The answer is Amazon Route 53 with a failover routing policy, Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployment with a cross-Region read replica, and an application deployment in a second AWS Region. These three components form the core of cross-region disaster recovery because Route 53’s failover routing policy provides DNS-based health checking and automatic traffic redirection to a secondary region when the primary fails, while the cross-Region RDS read replica ensures database continuity by replicating data asynchronously across regions, and deploying the application stack in a second region guarantees compute and networking resources are ready to serve traffic. On the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional DOP-C02 exam, this scenario tests your ability to distinguish between high-availability features within a single region versus true multi-region resilience—a common trap is selecting a single-region Multi-AZ deployment alone, which protects against AZ failure but not a full region outage. Remember the mnemonic “R3” for cross-region DR: Route 53, RDS replica, and a second Region.
DOP-C02 Resilient Cloud Solutions Practice Question
This DOP-C02 practice question tests your understanding of resilient cloud solutions. Match the stated requirement to the specific cloud service, access model, or configuration option — many options are valid in isolation but not for this scenario. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
A company wants to design a highly available web application using AWS services. The application must be resilient to the failure of an entire AWS Region. Which THREE components should the architecture include? (Choose THREE.)
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Amazon Route 53 with a failover routing policy.
Amazon Route 53 with a failover routing policy is correct because it enables DNS-based health checking and automatic traffic routing to a secondary region when the primary region becomes unavailable. This is essential for cross-region disaster recovery, as Route 53 can monitor endpoint health and update DNS records to direct users to the healthy region, ensuring application availability despite a full region failure.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
✗
An Application Load Balancer (ALB) deployed in one Region.
Why it's wrong here
An ALB is regional and cannot route traffic across Regions; you need a global load balancer.
✓
Amazon Route 53 with a failover routing policy.
Why this is correct
Failover routing directs traffic to a secondary Region if the primary fails.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✓
Auto Scaling groups in each Region with appropriate instance types.
Why this is correct
Auto Scaling ensures that the application can handle traffic in each Region.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
Amazon EC2 instances in a single Region.
Why it's wrong here
Instances in a single Region are vulnerable to Region failure.
✓
Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployment with a cross-Region read replica.
Why this is correct
Cross-Region read replicas provide disaster recovery across Regions.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates often confuse Multi-AZ deployments (which provide high availability within a single Region) with cross-Region disaster recovery, and they may incorrectly assume that a single-Region ALB or EC2 instances can survive a full Region failure without a multi-Region architecture.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Route 53 failover routing policy works by associating a primary and secondary resource record set with health checks; when the primary endpoint fails health checks (e.g., HTTP 5xx or connection timeout), Route 53 automatically returns the secondary record's IP address. The health checks are performed from multiple global locations every 30 seconds by default, and DNS TTL values (e.g., 60 seconds) control how quickly clients receive updated records, making failover effective within minutes. For cross-Region read replicas, Amazon RDS uses asynchronous replication with a typical lag of seconds, and in a disaster, you can promote the read replica to a standalone primary database, but this requires manual or automated promotion steps.
KKey Concepts to Remember
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
→Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
→Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
An e-commerce site experiences heavy traffic on Black Friday and near-zero traffic during off-peak weeks. Rather than provisioning permanent large VMs, the team uses auto-scaling groups that add capacity automatically under load and reduce it overnight. Questions like this test whether you understand elasticity, availability zones, and cloud compute scaling patterns.
What to study next
Got this wrong? Here's your next step.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Resilient Cloud Solutions — This question tests Resilient Cloud Solutions — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Amazon Route 53 with a failover routing policy. — Amazon Route 53 with a failover routing policy is correct because it enables DNS-based health checking and automatic traffic routing to a secondary region when the primary region becomes unavailable. This is essential for cross-region disaster recovery, as Route 53 can monitor endpoint health and update DNS records to direct users to the healthy region, ensuring application availability despite a full region failure.
What should I do if I get this DOP-C02 question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
About these practice questions
Courseiva creates original exam-style practice questions with explanations and wrong-answer analysis. It does not publish real exam questions, exam dumps, or protected exam content. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
Variation 1. A company is deploying a critical web application on AWS and needs to ensure high availability and disaster recovery across multiple AWS Regions. The application uses an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in the primary Region and an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB instance. Which TWO actions should the company take to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)
easy
A.Configure an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployment in a secondary Region.
B.Set up Amazon CloudFront with multiple origins pointing to each Region's ALB.
C.Create an Auto Scaling group in the secondary Region that automatically scales up when the primary fails.
✓ D.Use AWS Global Accelerator with endpoint groups in multiple Regions.
✓ E.Configure Amazon Route 53 with a failover routing policy and health checks.
Why D: Option B is correct because AWS Global Accelerator provides static IP addresses and routes traffic to the optimal endpoint across regions, supporting active-passive failover. Option E is correct because Route 53 health checks can monitor the primary ALB and automatically failover to a secondary ALB in another region. Option A is wrong because RDS Multi-AZ only provides high availability within a single region, not cross-region disaster recovery. Option C is wrong because Auto Scaling groups are for scaling within a region, not cross-region failover. Option D is wrong because CloudFront is a CDN, not designed for regional failover routing.
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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.
Question Discussion
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