SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a multi-region disaster recovery solution for a stateful web application on Amazon EC2 with an Amazon Aurora MySQL database. The RPO must be less than 1 second and RTO less than 5 minutes. The application uses a custom TCP port 8080. What is the MOST cost-effective architecture?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse cross-region read replicas (which have asynchronous replication and manual failover) with Aurora Global Database (which provides near-synchronous replication and automated failover), leading them to choose Option C despite its inability to meet the strict RPO and RTO requirements.
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
✓
Use Amazon Aurora Global Database. Use Amazon Route 53 failover routing with a health check on port 8080.
Amazon Aurora Global Database provides cross-region replication with a typical lag of under 1 second, meeting the RPO requirement, and supports failover in under 1 minute, satisfying the RTO of less than 5 minutes. Combined with Route 53 failover routing and a health check on port 8080, this architecture enables rapid, automated traffic redirection to the secondary region without additional compute or storage costs beyond the Aurora storage and I/O.
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 Amazon RDS Multi-AZ with synchronous replication. Use Elastic Load Balancing with cross-zone load balancing.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ is within a single region, not multi-region DR.
- ✗
Use Amazon DynamoDB global tables. Use an Application Load Balancer in each region with Route 53 weighted routing.
Why it's wrong here
DynamoDB global tables are for NoSQL, not MySQL; weighted routing is not for failover.
- ✗
Use Amazon RDS for MySQL with a cross-region read replica. Use Amazon Route 53 failover routing with a health check on port 8080.
Why it's wrong here
Cross-region read replica RPO is typically seconds, not sub-second.
- ✓
Use Amazon Aurora Global Database. Use Amazon Route 53 failover routing with a health check on port 8080.
Why this is correct
Aurora Global Database offers sub-second replication; Route 53 failover routing provides fast DNS failover.
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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.