

Answer

Create a read replica in the same AWS Region.

Answer

Enable automated backups with a retention period of 35 days.

Answer

Take manual snapshots every hour.

Question 11

An organization is using AWS CloudFormation to deploy infrastructure. The SysOps administrator needs to ensure that if a stack update fails, the stack automatically rolls back to the last known good state. Which stack update option should be configured?

Accepted Answer

Rollback on failure. Option A is correct because the Rollback on failure setting causes CloudFormation to automatically revert to the previous state if the update fails. Option B is incorrect because Disable rollback is the opposite. Option C is incorrect because Stack policy controls updates to specific resources, not rollback behavior. Option D is incorrect because Change sets allow preview of changes but do not control automatic rollback.

Answer

Disable rollback

Answer

Change sets

Answer

Stack policy

Question 12

A SysOps administrator needs to ensure that an Amazon S3 bucket can withstand the loss of an entire AWS Availability Zone. What is the SIMPLEST configuration to meet this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Use S3 Standard storage class.. Option C is correct because S3 Standard is designed for 99.99% availability and can withstand the loss of two facilities concurrently. Option A is wrong because cross-region replication is for disaster recovery, not just AZ resilience. Option B is wrong because S3 One Zone-IA does not survive AZ loss. Option D is wrong because MFA Delete is for data protection, not durability.

Answer

Enable cross-region replication to a bucket in another Region.

Answer

Use S3 One Zone-IA storage class.

Answer

Enable MFA Delete on the bucket.

Question 13

A company uses AWS CloudTrail to log API activity. The SysOps administrator needs to ensure that log files are protected from accidental deletion and are available for compliance audits for at least 7 years. Which service should be used to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Enable S3 Object Lock in Compliance mode.. Option B is correct because S3 Object Lock with Compliance mode prevents deletion and ensures immutability. Option A is incorrect because versioning alone does not prevent deletion. Option C is incorrect because Glacier has retrieval delays and no write-once-read-many (WORM) protection. Option D is incorrect because CloudWatch Logs can store logs but does not provide WORM protection natively.

Answer

Enable S3 Versioning on the CloudTrail S3 bucket.

Answer

Move CloudTrail logs to Amazon S3 Glacier after 90 days.

Answer

Store logs in Amazon CloudWatch Logs with an expiration policy of 7 years.

Question 14

A company has a production RDS for PostgreSQL instance with Multi-AZ enabled. During a recent failover test, the application experienced a 5-minute downtime. The company requires that failover be completed within 2 minutes. Which action should be taken to meet this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Configure an RDS Proxy in front of the database.. Option C is correct because RDS Proxy reduces failover time by pooling database connections and maintaining them during failover. Option A is wrong because increasing instance size does not directly reduce failover time. Option B is wrong because enabling automatic backups does not affect failover speed. Option D is wrong because switching to Aurora may help but is a larger architectural change; RDS Proxy is a simpler solution for RDS.

Answer

Migrate the database to Amazon Aurora with Multi-AZ.

Answer

Enable automated backups with a short retention period.

Answer

Increase the DB instance class to a larger size.

Question 15

A company runs a critical web application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer in a single Availability Zone. To improve reliability, what is the MOST effective design change?

Accepted Answer

Launch EC2 instances across two or more Availability Zones.. Option C is correct because deploying instances across multiple Availability Zones eliminates a single point of failure and is a fundamental high-availability design. Option A is wrong because increasing instance size does not provide fault tolerance. Option B is wrong because a Multi-AZ RDS instance improves database reliability but does not address the web tier's single AZ risk. Option D is wrong because an additional load balancer in the same AZ does not protect against AZ failure.

Answer

Place the RDS database in a Multi-AZ deployment.

Answer

Add a second Application Load Balancer in the same Availability Zone.

Answer

Increase the EC2 instance size to handle more traffic.