SOA-C02 Reliability and Business Continuity — Timed 10 Questions

Question 1

A company runs a web application on two EC2 instances in different Availability Zones, each with an Elastic IP address. The SysOps administrator needs to automatically route traffic to the healthy instance and fail over if one instance becomes unhealthy. The application must be accessible via a single DNS name. Which Route 53 routing policy should be used?

10 minute time limit — choose an answer to begin.

Accepted Answer

Failover routing policy. The failover routing policy in Amazon Route 53 is designed to route traffic from a primary resource to a secondary resource when the primary becomes unhealthy. In this scenario, the two EC2 instances in different Availability Zones act as primary and secondary endpoints, and Route 53 uses health checks to monitor the primary instance. If the health check fails, Route 53 automatically fails over to the secondary instance, ensuring the application remains accessible via a single DNS name.

Answer

Weighted routing policy

Answer

Geolocation routing policy

Answer

Simple routing policy

Question 2

A company runs a critical application on Amazon ECS with the EC2 launch type. The application must remain available if a single Availability Zone fails. The SysOps administrator needs to configure the ECS service for high availability. Which configuration should be used?

Accepted Answer

Use a spread placement strategy across multiple Availability Zones.. Using a spread placement strategy across multiple Availability Zones ensures that ECS tasks are distributed across distinct zones, so the application remains available if a single zone fails. With the EC2 launch type, the spread strategy can be applied at the Availability Zone level, and ECS automatically manages task placement to maintain the desired distribution. This configuration meets the high availability requirement by eliminating a single point of failure at the zone level.

Answer

Place tasks in a single Availability Zone.

Answer

Use a binpack placement strategy.

Answer

Increase the desired task count to 10.

Question 3

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

Take hourly EBS snapshots and copy them to us-west-2. In a disaster, launch a new instance from the snapshot and attach it.. Option A is correct: Take hourly EBS snapshots and copy them to us-west-2 using the EC2 CopySnapshot API. This meets the RPO of 1 hour. In a disaster, create a volume from the snapshot and attach it to a new instance, meeting the RTO of 15 minutes. Option B is incorrect because using both DLM and AWS Backup in that manner is not a valid architecture; AWS Backup copies recovery points it manages, not arbitrary DLM snapshots. DLM can handle cross-region copy directly, or AWS Backup can be used alone to create and copy snapshots.

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.

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 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.. 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 is designing a highly available architecture for a web application. The application uses an Application Load Balancer (ALB) and an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances. Which TWO steps should the company take to ensure the architecture is resilient to an Availability Zone failure? (Select TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Configure the Auto Scaling group to launch instances in at least two Availability Zones.. Option C is correct because an Auto Scaling group that spans at least two Availability Zones can continue serving traffic from the surviving AZ when one AZ fails, and the ASG will also attempt to rebalance capacity across the remaining healthy AZs. Option E is correct because an internet-facing ALB with cross-zone load balancing distributes traffic evenly across all registered targets in all enabled AZs, so if one AZ becomes unavailable, the load balancer routes requests to healthy targets in the other AZs. Option A is not correct because simply raising desired capacity does not provide AZ redundancy if all instances are still placed in a single AZ or if the ASG is not configured across multiple AZs. Option B is not correct because a CloudWatch alarm on ALB 5xx errors only detects failures; it does not by itself make the architecture resilient to an AZ outage. Option D is not correct because using a single EC2 instance type does not address AZ failure resilience and may even reduce flexibility in capacity recovery.

Answer

Set the Auto Scaling group's desired capacity to a high number.

Answer

Create a CloudWatch alarm that triggers if the ALB has elevated 5xx errors.

Answer

Use a single EC2 instance type for all instances.

Question 6

A company has a production AWS account with multiple VPCs connected via a transit gateway. The security team requires that all cross-VPC traffic be inspected by a centralized network firewall appliance. The firewall is deployed in a dedicated inspection VPC. The SysOps administrator must ensure that traffic from VPC A to VPC B is routed through the inspection VPC. Which configuration achieves this?

Accepted Answer

Configure the transit gateway route tables to propagate a blackhole route for VPC A and VPC B CIDRs to the inspection VPC attachment, then have the firewall forward traffic.. Transit gateway route tables can be configured to force all inter-VPC traffic through a centralized inspection VPC. By propagating a blackhole route for the CIDRs of VPC A and VPC B to the inspection VPC attachment, the transit gateway drops traffic that is not explicitly routed through the inspection VPC. The firewall in the inspection VPC then forwards the inspected traffic back to the transit gateway, which uses separate route tables to direct the traffic to the destination VPC. This ensures that all cross-VPC traffic is inspected without requiring VPC peering or NAT gateways.

Answer

Create a VPC peering connection between VPC A and VPC B, and use route tables to send traffic through the inspection VPC.

Answer

Use security groups in the inspection VPC to filter traffic between VPC A and VPC B.

Answer

Attach a NAT gateway in the inspection VPC and configure route tables in VPC A and B to point to the NAT gateway.

Question 7

A SysOps administrator is tasked with designing a disaster recovery strategy for an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database. The database is currently in us-east-1. The recovery point objective (RPO) is 5 seconds, and the recovery time objective (RTO) is 1 minute. Which solution meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Enable Multi-AZ deployment with automatic failover.. Multi-AZ deployment for Amazon RDS provides synchronous replication to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone, with automatic failover typically completing within 1-2 minutes. This meets the RTO of 1 minute and, because replication is synchronous, the RPO is effectively zero seconds (no data loss), which satisfies the 5-second RPO requirement.

Answer

Create a cross-region read replica in us-west-2 and promote it during a disaster.

Answer

Take daily automated snapshots and copy them to another region.

Answer

Deploy the database in a single AZ and use point-in-time recovery.

Question 8

A SysOps administrator is implementing a disaster recovery strategy for an S3 bucket containing critical data. The bucket must be available within 15 minutes if the primary region fails. Data must be replicated with RPO of less than 5 minutes. Which S3 replication configuration should be used?

Accepted Answer

Enable S3 Versioning and configure S3 Event Notifications to trigger a Lambda function that copies objects to another region. The correct choice because it can meet the RPO of less than 5 minutes by using S3 Event Notifications to trigger a Lambda function that copies objects to another region in near real-time. This approach allows for sub-5-minute replication, and the bucket is available within 15 minutes after failover. S3 Versioning ensures data integrity. While CRR with RTC guarantees replication within 15 minutes, it does not guarantee sub-5-minute RPO. Options A and C either replicate within the same region or are not suitable for continuous, near-real-time replication.

Answer

Enable S3 Versioning and S3 Same-Region Replication (SRR)

Answer

Enable S3 Versioning and transfer data to another region using AWS DataSync

Answer

Enable S3 Versioning and S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) with replication time control (RTC)

Question 9

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. Option C is correct because Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) requires an IAM role that grants the service permissions to create and delete EBS snapshots on your behalf; without this role the lifecycle policy cannot execute. Option D is correct because a DLM lifecycle policy is the native mechanism to define a schedule (hourly, expressed as a cron expression) and a retention rule (7 days), which automatically creates and expires snapshots. Option E is correct because DLM targets resources by tag, so the EBS volumes must carry the specific tag referenced in the policy's target specification (e.g., Backup=true) for them to be included. Option A is not needed because a CloudWatch Events rule with a Lambda function is a custom, more complex approach rather than the required DLM steps. Option B is not needed because AWS Backup, while capable of hourly backups and retention, is a separate service and not part of the DLM-based solution the question requires.

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 10

A company uses Amazon Route 53 for DNS and has a domain registered with Route 53. The company wants to ensure that if the primary web server fails, traffic is automatically routed to a secondary server in a different region. The health check must consider both the server response and the application response time. Which routing policy should be used?

Accepted Answer

Failover routing policy. Failover routing policy is correct because it allows you to configure an active-passive setup where Route 53 automatically routes traffic to a secondary resource when the primary fails. By associating a health check that monitors both server response (HTTP status code) and application response time (latency threshold), Route 53 can detect failure and trigger the failover. This policy directly supports the requirement for automatic failover based on a composite health check.

Answer

Weighted routing policy

Answer

Geolocation routing policy

Answer

Latency routing policy