SOA-C02 · domain
Reliability and Business Continuity
Practise AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate SOA-C02 Reliability and Business Continuity practice questions — original exam-style scenarios with answer choices, explanations, and analysis of common mistakes.
Focused practice
Practice Reliability and Business Continuity questions
Scored sessions drawing only from this domain — pick a length below.
Start 20-question practice test →What this domain covers
What to know about Reliability and Business Continuity
Reliability and Business Continuity questions test whether you can apply the concept in context, not just recognise a definition.
How the topic appears in realistic exam-style scenarios.
Which detail in the question changes the correct answer.
How to eliminate plausible but wrong options.
How to connect the question back to the wider exam objective.
Watch out for
Common Reliability and Business Continuity exam traps
- ▸Answering from memory before reading the full scenario.
- ▸Missing a constraint such as cost, availability, security, scope or command context.
- ▸Choosing a broad answer when the question asks for the most specific fix.
- ▸Ignoring why the wrong options are tempting.
Question index
All Reliability and Business Continuity questions (35)
Click any question to see the full explanation, or start a practice session above.
A company runs a stateful web application on a single Amazon EC2 instance. The application stores session state in memory and writes critical data to an Amazon EBS volume. The SysOps administrator needs to implement a highly available architecture that can tolerate an Availability Zone (AZ) failure. The administrator plans to use an Auto Scaling group and an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Which combination of steps is required to make the application highly available while preserving session and data durability across AZ failures?
Medium2A company runs a critical production database on Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ deployment. The SysOps administrator needs to be automatically notified when a failover event occurs, and also capture the exact time and reason for the failover for compliance purposes. Which AWS service or feature should be used to capture the failover event details with the least operational overhead?
Medium3Which TWO actions should a SysOps administrator take to ensure high availability of a web application running on EC2 instances? (Choose two.)
Easy4A company runs a critical web application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application uses session stickiness (sticky sessions) to maintain user sessions. The SysOps administrator notices that when instances are replaced during a scale-in or failure event, users lose their session data. The administrator needs to preserve session data across instance failures without losing stickiness benefits. What should the administrator do?
Medium5A company runs a stateful web application on a single Amazon EC2 instance. The SysOps administrator needs to implement a high availability architecture that can tolerate an Availability Zone (AZ) failure. The application stores session state in memory and also writes critical data to an Amazon EBS volume. The administrator wants to use an Auto Scaling group and an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Which combination of steps is required to make the application highly available?
Medium6A company runs a critical web application on Amazon EC2 instances that are part of an Auto Scaling group. The application receives unpredictable traffic spikes. The SysOps administrator needs to ensure that when a scale-out event occurs, new instances are ready to serve traffic quickly to minimize latency spikes. Currently, the instance launch and configuration process (including software installs and cache warming) takes about 5 minutes. The administrator wants to reduce the time it takes for new instances to start serving traffic. Which combination of Auto Scaling features should be used?
Hard7A company runs a critical database workload on an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance with Multi-AZ deployment in the us-east-1 region. The SysOps administrator must design a disaster recovery strategy that can recover from a complete regional outage. The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is 2 hours and the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is 1 hour. Which solution meets these requirements at the lowest cost?
Hard8A SysOps administrator is troubleshooting an issue where an Application Load Balancer (ALB) is returning 503 errors to clients. The target group has healthy EC2 instances. Which THREE possible causes should the administrator investigate? (Choose three.)
Medium9A company wants to implement a disaster recovery solution for its on-premises database using AWS. The solution must have an RPO of less than 1 hour and an RTO of less than 4 hours. Which THREE steps should the SysOps administrator take? (Choose THREE.)
Hard10A company runs a critical database on an RDS for PostgreSQL instance in a single Availability Zone. The database experiences high write latency. The SysOps Administrator needs to improve the database's reliability and performance without downtime. Which solution meets these requirements?
Hard11Which TWO steps should a SysOps administrator take to ensure that an RDS for MySQL instance can withstand an Availability Zone failure? (Choose 2)
Medium12A company stores critical data in an S3 bucket. The SysOps administrator needs to ensure that the data is durable and can be recovered if an entire AWS Region becomes unavailable. What is the MOST cost-effective solution?
Easy13A 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?
Medium14A company runs a global e-commerce application that uses Amazon DynamoDB as its primary database. The application requires single-digit millisecond read and write latency from any region and must continue to operate during a regional outage with minimal data loss. Which DynamoDB feature should the SysOps administrator enable to meet these requirements?
Medium15A 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?
Easy16Refer to the exhibit. An IAM policy is attached to an IAM user. Which action can the user perform?
Easy17A company uses AWS CloudFormation to deploy its infrastructure. The SysOps administrator needs to ensure that the application stack can be recreated in another AWS Region in the event of a disaster. The stack includes an RDS MySQL database and an EC2 instance running a web server. The administrator wants to automate the backup of the RDS database and the EC2 instance configuration. What is the MOST efficient way to achieve this?
Medium18A company is designing a backup strategy for its on-premises file servers to AWS. Which TWO services can be used to back up data to AWS? (Choose TWO.)
Medium19A company runs a critical stateful web application on Amazon EC2 instances in a single AWS region. The application stores user session data in an Amazon ElastiCache for Redis cluster. The SysOps administrator must design a disaster recovery (DR) strategy that can survive a complete regional outage with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1 hour. The application must be able to redirect users to the DR region with minimal manual effort. Which combination of actions meets these requirements?
Hard20A 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?
Medium21An 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?
Hard22A 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.)
Medium23A 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?
Hard24Regulatory 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?
Medium25A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application stores session state in memory on each instance. The SysOps administrator wants to make the application highly available across multiple Availability Zones without losing session data when instances are terminated or replaced. The solution must minimize application changes. Which approach should the administrator take?
Medium26A company wants to ensure that its Amazon RDS database can withstand the loss of an entire Availability Zone. Which feature should the SysOps administrator enable?
Easy27A 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?
Medium28Drag and drop the steps to set up an Amazon S3 bucket policy to grant cross-account access into the correct order.
Medium29An 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?
Medium30A company runs a stateful web application on a single Amazon EC2 instance with an Elastic IP address. The SysOps administrator needs to increase availability so that if the instance fails, a new instance can be launched quickly with the same configuration and the same IP address. The administrator also needs to ensure data is not lost. Which solution meets these requirements with the least operational overhead?
Medium31A 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?
Medium32Drag and drop the steps to set up an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection into the correct order.
Medium33A 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?
Hard34A company runs a production web application on AWS using Auto Scaling groups (ASGs) behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application state is stored in an Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. The application experiences periodic traffic spikes, and the current ASG uses a simple scaling policy based on average CPU utilization. Recently, during a spike, the application became unresponsive for several minutes. The CloudWatch metrics show that the CPU utilization on the RDS instance peaked at 80%, and the DB Connections metric reached the maximum allowed. The read replica lag increased to over 10 seconds during the spike. The web servers are stateless and scale out quickly. The operations team needs to improve the reliability and performance of the application to handle future spikes. Which solution should the team implement?
Hard35A SysOps administrator creates the above IAM policy for a user. The user reports that they cannot delete an object in the bucket 'my-bucket' even though they are using MFA. What is the likely cause?
MediumOther domains
All SOA-C02 exam domains
Frequently asked questions
- What does the Reliability and Business Continuity domain cover on the SOA-C02 exam?
- Reliability and Business Continuity questions test whether you can apply the concept in context, not just recognise a definition.
- How many questions are in this domain?
- This page lists all 35 Reliability and Business Continuity questions in the SOA-C02 question bank. The actual exam draws from this domain proportionally to its weighting in the official exam blueprint.
- What is the best way to practise this domain?
- Start with a short focused session (10 questions) to identify gaps, then work through explanations. Repeat with a longer session once the weak areas feel solid.
- Can I practise only Reliability and Business Continuity questions?
- Yes — the session launcher on this page filters questions to this domain only. Choose any session length for inline explanations and scoring.