Cross-Region Disaster Recovery Components
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.)
Quick Answer
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.
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers 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.
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
✓
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.
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.
- ✓
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.
- ✗
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.
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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 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: AWS Global Accelerator provides static IP addresses and routes traffic to the optimal endpoint across regions, supporting active-passive failover for multi-region disaster recovery. Option E is correct because Amazon Route 53 with a failover routing policy and health checks can monitor the primary ALB's health and automatically route traffic to a secondary ALB in another region if the primary fails. Option A is wrong because RDS Multi-AZ only provides high availability within a single region, not cross-region disaster recovery. Option B is wrong because Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network, not designed for regional failover routing; it can distribute content but does not provide active-passive failover across regions. Option C is wrong because Auto Scaling groups are for scaling compute capacity within a region, not for cross-region failover.
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.