CLF-C02 Cloud Concepts Practice Question
A company is designing a resilient multi-tier web application on AWS. The architect wants to implement the Well-Architected Framework Reliability pillar design principle of 'automatically recover from failure.' Which combination of services implements this most completely?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse monitoring services (like CloudTrail and CloudWatch) with recovery services, failing to recognize that detection alone does not satisfy the 'automatically recover' principle unless paired with an automated action mechanism such as Auto Scaling or Multi-AZ failover.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
EC2 Auto Scaling + ELB health checks + RDS Multi-AZ
It combines EC2 Auto Scaling to automatically replace unhealthy instances, ELB health checks to detect failures and route traffic away from them, and RDS Multi-AZ to automatically failover to a standby database in a different Availability Zone. This trio directly implements the 'automatically recover from failure' principle by enabling self-healing at both the compute and database tiers without manual intervention.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Manual restart procedures documented in a runbook
Why it's wrong here
A runbook with manual restart steps is inherently reactive, requiring a human to detect the failure, log in, and execute the documented commands. This adds significant recovery time and is prone to error, especially during off-hours. It does not provide automatic recovery because the process is not triggered or executed by any AWS service without human intervention.
- ✓
EC2 Auto Scaling + ELB health checks + RDS Multi-AZ
Why this is correct
This combination delivers full automatic recovery across compute and database tiers. EC2 Auto Scaling replaces unhealthy instances based on health checks, while an Application or Network Load Balancer continuously verifies instance health and routes traffic only to healthy targets. RDS Multi-AZ automatically fails over to a standby replica in another Availability Zone if the primary database becomes unavailable, ensuring minimal downtime without manual action.
- ✗
AWS CloudTrail + Amazon CloudWatch
Why it's wrong here
CloudTrail records API activity for auditing, and CloudWatch collects metrics, logs, and alarms to detect operational issues. These services are observability tools that surface failures but do not execute any corrective action themselves. An alarm can notify operators, but recovery still requires a separate automation mechanism such as Lambda or a runbook — they do not self-heal or replace failed resources.
- ✗
AWS Config rules with manual remediation
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config rules evaluate resource configurations against desired policies and can flag noncompliant resources, but manual remediation relies on an engineer to review and fix each issue. The question specifically says manual remediation, so there is no automated enforcement or recovery loop. Config only detects configuration drift; it does not automatically restore the resource or trigger a replacement without additional automation such as SSM automation documents.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CLF-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CLF-C02 exam.