- A
Use a larger instance type to handle more traffic.
Why wrong: Larger instances do not protect against AZ failure.
- B
Enable EC2 Auto Recovery to automatically restart the instance if it fails.
Why wrong: Auto Recovery works within the same AZ; if the AZ fails, the instance remains unavailable.
- C
Deploy EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones using an Auto Scaling group.
Multi-AZ deployment ensures application availability even if one AZ fails.
- D
Place the instance in a placement group to ensure low latency.
Why wrong: Placement groups are for performance, not resilience.
Question 549 of 1,750
Improve Resilience with Multi-AZ Deployment
This DOP-C02 practice question tests your understanding of resilient cloud solutions. Read the scenario carefully and evaluate each option against the stated constraints before committing to an answer. 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's application runs on EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone. The operations team wants to improve resilience without redesigning the application. Which action is the MOST effective?
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
✓
Deploy EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones using an Auto Scaling group.
Deploying EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) using an Auto Scaling group is the most effective action because it eliminates the single point of failure at the AZ level. If one AZ experiences an outage, the Auto Scaling group automatically launches replacement instances in the remaining healthy AZs, ensuring application availability without requiring any application-level changes. This directly addresses the goal of improving resilience by leveraging AWS's fault-isolated infrastructure.
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.
- ✗
Use a larger instance type to handle more traffic.
Why it's wrong here
Larger instances do not protect against AZ failure.
- ✗
Enable EC2 Auto Recovery to automatically restart the instance if it fails.
Why it's wrong here
Auto Recovery works within the same AZ; if the AZ fails, the instance remains unavailable.
- ✓
Deploy EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones using an Auto Scaling group.
Why this is correct
Multi-AZ deployment ensures application availability even if one AZ fails.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
- ✗
Place the instance in a placement group to ensure low latency.
Why it's wrong here
Placement groups are for performance, not resilience.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates often confuse instance-level recovery (Auto Recovery) with infrastructure-level resilience (multi-AZ deployment), mistakenly thinking that restarting a failed instance in the same AZ provides sufficient protection against the most common cause of downtime—an AZ outage.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Under the hood, an Auto Scaling group with a multi-AZ configuration uses the Amazon EC2 health check mechanism and the group's minimum/maximum/desired capacity settings to maintain instance count across AZs. When an AZ fails, the Auto Scaling group detects the unhealthy instances via EC2 status checks or Elastic Load Balancing health checks and launches new instances in the remaining AZs, respecting the AZ rebalancing logic. This approach leverages the fact that each AZ is a physically separate, isolated location with independent power, cooling, and networking, so a failure in one does not affect others.
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.
- →
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FAQ
Questions learners often ask
What does this DOP-C02 question test?
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: Deploy EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones using an Auto Scaling group. — Deploying EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) using an Auto Scaling group is the most effective action because it eliminates the single point of failure at the AZ level. If one AZ experiences an outage, the Auto Scaling group automatically launches replacement instances in the remaining healthy AZs, ensuring application availability without requiring any application-level changes. This directly addresses the goal of improving resilience by leveraging AWS's fault-isolated infrastructure.
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 →
Same concept, more angles
1 more ways 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 has a stateless web application on EC2 instances behind an ALB. They want to ensure that if an entire Availability Zone fails, the application remains available with minimal impact. Which architecture best meets this requirement?
hard- A.Use a global secondary index in DynamoDB to replicate data across regions
- B.Deploy EC2 instances in two AZs but use a single-AZ ALB
- ✓ C.Deploy the application in two AZs with an Auto Scaling group and an ALB that is enabled for multiple AZs
- D.Deploy the application in a single AZ with an Auto Scaling group that launches instances in the same AZ
Why C: Option C is correct because deploying EC2 instances in two AZs with an Auto Scaling group and a multi-AZ ALB ensures that if one AZ fails, the ALB can route traffic to healthy instances in the other AZ, providing high availability with minimal impact. Option A is incorrect: a global secondary index in DynamoDB is used to improve query performance, not to provide compute-layer high availability; the application is stateless on EC2, so resilience depends on the compute and load balancer layer. Option B is incorrect: although EC2 instances are in two AZs, a single-AZ ALB is a single point of failure; if that AZ fails, the ALB becomes unavailable. Option D is incorrect: deploying in a single AZ creates a single point of failure; Auto Scaling within that AZ cannot recover from an AZ failure.
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Last reviewed: Jun 11, 2026
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