SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
A company has a monolithic application running on a single Amazon EC2 instance. The application stores data on an instance store volume. The company wants to improve availability and disaster recovery with minimal architectural changes. What is the MOST cost-effective solution?
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
✓
Replace the instance store volume with an Amazon EBS volume, create an AMI, and use Auto Scaling with an Application Load Balancer.
The most cost-effective solution with minimal architectural changes. By replacing the ephemeral instance store with an EBS volume, the data becomes persistent. Then creating an AMI and using Auto Scaling with an Application Load Balancer provides high availability and disaster recovery automatically. Option B only adds backups but does not provide high availability, and restoring from snapshots is slower. Option C, AWS Backup, cannot back up instance store data directly, so it is ineffective. Option D provides high availability but still uses instance store, so data is lost on instance failure; it also does not address data persistence. Therefore, Option A is correct.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Replace the instance store volume with an Amazon EBS volume, create an AMI, and use Auto Scaling with an Application Load Balancer.
Why this is correct
EBS provides persistent storage, and Auto Scaling with ALB improves availability and disaster recovery.
- ✗
Attach an Amazon EBS volume and configure the application to write to it, then take periodic EBS snapshots.
Why it's wrong here
This requires architectural changes but does not provide automatic failover.
- ✗
Use AWS Backup to schedule backups of the instance and restore to a new instance if needed.
Why it's wrong here
AWS Backup does not support instance store volumes.
- ✗
Create an AMI from the instance and launch a second instance in a different Availability Zone behind an Application Load Balancer.
Why it's wrong here
Instance store data is ephemeral; the AMI will not preserve data.
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