SOA-C02 Reliability and Business Continuity Practice Test 5 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company runs a critical MySQL database on an Amazon RDS DB instance in a single Availability Zone. The SysOps administrator needs to implement a disaster recovery solution with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 5 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1 hour, while minimizing costs. Which solution meets these requirements?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Enable cross-Region automated backups to another Region. Cross-Region automated backups replicate transaction logs to another AWS Region with a typical lag of a few minutes, enabling point-in-time recovery (PITR) that can meet an RPO of 5 minutes. When a disaster occurs, you can restore the automated backup to a new DB instance in the destination Region, and the RTO depends on the restore time, which can be under 1 hour for a properly sized instance. This solution minimizes costs by avoiding the continuous compute and storage overhead of a standby replica or read replica.

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Enable Multi-AZ deployment with a synchronous standby replica in another Availability Zone

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Create a cross-Region read replica and promote it to a standalone DB instance during a disaster

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Take daily automated snapshots and copy them to another Region manually

Question 2

A company stores critical data in an Amazon S3 bucket in the us-west-2 Region. The SysOps administrator needs to ensure that all objects are automatically replicated to another AWS Region for disaster recovery. The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) must be less than 15 minutes, and existing objects must also be replicated. Which S3 feature should the administrator use?

Accepted Answer

S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) with Replication Time Control (RTC). S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) with Replication Time Control (RTC) is the correct choice because it provides automatic, asynchronous replication of objects to a different AWS Region, meeting the RPO of less than 15 minutes by guaranteeing replication within 15 minutes for most objects (99.99% of objects are replicated within 15 minutes). Additionally, CRR can replicate existing objects when configured with the appropriate replication rule and batch operations, satisfying the requirement to replicate all objects.

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S3 Same-Region Replication (SRR)

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S3 Event Notifications with an AWS Lambda function to copy objects to another region

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S3 Transfer Acceleration

Question 3

A company processes orders using an Amazon SQS standard queue. The order processing application occasionally fails to process a message. The SysOps administrator wants to ensure that any message that fails to be successfully processed after three attempts is automatically moved to a separate queue for manual review. Which SQS feature should be configured?

Accepted Answer

Configure a Dead Letter Queue (DLQ) with a redrive policy. A Dead Letter Queue (DLQ) with a configured redrive policy is the correct SQS feature to automatically move messages that have failed processing after a specified number of attempts (in this case, three) to a separate queue for manual review. The redrive policy defines the source queue, the DLQ, and the maximum receive count (maxReceiveCount) threshold. When a message is received from the source queue more times than the maxReceiveCount, SQS automatically redirects it to the DLQ, isolating problematic messages without manual intervention.

Answer

Increase the visibility timeout of the queue

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Convert the queue to a FIFO queue

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Enable redrive allow policy on the queue

Question 4

A company runs a critical application on Amazon EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones. The application stores state data on a shared Amazon EFS file system. The SysOps administrator needs to ensure that the file system remains available if an entire Availability Zone fails. The file system must also provide low-latency access from all instances. Which configuration meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Create an EFS file system with the Standard storage class in the same Region, and mount it from all instances using the regional mount target.. The EFS Standard storage class stores data redundantly across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) within a Region, ensuring high availability and durability even if an entire AZ fails. By mounting the file system using the regional mount target (which resolves to the EFS file system's regional DNS name), instances in any AZ can access the file system with low latency, as EFS automatically routes traffic to the most appropriate mount target in the same AZ. This configuration meets both the availability and low-latency requirements without additional replication or failover complexity.

Answer

Create an EFS file system with the One Zone storage class and mount it from all instances.

Answer

Create an EFS file system with the Standard storage class, enable replication to another Region, and use DNS failover.

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Create an EFS file system with the Standard storage class, and enable Multi-AZ deployment.

Question 5

A company has an Amazon DynamoDB table with on-demand capacity mode. The SysOps administrator needs to ensure that the table can survive a regional outage. The table is currently in us-east-1. Which feature should be configured to achieve regional resilience with minimal data loss?

Accepted Answer

DynamoDB global tables. DynamoDB global tables provide multi-Region, fully replicated tables that automatically propagate writes to all configured Regions, enabling the table to survive a regional outage with minimal data loss. This feature uses DynamoDB Streams to replicate data asynchronously across Regions, offering recovery point objectives (RPO) of typically under one second. For the requirement of regional resilience, global tables are the correct choice because they maintain active copies in multiple AWS Regions.

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DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)

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DynamoDB point-in-time recovery

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DynamoDB auto scaling

Question 6

A company hosts a critical web application on Amazon EC2 instances in a single AWS Region (us-east-1). The SysOps administrator needs to implement a Disaster Recovery (DR) solution using a different AWS Region (us-west-2). The DR plan requires a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1 hour and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes. The application uses an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster and static assets stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. Which combination of actions should the administrator take to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Create an Aurora cross-Region read replica in us-west-2. Configure S3 Cross-Region Replication from the source bucket to a destination bucket in us-west-2. During DR, promote the read replica to a primary cluster and update DNS.. Aurora cross-Region read replicas provide asynchronous replication with an RPO typically under 1 second, easily meeting the 15-minute RPO requirement. Promoting the read replica to a primary cluster in us-west-2 can be completed within minutes, satisfying the 1-hour RTO. S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) automatically replicates static assets to the destination bucket in us-west-2 with near-real-time latency, ensuring the S3 data is also current within the RPO window.

Answer

Take a manual snapshot of the Aurora DB cluster every 15 minutes and copy it to us-west-2. Use S3 batch operations to copy assets to us-west-2 daily.

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Enable Aurora Multi-AZ in us-east-1 and configure S3 transfer acceleration to us-west-2.

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Use AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) for continuous replication to a DB instance in us-west-2. Use S3 versioning to keep previous object versions.

Question 7

A company runs a critical application on a single Amazon EC2 instance. The SysOps administrator needs to ensure that if the instance fails, a new instance is automatically provisioned in a different Availability Zone. Which configuration should the administrator implement?

Accepted Answer

Create an Auto Scaling group with the instance in multiple Availability Zones. An Auto Scaling group (ASG) can be configured with a minimum, desired, and maximum size of 1, spanning multiple Availability Zones (AZs). When the EC2 instance fails, the ASG health check replacement mechanism automatically terminates the unhealthy instance and launches a new one in a different AZ, ensuring the application remains available across AZ boundaries without manual intervention.

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Create a placement group and launch the instance in it

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Place the instance behind an Elastic Load Balancer

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Configure an Amazon Route 53 health check with failover routing

Question 8

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.. 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.

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

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

Question 9

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.

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Read Replicas

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Automated backups with point-in-time recovery

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Amazon RDS Proxy

Question 10

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.

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Place the Amazon EC2 instances in a cluster placement group.

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Associate an Elastic IP address with the primary instance.

Question 11

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. 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

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

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

Question 12

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

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Configure automated backups with cross-region copy

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Enable deletion protection on the DB instance

Question 13

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.

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

Question 14

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 15

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.

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

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

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