DOP-C02 Resilient Cloud Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a multi-region disaster recovery strategy for a stateless web application. They want to minimize RTO and RPO. Which TWO of the following should they implement? (Choose TWO.)
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse cross-region read replicas (which are read-only and not suitable for active-active writes) with true multi-region replication solutions, leading them to select Option D instead of Option A or E.
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
✓
Use cross-region replication for data stores.
Cross-region replication for data stores ensures that data is continuously synchronized to a secondary AWS region, minimizing Recovery Point Objective (RPO) to near-zero and reducing Recovery Time Objective (RTO) as the data is already available in the DR region. This approach avoids the need to restore from backups, which would increase RTO and potentially lose recent transactions.
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 cross-region replication for data stores.
Why this is correct
Cross-region replication for data stores, such as Amazon S3 CRR, DynamoDB global tables, or Aurora Global Database, synchronizes data between regions automatically, typically with sub-minute RPO. This ensures that when a regional failure occurs, the application can fail over to the DR region with minimal data loss, making it a strong foundation for a multi-region DR strategy. Because replication is continuous rather than point-in-time, it provides a much lower RPO than backup and restore, and it often pairs with per-region compute stacks to achieve low RTO.
- ✗
Use a passive standby in a single Availability Zone.
Why it's wrong here
A passive standby deployed in a single Availability Zone is still confined to one region; if that entire region experiences an outage, the standby is unavailable just like the primary. This architecture does not meet multi-region DR objectives because it provides neither AZ independence (if the AZ fails) nor regional isolation. For true disaster recovery, you need at least two regions, with the standby able to take over traffic, rather than a single-AZ deployment that remains dependent on the same regional failure domain.
- ✗
Perform periodic backups and restore in the DR region.
Why it's wrong here
Performing periodic backups and restoring them in the DR region is a common DR approach, but it involves exporting snapshots (e.g., RDS snapshots, EBS snapshots) and rebuilding the infrastructure, which can take hours. This results in both high RTO (time to recover) and high RPO (data loss up to the last backup interval), often on the order of hours to a day. While it is cost-effective for non-critical workloads, it does not meet low-RPO requirements and is not a true continuous replication strategy.
- ✗
Configure cross-region read replicas for the database.
Why it's wrong here
Cross-region read replicas for Amazon RDS are primarily designed to offload read traffic and improve read latency, not to serve as a disaster recovery mechanism. They replicate data asynchronously, so replication lag can result in significant data loss if you promote a replica during a failure, and the promotion process is manual and requires operational intervention (e.g., using the promote command). Moreover, read replicas are read-only, so they cannot accept writes until promoted, making failover slow and not automated, which is why they are not a recommended DR solution.
- ✓
Deploy an active-active workload using Route 53 weighted routing.
Why this is correct
Deploying an active-active workload with Route 53 weighted routing means that multiple regions are simultaneously serving production traffic, with weights controlling the proportion of requests. If one region fails, Route 53 health checks automatically reroute traffic to the remaining healthy region, achieving near-zero failover time and essentially no RTO. However, this requires the application to be designed for multi-region operation, including handling data consistency and conflict resolution, so it is a viable but more complex DR pattern compared to simple replication.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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