PAS-C01 Operations and Maintenance Practice Question
A company is designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical application running on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application uses an RDS Multi-AZ database. Which TWO actions should the operations team take to minimize recovery time and data loss?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to assume creating an AMI from a running instance (Option C) is sufficient for DR, but they overlook that it does not provide ongoing incremental replication, leading to significant data loss compared to automated EBS snapshots copied to a secondary region.
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
✓
Configure automated EBS snapshots for EC2 instances and copy them to a secondary region.
Automated EBS snapshots, when copied to a secondary region, provide a mechanism to restore EC2 instances and their data in the event of a regional failure. This minimizes recovery time by having the snapshots available in the DR region, and minimizes data loss by ensuring point-in-time backups are replicated off-site. The snapshots can be used to launch new instances or create AMIs in the secondary region, supporting the recovery of the Auto Scaling group.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Configure automated EBS snapshots for EC2 instances and copy them to a secondary region.
Why this is correct
Snapshots can be used to restore volumes in another region.
- ✓
Enable cross-region read replicas for the RDS database and promote to master if needed.
Why this is correct
Cross-region replicas reduce RPO and RTO.
- ✗
Create an AMI from a running instance and share it with the secondary region.
Why it's wrong here
Requires manual action and does not ensure data consistency.
- ✗
Use Route53 health checks to automatically failover traffic to a standby environment.
Why it's wrong here
Does not protect database data.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PAS-C01 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 PAS-C01 exam.