DOP-C02 Resilient Cloud Solutions Practice Question
A company wants to automate the recovery of an Amazon RDS DB instance in a different region if the primary region becomes unavailable. Which service should they use?
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
✓
RDS cross-region automated backups.
RDS cross-region automated backups can be restored to a different region. Option A is incorrect because RDS Multi-AZ only provides failover within the same region. Option C is incorrect because read replicas can be promoted but require manual intervention. Option D is incorrect because RDS does not support CloudFormation for automated recovery across regions.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
RDS Multi-AZ deployment.
Why it's wrong here
RDS Multi-AZ deployment replicates data synchronously to a standby instance in another Availability Zone within the same region. Although failover to the standby is automatic, it only protects against AZ-level failures; it does not provide regional resilience or the ability to restore data into a separate AWS Region after a region-wide disaster. Multi-AZ is therefore a high-availability mechanism, not a disaster-recovery automation for cross-region restoration.
- ✓
RDS cross-region automated backups.
Why this is correct
RDS cross-region automated backups continuously copy automated backups and applicable transaction logs from the source DB instance to a destination AWS Region without manual intervention. This allows the database to be restored to a specific point in time, or to the latest restorable time, in the secondary region, making recovery from a regional outage repeatable and largely automated. Because the backups are managed by RDS and restored through the standard restore workflow, this option directly supports automated cross-region recovery.
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RDS read replicas.
Why it's wrong here
An RDS read replica maintains asynchronous replication from the primary instance, and a cross-region replica can be manually promoted to a standalone primary. However, promotion requires an operator to trigger it, and because replication is asynchronous, the replica can lag behind the source and potentially lose data during failover. RDS also does not automatically update the application endpoint or manage the original source lifecycle when a replica is promoted, so a read replica alone does not provide automated recovery.
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AWS CloudFormation custom resource.
Why it's wrong here
AWS CloudFormation is an infrastructure-as-code service that defines and provisions AWS resources, not a managed RDS backup or recovery feature. A custom resource could be used to invoke Lambda or other logic to restore a database, but that is self-built orchestration and lacks RDS's native automated backup, retention, and point-in-time restore guarantees. Using CloudFormation custom resources for RDS recovery introduces unnecessary custom code and operational complexity without satisfying the requirement for automated native recovery.
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JA
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.