SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a disaster recovery solution for a critical application running on EC2 with data in an Amazon RDS MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. The recovery time objective (RTO) is 15 minutes and recovery point objective (RPO) is 1 hour. Which strategy meets these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Multi-AZ (which is Region-bound) with cross-Region disaster recovery, or they assume daily snapshots are sufficient for a 1-hour RPO, failing to recognize that snapshot frequency must match the RPO window.
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
✓
Create a cross-Region read replica of the RDS DB instance.
A cross-Region read replica of an Amazon RDS MySQL DB instance provides asynchronous replication with a typical replication lag of seconds to minutes, meeting the RPO of 1 hour and RTO of 15 minutes by promoting the replica to a standalone instance in the event of a disaster. This approach minimizes data loss and allows rapid failover without relying on snapshot restoration or backup copying.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Enable Multi-AZ in a different Region.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ is within a single Region.
- ✓
Create a cross-Region read replica of the RDS DB instance.
Why this is correct
Promoting a read replica can achieve RTO under 15 minutes and RPO under 1 hour.
- ✗
Take daily snapshots of the RDS DB instance and copy them to another Region.
Why it's wrong here
Daily snapshots do not meet RPO of 1 hour.
- ✗
Use Amazon S3 cross-Region replication for database backups.
Why it's wrong here
S3 replication does not apply to live RDS data.
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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.