SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a new application that will be deployed on EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones. The application must be highly available and must automatically recover from instance failures. Which solution should the architect recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse 'high availability' with 'fault tolerance' and assume that simply having two instances in different AZs (Option C) is sufficient, but without an auto-recovery mechanism like Auto Scaling, a failed instance remains down and requires manual remediation.
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 an Auto Scaling group with a minimum of two instances across two Availability Zones
An Auto Scaling group with a minimum of two instances across two Availability Zones ensures that if one instance or an entire AZ fails, the remaining instance continues to serve traffic, and Auto Scaling automatically launches a replacement instance to restore the desired count. This architecture provides both high availability and automatic recovery from instance failures without manual intervention.
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 a single EC2 instance in one AZ and a standby instance in another AZ
Why it's wrong here
A single instance with a standby in another AZ provides no automatic failover; recovery requires manual intervention or a script, so instance failure is not handled automatically. It is tempting because cross-AZ standby is a recognised DR pattern, and would be correct for cost-sensitive workloads tolerating manual recovery, not automatic HA.
- ✗
Use AWS Elastic Beanstalk with a single instance environment
Why it's wrong here
A single-instance Elastic Beanstalk environment runs one EC2 instance with no load balancer or Auto Scaling group, so an instance failure is not automatically recovered. It is tempting because Beanstalk handles deployment and platform configuration, and would be correct for development or low-traffic environments, not production HA.
- ✗
Use AWS CloudFormation to launch a single instance in each AZ
Why it's wrong here
CloudFormation launches the instances once but does not monitor or replace them; a failed instance stays failed until the stack is updated or re-run. It is tempting because CloudFormation gives repeatable, versioned infrastructure provisioning, and would be correct for standardised deployments, not for automatic instance recovery.
- ✓
Use an Auto Scaling group with a minimum of two instances across two Availability Zones
Why this is correct
An Auto Scaling group spanning two Availability Zones with a minimum of two instances provides both multi-AZ redundancy and automatic replacement of failed instances. This directly satisfies the high availability and automatic failure recovery requirements for the EC2 deployment.
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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.