SOA-C02 Reliability and Business Continuity Practice Test 6 — 15 Questions

Question 1

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?

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

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 2

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 3

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 4

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 5

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

Question 6

A web application runs on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. To achieve high availability, what is the minimum number of Availability Zones (AZs) that must be configured for the Auto Scaling group?

Accepted Answer

2. For high availability, an Auto Scaling group must span at least two Availability Zones (AZs) to ensure that if one AZ fails, the application remains available from the other AZ. A single AZ would create a single point of failure, violating the high-availability requirement. The Application Load Balancer distributes traffic across healthy instances in all configured AZs, so two AZs are the minimum to achieve fault tolerance.

Answer

1

Answer

3

Answer

4

Question 7

A production RDS MySQL database stores financial records. The team needs the ability to restore the database to any point within the last 7 days in case of accidental data deletion. Automated backups are currently disabled. What must be configured?

Accepted Answer

Enable automated backups and set the backup retention period to 7 days. To restore an RDS MySQL database to any point within the last 7 days, you must enable automated backups and set the backup retention period to 7 days. Automated backups enable point-in-time recovery (PITR), which allows restoration to any second within the retention window using binary logs. Without automated backups, RDS cannot perform PITR, even if manual snapshots exist.

Answer

Create a manual DB snapshot every night using the AWS CLI on a schedule

Answer

Enable Multi-AZ to maintain a synchronous standby replica in a second Availability Zone

Answer

Enable RDS read replicas and promote one if data deletion occurs

Question 8

An Auto Scaling group launches new EC2 instances when CPU exceeds 70 percent. The instances take 4 minutes to bootstrap (install software, register with a service discovery system, and warm up caches). Without a hook, the load balancer routes traffic to new instances before they are ready, causing 503 errors. What is the correct solution?

Accepted Answer

Add a lifecycle hook on the autoscaling:EC2_INSTANCE_LAUNCHING transition; signal CompleteLifecycleAction(CONTINUE) when bootstrap finishes. Lifecycle hooks allow the Auto Scaling group to pause instance launch until a custom action (e.g., bootstrap completion) is finished. By adding a hook on the autoscaling:EC2_INSTANCE_LAUNCHING transition, the instance is held in a 'pending:wait' state. Once the bootstrap script calls CompleteLifecycleAction with the CONTINUE result, the instance transitions to 'InService' and can then be registered with the load balancer, preventing premature traffic and 503 errors.

Answer

Increase the load balancer health check grace period to 10 minutes to give instances time to bootstrap

Answer

Increase the warm-up time in the Auto Scaling group's instance refresh configuration

Answer

Use a weighted target group with 0 weight for new instances until they are confirmed healthy

Question 9

Regulatory requirements mandate that all RDS and EBS backups are replicated to a secondary AWS region within 24 hours of creation. The company has workloads in us-east-1 and must replicate backups to eu-west-1. Restoring from the secondary region must be possible without manual copying steps during a disaster. What service and configuration implements this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Create an AWS Backup plan with a cross-Region copy rule that replicates recovery points to a backup vault in eu-west-1 within 24 hours. AWS Backup is the correct service because it natively supports cross-Region copy rules that automatically replicate recovery points (including RDS snapshots and EBS snapshots) to a backup vault in a secondary Region within a specified time window. This meets the 24-hour replication requirement and enables direct restores from the secondary Region without manual copying, as the backup vault in eu-west-1 contains the replicated recovery points ready for use.

Answer

Schedule a Lambda function that calls CreateDBSnapshot and CopyDBSnapshot to replicate RDS snapshots, and CreateSnapshot and CopySnapshot for EBS volumes to eu-west-1

Answer

Enable RDS automated backups with cross-region replication and configure EBS snapshot copy separately using Data Lifecycle Manager

Answer

Use S3 Cross-Region Replication to replicate the backup bucket containing RDS and EBS snapshots to eu-west-1

Question 10

An EC2 instance runs a database on a 2 TB EBS gp3 volume. After a corruption event, the team must restore from a snapshot. When they detach the corrupted volume, attach a new volume restored from the snapshot, and start the database, performance is 10 to 20 times lower than normal for the first two hours. What causes this behavior, and what feature eliminates it?

Accepted Answer

Enable Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) on the snapshot in the target Availability Zone before creating the replacement volume. When you create an EBS volume from a snapshot, the volume's data blocks are lazily loaded from Amazon S3 on first access. This causes high latency and low IOPS until all blocks are fetched. Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) pre-initializes the volume in a specific Availability Zone, eliminating the need for lazy loading and providing full performance immediately.

Answer

Use a Provisioned IOPS (io2) volume type instead of gp3 to get higher IOPS during initialization

Answer

Run a full dd or fio pre-warm pass over the volume after attaching it but before starting the database

Answer

Increase the EBS volume size to 4 TB when restoring from the snapshot to get double the throughput baseline

Question 11

Drag and drop the steps to set up an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection into the correct order.

Accepted Answer

Create and attach virtual private gateway, then define customer gateway, then create VPN connection, then configure on-premises router, then verify tunnel. First create and attach the virtual private gateway, then define the customer gateway, then create the VPN connection, configure the on-premises router, and verify the tunnel.

Answer

Define customer gateway, then create and attach virtual private gateway, then create VPN connection, then configure on-premises router, then verify tunnel

Answer

Create and attach virtual private gateway, then create VPN connection, then define customer gateway, then configure on-premises router, then verify tunnel

Answer

Create and attach virtual private gateway, then define customer gateway, then configure on-premises router, then create VPN connection, then verify tunnel

Question 12

Drag and drop the steps to set up an Amazon S3 bucket policy to grant cross-account access into the correct order.

Accepted Answer

Identify the bucket and account, then write the policy with correct principal and actions, then save the policy, then test access.. Identify the bucket and account, write the policy with correct principal and actions, save, and test.

Answer

Write the policy with correct principal and actions, then identify the bucket and account, then save the policy, then test access.

Answer

Identify the bucket and account, then write the policy with correct principal and actions, then test access, then save the policy.

Answer

Identify the bucket and account, then save the policy, then write the policy with correct principal and actions, then test access.

Question 13

Match each AWS storage service to its description.

Accepted Answer

Amazon S3: Object storage for internet-scale data.. Amazon S3 is object storage, EBS is block storage, EFS is file storage, and Glacier is archival. Common confusions include mixing S3 and EBS definitions.

Answer

Amazon S3: Block-level storage for EC2 instances.

Answer

Amazon EBS: Object storage for internet-scale data.

Question 14

Match each AWS backup and disaster recovery service to its feature.

Accepted Answer

AWS Backup: Centralized backup service that automates and consolidates backup tasks across AWS services.. The correct matches are: AWS Backup for centralized automation, AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery for continuous replication, AWS Storage Gateway for hybrid cloud storage, and AWS Snowball for offline transfer. Common confusions involve swapping the centralized backup and replication functions.

Answer

AWS Backup: Continuous block-level replication for fast recovery of applications.

Answer

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery: Centralized backup service that automates and consolidates backup tasks across AWS services.

Question 15

A company is running a critical web application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The instances are in an Auto Scaling group across two Availability Zones. The company needs to ensure that if an entire Availability Zone fails, the application remains available. Which configuration meets this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Configure the Auto Scaling group to launch instances in at least two Availability Zones.. Configuring the Auto Scaling group to launch instances in at least two Availability Zones ensures that if one AZ fails, the remaining AZ(s) continue to serve traffic. The Application Load Balancer automatically distributes incoming requests across healthy instances in all configured AZs, and the Auto Scaling group replaces failed instances in the remaining AZs, maintaining capacity. This design provides high availability without relying on a single AZ, which would be a single point of failure.

Answer

Use larger EC2 instance types to handle the load during a failure.

Answer

Use Amazon CloudFront to distribute traffic across multiple regions.

Answer

Launch all instances in the same Availability Zone to reduce latency.