SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a new application on AWS that requires a highly available and fault-tolerant architecture. Which TWO design principles should they follow?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse data backup strategies (like EBS snapshots) with high availability design, or they mistakenly believe that a single large instance or a single-region storage approach is sufficient for fault tolerance, ignoring the need for redundancy and automated recovery.
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 Auto Scaling groups to automatically replace unhealthy instances.
Auto Scaling groups can automatically replace unhealthy EC2 instances by performing health checks and launching new instances to maintain desired capacity, which is a core principle of fault-tolerant design. Option B is correct because deploying across multiple Availability Zones ensures that if one AZ fails, the application continues to operate from another AZ, providing high availability and fault tolerance.
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 Auto Scaling groups to automatically replace unhealthy instances.
Why this is correct
Auto Scaling helps maintain desired capacity.
- ✓
Deploy application across multiple Availability Zones.
Why this is correct
Increases availability by distributing across AZs.
- ✗
Manually create EBS snapshots every day.
Why it's wrong here
Manual snapshots are not automated and do not provide high availability.
- ✗
Store data in a single Amazon S3 bucket in one Region.
Why it's wrong here
Single Region may not be fault-tolerant.
- ✗
Use a single large EC2 instance to simplify management.
Why it's wrong here
A single large EC2 instance creates a single point of failure; if the instance fails or the underlying hardware experiences an outage, the application becomes unavailable, directly violating the requirement for fault tolerance. This option is tempting because consolidating workloads onto one large instance reduces operational overhead and licensing costs, and it would be correct for a non-critical application where simplicity and cost control are prioritised over resilience.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This SAP-C02 question is part of Courseiva's 1,660-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
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.