SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A solutions architect is designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical application. The application runs on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in us-east-1. The recovery time objective (RTO) is 15 minutes, and the recovery point objective (RPO) is 1 hour. Which approach meets these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse pilot light with warm standby, assuming a minimal running stack can be scaled within 15 minutes, but pilot light typically requires provisioning compute and networking resources (e.g., launching EC2 instances, configuring ALB) which takes longer than the RTO, whereas warm standby already has those resources running in a scaled-down state.
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 a warm standby: maintain a scaled-down copy of the environment in us-west-2 that can be scaled up within 15 minutes.
A warm standby strategy meets the RTO of 15 minutes and RPO of 1 hour by maintaining a scaled-down copy of the environment in us-west-2 that can be rapidly scaled up to full production capacity. This approach ensures data replication (e.g., using Amazon RDS cross-Region replication or EBS snapshots) meets the 1-hour RPO, while the pre-provisioned but smaller infrastructure allows scaling within the 15-minute RTO, unlike a pilot light which requires more time to provision resources.
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 backup and restore: take hourly snapshots of EBS volumes and copy to us-west-2, then restore EC2 instances from snapshots.
Why it's wrong here
Restoring from snapshots takes longer than 15 minutes.
- ✗
Implement a pilot light strategy: replicate data to us-west-2 and keep a minimal stack running.
Why it's wrong here
Pilot light requires provisioning resources during failover, which may exceed 15 minutes.
- ✗
Deploy a multi-site active-active configuration with full capacity in both regions.
Why it's wrong here
This is costly and may not be necessary; also failover could be complex.
- ✓
Use a warm standby: maintain a scaled-down copy of the environment in us-west-2 that can be scaled up within 15 minutes.
Why this is correct
Warm standby allows quick scaling to full capacity within RTO.
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