SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a new multi-region disaster recovery solution for a critical database. The database runs on Amazon RDS for MySQL in us-east-1. The recovery point objective (RPO) is 1 second, and the recovery time objective (RTO) is 1 minute. Which strategy meets these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates assume Amazon Aurora Global Database is the best choice for low RPO/RTO, but for RDS for MySQL, the cross-Region read replica is the correct service, and Aurora Global Database has a slightly higher RTO due to the failover process, making it unsuitable for a 1-minute RTO.
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
✓
Multi-AZ RDS instance with a cross-Region read replica in us-west-2
A Multi-AZ RDS instance with a cross-Region read replica in us-west-2 can achieve an RPO of 1 second and an RTO of 1 minute. The cross-Region read replica uses asynchronous replication with a typical lag of less than 1 second, meeting the RPO. For RTO, you can promote the read replica to a standalone instance in under a minute, and the Multi-AZ configuration in the primary region ensures high availability during the promotion process.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Single-AZ RDS instance with cross-Region snapshot copy
Why it's wrong here
RPO is hours (snapshot interval), RTO is minutes to restore.
- ✗
Multi-AZ RDS instance in us-east-1
Why it's wrong here
Does not provide cross-Region failover.
- ✓
Multi-AZ RDS instance with a cross-Region read replica in us-west-2
Why this is correct
Synchronous replication within region, asynchronous to replica, fast failover.
- ✗
Amazon Aurora Global Database
Why it's wrong here
Aurora Global Database is for Aurora, not RDS MySQL.
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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.