SOA-C02 Reliability and Business Continuity Practice Test 3 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group that spans two Availability Zones. The application uses an Application Load Balancer (ALB) that is deployed across the same Availability Zones. The SysOps administrator wants to ensure the application remains available if an entire Availability Zone fails. Which configuration is essential for this high availability?

Accepted Answer

Configure the Auto Scaling group with at least one instance in each Availability Zone.. Option A is correct because for high availability across an Availability Zone (AZ) failure, the Auto Scaling group must have at least one healthy instance in each AZ. This ensures that if one AZ becomes unavailable, the ALB can route traffic to instances in the remaining AZ. Without this minimum distribution, a single AZ failure could leave the application with zero healthy targets if all instances were in the failed AZ.

Answer

Enable cross-zone load balancing on the Application Load Balancer.

Answer

Use an Amazon Route 53 health check to route traffic away from a failed AZ.

Answer

Attach an Elastic IP address to each instance in the Auto Scaling group to ensure IP persistence.

Question 2

A company runs a stateful application on a single Amazon EC2 instance with a 200 GB EBS volume. The application data changes frequently. The SysOps administrator needs a disaster recovery (DR) plan with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 hour and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes. The DR region is us-west-2. Which combination of steps should the administrator implement?

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) to take snapshots every hour and use AWS Backup to copy them to us-west-2. In a disaster, restore the snapshot as a volume and attach to a new instance in us-west-2.. Option B is correct because AWS Backup can copy EBS snapshots across regions, meeting the RPO of 1 hour via hourly snapshots, and restoring a volume from a snapshot in us-west-2 and attaching it to a new instance can achieve the RTO of 15 minutes. Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) automates the snapshot creation, while AWS Backup handles cross-region copy, ensuring the DR region has the latest data within the RPO window.

Answer

Take hourly EBS snapshots and copy them to us-west-2. In a disaster, launch a new instance from the snapshot and attach it.

Answer

Enable Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication for the EBS volume's snapshot repository.

Answer

Attach an additional EBS volume configured with RAID 1, and use rsync to replicate data every hour to a volume in us-west-2.

Question 3

A company runs a production Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance. The SysOps administrator needs to ensure that in the event of a database failure, there is automatic failover to a standby instance in another Availability Zone with minimal downtime. Which deployment configuration should the administrator enable?

Accepted Answer

Multi-AZ deployment. A Multi-AZ deployment for Amazon RDS automatically provisions and maintains a synchronous standby replica in a different Availability Zone. In the event of a database failure or an Availability Zone outage, Amazon RDS automatically fails over to the standby, typically within 60-120 seconds, without requiring manual intervention. This ensures high availability and minimal downtime for the production PostgreSQL DB instance.

Answer

Read Replicas

Answer

Automated backups with point-in-time recovery

Answer

Amazon RDS Proxy

Question 4

A SysOps administrator needs to set up automated backups for a production Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance and copy the snapshots to another AWS Region for disaster recovery. Order the steps the administrator should take to implement this cross-region snapshot copy. (Drag each step to the correct order from first to last.) (Choose 4.)

Accepted Answer

Enable automated backups on the source DB instance.. Option A is correct because automated backups must be enabled on the source RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance to generate the necessary snapshots for cross-region copying. Without automated backups, there are no snapshots to copy, and the cross-region copy feature relies on these automated snapshots as the source.

Question 5

A company runs a stateless web application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group across two Availability Zones. The SysOps administrator needs to ensure that the application can tolerate a failure of an entire Availability Zone. Which configuration is required?

Accepted Answer

Use an Application Load Balancer (ALB) that spans both Availability Zones with health checks enabled.. An Application Load Balancer (ALB) that spans both Availability Zones with health checks enabled distributes incoming traffic across EC2 instances in multiple AZs. If an entire AZ fails, the ALB automatically routes traffic only to healthy instances in the remaining AZ, ensuring the stateless web application remains available. Health checks detect instance or AZ failure and remove unhealthy targets from the load balancer's target group, which is essential for fault tolerance.

Answer

Enable termination protection on all Amazon EC2 instances.

Answer

Place the Amazon EC2 instances in a cluster placement group.

Answer

Associate an Elastic IP address with the primary instance.

Question 6

A company runs a stateful application on a single Amazon EC2 instance with an attached EBS volume. The SysOps administrator needs to ensure that in the event of an instance failure, a new instance can be launched quickly with the same data. The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is 15 minutes and the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is 30 minutes. Which strategy should the administrator implement?

Accepted Answer

Configure an Amazon EC2 automatic recovery action using a CloudWatch alarm. Option A is correct because Amazon EC2 automatic recovery, triggered by a CloudWatch alarm based on status checks, can restart the instance on new hardware while preserving the attached EBS volume and its data. This meets the RPO of 15 minutes (data is current on the EBS volume) and the RTO of 30 minutes (recovery is typically within a few minutes). The stateful application remains intact because the same EBS volume is reattached to the replacement instance.

Answer

Schedule EBS snapshots every 15 minutes and use a Lambda function to launch a new instance from the latest snapshot

Answer

Use an Auto Scaling group with a custom AMI that is updated every 15 minutes

Answer

Use an Application Load Balancer with health checks to redirect traffic to a standby instance

Question 7

A company runs a production database on an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance in a single Availability Zone. The SysOps administrator needs to improve the database's availability to meet an SLA of 99.99% and ensure automatic failover in case of a database failure. Which configuration change should be made?

Accepted Answer

Enable a Multi-AZ deployment. Enabling a Multi-AZ deployment for an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL DB instance automatically provisions and maintains a synchronous standby replica in a different Availability Zone. In the event of a database failure or an Availability Zone outage, Amazon RDS automatically fails over to the standby replica, typically within 60-120 seconds, meeting the 99.99% SLA requirement without manual intervention.

Answer

Create a read replica in a different AWS Region

Answer

Configure automated backups with cross-region copy

Answer

Enable deletion protection on the DB instance

Question 8

A company runs a production Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance in a single Availability Zone (AZ). The SysOps administrator needs to improve database availability so that in the event of a database failure or AZ outage, a standby instance is automatically promoted with minimal downtime. Which configuration should the administrator enable?

Accepted Answer

Enable Multi-AZ deployment on the DB instance.. Multi-AZ deployment automatically creates and maintains a synchronous standby replica in a different Availability Zone. In the event of a failure or AZ outage, Amazon RDS automatically fails over to the standby, typically within 60–120 seconds, with no manual intervention required. This meets the requirement for automatic promotion with minimal downtime.

Answer

Enable automated backups with a retention period of 35 days.

Answer

Create a read replica in another Availability Zone.

Answer

Schedule manual snapshots to be taken every hour and restore from the latest snapshot when needed.

Question 9

A company runs a production Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance in a single Availability Zone. The SysOps administrator needs to improve database availability to ensure automatic failover if the primary instance fails. Which configuration should the administrator enable?

Accepted Answer

Enable Multi-AZ deployment on the DB instance.. Enabling Multi-AZ deployment on the DB instance automatically provisions and maintains a synchronous standby replica in a different Availability Zone. If the primary instance fails, Amazon RDS automatically fails over to the standby, providing high availability without manual intervention. This is the native AWS solution for automatic failover for RDS MySQL.

Answer

Create a Read Replica in another Availability Zone and promote it on failure.

Answer

Take hourly snapshots and automate restoration in another AZ.

Answer

Use Amazon RDS Proxy to manage connection failover.

Question 10

A company runs a critical application on a single Amazon EC2 instance with an attached Amazon EBS volume. The SysOps administrator needs to implement a disaster recovery solution that meets a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 30 minutes. The application runs continuously and data changes frequently. Which solution should the administrator implement?

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) to continuously replicate the instance to a staging area in another region.. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) continuously replicates the entire EC2 instance, including the EBS volume, to a staging area in another AWS Region with sub-second data changes. This meets the RPO of 15 minutes and RTO of 30 minutes because you can launch a fully recovered instance in the target region within minutes from the latest consistent point, without relying on periodic snapshots or backups that would miss frequent data changes.

Answer

Use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) to take EBS snapshots every 15 minutes and automate the creation of a new AMI.

Answer

Use AWS Backup to schedule backups every 15 minutes and restore from the latest backup when needed.

Answer

Use an Auto Scaling group with a custom AMI that is updated every 15 minutes by a Lambda function.

Question 11

A company runs a critical web application on a single Amazon EC2 instance with a 100 GiB gp2 EBS volume. The SysOps administrator needs to ensure data durability by taking automated snapshots of the root volume every hour. The snapshots should be retained for 7 days. Which AWS service can be used to automate this task with minimal configuration?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM). Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) is the correct choice because it is specifically designed to automate the creation, retention, and deletion of EBS snapshots with minimal configuration. It supports custom schedules (e.g., every hour) and retention policies (e.g., 7 days) directly on EBS volumes, making it ideal for this task without requiring additional scripting or infrastructure.

Answer

AWS Backup

Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Events

Answer

AWS Systems Manager

Question 12

A company has a production Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance in a single Availability Zone. The SysOps administrator needs to improve database availability to ensure automatic failover in the event of a database failure or an Availability Zone outage. Which configuration should the administrator enable?

Accepted Answer

Enable Multi-AZ deployment. Enabling a Multi-AZ deployment for Amazon RDS for MySQL automatically provisions and maintains a synchronous standby replica in a different Availability Zone. In the event of a database failure or an AZ outage, Amazon RDS automatically fails over to the standby replica, typically within 60–120 seconds, without requiring manual intervention. This configuration meets the requirement for automatic failover and improved availability.

Answer

Create a read replica in another Availability Zone

Answer

Enable automated backups

Answer

Change the DB instance to a larger instance class

Question 13

An RDS Multi-AZ DB instance fails over to the standby. The application uses the DB instance endpoint. What should the SysOps administrator usually do in the application after failover?

Accepted Answer

Ensure the application retries/reconnects using the same DB endpoint.. When an RDS Multi-AZ DB instance fails over to the standby, the DNS record for the DB instance endpoint is automatically updated to point to the new primary instance. The application should simply retry or reconnect using the same endpoint; no manual changes are needed because the endpoint remains valid. This is the standard behavior for Multi-AZ deployments, ensuring minimal disruption.

Answer

Manually change the application to the standby instance IP address.

Answer

Restore from the latest snapshot before reconnecting.

Answer

Create a new read replica and promote it immediately.

Question 14

A company uses Amazon MQ (RabbitMQ) for messaging between microservices. The SysOps administrator needs to ensure the message broker is highly available with automatic failover and no data loss. Which deployment mode should be used?

Accepted Answer

Active/standby broker. Amazon MQ for RabbitMQ supports an active/standby deployment mode that provides automatic failover and no data loss. In this mode, one broker instance is active and a second is a synchronous standby; if the active fails, the standby takes over without losing messages because all data is replicated synchronously across both instances. This meets the high availability and data durability requirements specified in the question.

Answer

Single-instance broker

Answer

Cluster deployment

Answer

Multi-AZ broker with read replicas

Question 15

A company runs a production application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group across two Availability Zones. The application uses an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB instance. The SysOps administrator wants to test the application's behavior during an Availability Zone failure of the database. Which action should the administrator take to simulate a failure with minimal impact on production?

Accepted Answer

Reboot the DB instance with the 'Reboot with failover' option. Rebooting the RDS Multi-AZ DB instance with the 'Reboot with failover' option forces a synchronous failover to the standby replica in the other Availability Zone. This simulates an AZ failure of the primary database with minimal impact because the application's Auto Scaling group spans two AZs and the RDS Multi-AZ deployment provides automatic failover, so the application should experience only a brief interruption during the DNS change to the new primary.

Answer

Modify the DB instance to be a single-AZ deployment

Answer

Delete the standby replica in the other Availability Zone

Answer

Stop the DB instance