DOP-C02 Resilient Cloud Solutions Practice Question
A company runs a stateful application on EC2 instances with instance store volumes. The application requires low-latency access to data. The operations team needs to ensure that instance failure does not result in data loss. Which solution is MOST resilient?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates assume instance store volumes are inherently durable because they are fast, overlooking that they are ephemeral and tied to the instance lifecycle, while the correct solution uses a hybrid approach to combine performance with persistence.
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
✓
Replicate data in real time to an EBS volume and take periodic snapshots.
It combines the low-latency performance of instance store volumes with the durability of EBS snapshots. By replicating data in real time to an EBS volume, the application benefits from the instance store's speed while the EBS volume provides a persistent copy that survives instance failure. Periodic snapshots of the EBS volume add further resilience by enabling point-in-time recovery, ensuring data is not lost even if the instance or its instance store fails.
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 instance store volumes with RAID 1 across multiple instances.
Why it's wrong here
RAID 1 across multiple instances is not a valid durability strategy for instance store volumes because each instance store is physically attached to its own host and is ephemeral. If an instance is stopped, terminated, or the underlying hardware fails, the data on its local instance store is permanently lost, regardless of how many copies are mirrored elsewhere. True RAID across different hosts would require a separate network-level replication mechanism, and even then it would not change the fact that the local volumes themselves have no persistence guarantee.
- ✓
Replicate data in real time to an EBS volume and take periodic snapshots.
Why this is correct
Replicating application data in real time to an Amazon EBS volume gives you a persistent, network-attached copy that survives the EC2 instance's lifecycle. EBS volumes are independently replicated within an Availability Zone, so they remain available if the instance is stopped or terminated. Taking periodic EBS snapshots copies the volume to Amazon S3, providing point-in-time recovery points that can be restored in the same or a different Availability Zone, which protects against both instance failure and EBS volume loss.
- ✗
Use larger instance types with more instance store capacity.
Why it's wrong here
Choosing a larger instance type with more instance store capacity only increases the amount of temporary, host-attached storage available; it does nothing to make that storage durable. Whether you have 100 GB or 10 TB of instance store, all of it is erased on instance stop, termination, or hardware failure. The fundamental limitation is that instance store is ephemeral by design, so adding capacity simply means you will lose more data when the instance goes away, not that the data will survive.
- ✗
Create an AMI of the instance periodically to capture the data.
Why it's wrong here
An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) captures the block device configuration of the instance, but it does not capture data stored on instance store volumes. When you create an AMI, it snapshots the EBS-backed root volume and any other EBS volumes defined in the launch block device mappings, while instance store volumes are ignored because they cannot be imaged. Therefore, periodically creating an AMI would restore the operating system and EBS data but would miss the stateful application data on instance store, making it useless for recovery of that state.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DOP-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 DOP-C02 exam.