SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a disaster recovery architecture for a critical application. The primary region runs on Amazon EC2 with an RDS database. The recovery time objective (RTO) is 15 minutes, and recovery point objective (RPO) is 1 minute. Which TWO steps should be taken to meet these objectives?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently assume Multi-AZ alone is sufficient for cross-region DR, but Multi-AZ only protects against AZ failures within the same region, not a regional disaster, so a cross-region solution like Aurora Global Database is required to meet the RTO and RPO for a full region outage.
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 RDS Multi-AZ in the primary region.
RDS Multi-AZ provides automatic failover to a standby in a different Availability Zone within the same region, achieving an RTO typically under 1-2 minutes and an RPO of zero (synchronous replication). This meets the 15-minute RTO and 1-minute RPO for intra-region failures, but it does not address cross-region DR. Option B is correct because Amazon Aurora Global Database uses asynchronous replication with a typical RPO of 1 second or less and can promote a secondary region in under 1 minute, satisfying both the 15-minute RTO and 1-minute RPO for a full regional disaster.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Configure RDS Multi-AZ in the primary region.
Why this is correct
Multi-AZ provides automatic failover with low RTO.
- ✓
Deploy an Amazon Aurora Global Database with a secondary region.
Why this is correct
Aurora Global Database provides low RPO and RTO across regions.
- ✗
Pre-warm a standby EC2 instance in the DR region.
Why it's wrong here
EC2 warm standby alone does not address database failover.
- ✗
Take hourly snapshots of RDS and copy them to the DR region.
Why it's wrong here
Snapshot restore takes more than 15 minutes.
- ✗
Use Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication for application data.
Why it's wrong here
S3 CRR is for object storage, not database.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SAP-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 SAP-C02 exam.