SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  Deploy the web and application tiers in a single Availability Zone with a larger instance size to reduce the chance of failure.

  Why it's wrong here

  Using a larger instance size in a single Availability Zone does not protect against an Availability Zone failure. If that zone becomes unavailable, the entire application becomes unavailable. This approach increases cost without providing the required fault tolerance. It fails to meet the requirement to withstand the failure of a single Availability Zone, and it does not minimize operational overhead for recovery.

• ✗

  Use Amazon Route 53 with a latency-based routing policy to distribute traffic across multiple Regions.

  Why it's wrong here

  Latency-based routing across multiple Regions can improve performance and provide disaster recovery, but it is not necessary to withstand a single Availability Zone failure. It adds complexity and cost, and it does not directly address automatic database failover. The requirement is to survive an AZ failure with minimal operational overhead, which is better achieved by multi-AZ deployments within a single Region.

• ✓

  Deploy the database tier on Amazon RDS with a Multi-AZ configuration.

  Why this is correct

  Amazon RDS Multi-AZ maintains a synchronous standby replica in a different Availability Zone and automatically fails over to it if the primary fails. This meets the requirement for automatic database failover and AZ resilience. It requires minimal operational effort because AWS manages replication and failover. It is the standard solution for high availability of relational databases on AWS.

• ✗

  Deploy the database tier on Amazon EC2 instances with a primary and standby replica, and use a third-party clustering solution for automatic failover.

  Why it's wrong here

  Running a self-managed database cluster on EC2 requires significant operational overhead for setup, patching, monitoring, and failover orchestration. While it can achieve high availability, it does not minimize operational overhead as required. Additionally, it is more complex and error-prone than using a managed service like Amazon RDS Multi-AZ. This option is not recommended for the given requirements.

• ✓

  Deploy the web and application tiers across multiple Availability Zones using an Auto Scaling group and an Application Load Balancer.

  Why this is correct

  Distributing the web and application tiers across multiple Availability Zones with an Auto Scaling group and an Application Load Balancer ensures that if one Availability Zone fails, the load balancer routes traffic to healthy instances in the remaining zones. This provides high availability and fault tolerance with minimal operational overhead because Auto Scaling and the load balancer manage health checks and replacement automatically.

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