DOP-C02 Resilient Cloud Solutions Practice Question
A DevOps engineer needs to ensure that an application running on EC2 can automatically recover from an underlying hardware failure without manual intervention. Which AWS feature should be enabled?
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 EC2 Auto Recovery with a CloudWatch alarm
EC2 Auto Recovery automatically recovers an instance when it becomes impaired due to underlying hardware failure, preserving its instance ID, private IP, and Elastic IP. Option A is incorrect because termination protection only prevents accidental deletion, not recovery. Option C is incorrect because an Auto Scaling group with a minimum size of 1 can replace a failed instance but launches a new instance rather than recovering the same one. Option D is incorrect because CloudWatch detailed monitoring provides more frequent metrics but does not trigger recovery actions.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Enable termination protection
Why it's wrong here
Termination protection is a lifecycle flag that only blocks user-initiated termination requests from the Console, CLI, or API. It provides no defense against AWS-side hardware failures, which can cause the instance's underlying physical host to become degraded and trigger an impromptu stop or retirement despite the flag. Therefore, it cannot restore the application automatically and leaves the instance exposed to downtime on hardware faults.
- ✓
Configure EC2 Auto Recovery with a CloudWatch alarm
Why this is correct
EC2 Auto Recovery uses a CloudWatch alarm on the StatusCheckFailed_System metric to detect underlying host or network failures. When the alarm triggers, EC2 automatically relaunches the same instance on a new physical host while preserving the instance ID, private and Elastic IP addresses, and attached EBS volumes. This in-place recovery requires the instance to be EBS-backed and in a VPC, making it the correct choice for restoring availability after hardware failure.
- ✗
Configure an Auto Scaling group with a minimum size of 1
Why it's wrong here
An Auto Scaling group with minimum size 1 provides replacement, not recovery. If the instance is terminated, the ASG launches a brand-new instance using the launch template, which gets a different instance ID and loses any instance store data, and it must go through bootstrapping before serving traffic again. It only responds to the group's health checks and does not begin until after termination, so it is not equivalent to an automatic in-place recovery that avoids IP or identity changes.
- ✗
Enable CloudWatch detailed monitoring
Why it's wrong here
CloudWatch detailed monitoring simply changes the metric collection interval from 5 minutes to 1 minute for metrics like CPUUtilization, network, and disk I/O. It cannot create alarms, execute remediation, or react to system health failures by itself; it only supplies more granular data for your dashboards and alarm calculations. Without an accompanying CloudWatch alarm configured with an Auto Recovery action, detailed monitoring has no effect on application availability.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This DOP-C02 question is part of Courseiva's 1,298-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
Same concept, more angles
1 more way this is tested on DOP-C02
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 runs a web application on EC2 instances behind an ALB. To improve resilience, they want to automatically re-register failed instances. Which solution meets this requirement?
medium- A.Set up a CloudWatch alarm to terminate the instance and notify an operator to re-register it.
- ✓ B.Enable EC2 instance recovery and configure ALB health checks to deregister unhealthy instances.
- C.Configure Auto Scaling to launch a new instance on instance failure.
- D.Use Route 53 health checks to detect failure and update DNS to remove the instance.
Why B: Enabling EC2 instance recovery automatically restarts the instance on a new healthy host if the underlying hardware fails, while ALB health checks detect application-level failures and deregister unhealthy instances from the target group. This combination ensures failed instances are automatically replaced in the load balancer's rotation without manual intervention, meeting the resilience requirement.
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.