DBS-C01 Workload-Specific Database Design Practice Question
A company is designing a disaster recovery strategy for an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database. They need a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 5 seconds and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 1 minute. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose two.)
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often assume cross-region read replicas support automatic failover natively, but they do not; you must explicitly configure Route 53 health checks and DNS failover to achieve the required RTO, while Multi-AZ provides automatic failover but only within the same region, not cross-region.
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
✓
Create a cross-region read replica and configure automatic failover using Amazon Route 53 health checks
A cross-region read replica can be promoted to a primary instance in under a minute, and with Amazon Route 53 health checks configured for automatic failover, the DNS update occurs automatically, meeting the RTO of less than 1 minute. The asynchronous replication lag is typically sub-second, achieving an RPO of less than 5 seconds. Option E is correct because a Multi-AZ deployment with a synchronous standby in another Availability Zone provides automatic failover with no data loss (RPO of 0) and failover completes in about 30-60 seconds, satisfying both RPO and RTO requirements.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use AWS Database Migration Service for continuous replication to a separate instance
Why it's wrong here
DMS uses asynchronous replication, leading to higher RPO than 5 seconds.
- ✗
Create a cross-region read replica and manually update DNS in a disaster
Why it's wrong here
Manual DNS update increases RTO beyond 1 minute.
- ✗
Take hourly snapshots and restore in another region
Why it's wrong here
Hourly snapshots result in RPO up to 1 hour, not <5 seconds.
- ✓
Create a cross-region read replica and configure automatic failover using Amazon Route 53 health checks
Why this is correct
Automatic failover with health checks can achieve RTO <1 minute and RPO <5 seconds with synchronous replication.
- ✓
Configure Multi-AZ deployment with a synchronous standby in another AZ
Why this is correct
Multi-AZ provides synchronous replication with RPO <5 seconds and automatic failover.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DBS-C01 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 DBS-C01 exam.