DVA-C02 Deployment Practice Question
A developer is deploying an application using AWS Elastic Beanstalk. The developer wants to ensure that the application is highly available and can recover from an AZ failure. Which TWO configurations should be applied? (Choose TWO.)
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
✓
Configure the environment to use multiple Availability Zones.
Options A and D are correct. A: Deploying to multiple Availability Zones ensures that if one AZ fails, the application remains available. D: An Elastic Load Balancer distributes traffic across instances in multiple AZs, improving fault tolerance. Option B is incorrect because selecting a larger EC2 instance type increases compute capacity but does not provide AZ redundancy. Option C is incorrect because enabling Multi-AZ for an RDS database improves database availability, but the question asks about application-level high availability; it does not address the compute tier. Option E is incorrect because using a single EC2 instance creates a single point of failure and does not ensure high availability.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Configure the environment to use multiple Availability Zones.
Why this is correct
Setting the Elastic Beanstalk environment to span multiple Availability Zones ensures that EC2 instances are distributed across physically separate data centers within the region. If one Availability Zone experiences an outage, instances in the other zones remain healthy and continue serving traffic, eliminating the risk of a single-AZ failure. Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles this distribution when you configure the environment with subnets in multiple AZs, providing a foundational layer of application-tier redundancy.
- ✗
Select a larger EC2 instance type.
Why it's wrong here
Selecting a larger EC2 instance type (scaling vertically) increases the CPU, memory, and network capacity of a single instance, but it does not add any form of redundancy or failover. If that instance fails, or its Availability Zone goes down, the application becomes unavailable regardless of how powerful the instance is. Horizontal scaling and distribution across AZs are required for high availability; a bigger instance merely delays resource exhaustion, not the risk of failure.
- ✗
Enable Multi-AZ for the application's Amazon RDS database.
Why it's wrong here
Enabling Multi-AZ on Amazon RDS provisions a synchronous standby replica in a different Availability Zone and automatically fails over the database if the primary fails. This protects only the database tier, not the EC2 instances that run your application in Elastic Beanstalk. The application servers remain a single point of failure, especially if you have just one instance, so this option does not address application-tier availability.
- ✓
Attach an Elastic Load Balancer to the environment.
Why this is correct
Attaching an Elastic Load Balancer to the Elastic Beanstalk environment distributes incoming traffic across multiple EC2 instances and performs health checks to detect unhealthy hosts. When an instance fails, the load balancer stops sending requests to it and reroutes traffic to the remaining healthy instances, allowing the application to continue running. This is a key part of a highly available architecture, but it should be combined with multiple instances across multiple AZs to be fully effective.
- ✗
Use a single EC2 instance for simplicity.
Why it's wrong here
Running the application on a single EC2 instance creates an absolute single point of failure: if the instance crashes, undergoes hardware failure, or its Availability Zone becomes unavailable, the application is completely inaccessible. There is no automatic recovery, no health checking, and no failover, so the design does not meet minimal high-availability requirements. It may be simpler and cheaper, but it sacrifices continuity in the event of any infrastructure disruption.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
One of 724 original DVA-C02 practice questions on Courseiva, each with a full explanation and wrong-answer analysis — not exam dumps or protected exam content. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DVA-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 DVA-C02 exam.