PAS-C01 Operations and Maintenance Practice Question
This PAS-C01 practice question tests your understanding of operations and maintenance. Read the scenario carefully and evaluate each option against the stated constraints before committing to an answer. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
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?
Clue words in this question
Noticing these words before you look at the options changes how you read each choice.
Clue: "minimum / minimize"
Why it matters: Asks for the least resource use — fewest addresses, smallest subnet, lowest overhead. Eliminate over-provisioned options even if they would technically work.
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.
Option A is correct because 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.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
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.
Clue confirmation
The clue word "minimum / minimize" in the question point toward this answer.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✓
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.
Clue confirmation
The clue word "minimum / minimize" in the question point toward this answer.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
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.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates may 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.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Automated EBS snapshots use incremental block-level backups, and copying them to a secondary region leverages AWS's cross-region snapshot copy feature, which encrypts data in transit and at rest. For RDS Multi-AZ, enabling cross-region read replicas (Option B) allows asynchronous replication to a secondary region, and promoting the replica to a master can achieve a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of seconds to minutes, depending on replication lag. This combination of EBS snapshots for EC2 and RDS cross-region replicas addresses both compute and database layers for a comprehensive DR plan.
KKey Concepts to Remember
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
→Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
→Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
A cloud solutions architect for a retail company is evaluating services for a new workload. The correct answer here reflects best practice for the specific scenario described — not a general cloud recommendation. Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option. Cloud exam questions reward reading the constraint carefully: the same technology can be right or wrong depending on the use case.
What to study next
Got this wrong? Here's your next step.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Operations and Maintenance — This question tests Operations and Maintenance — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Configure automated EBS snapshots for EC2 instances and copy them to a secondary region. — Option A is correct because 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.
What should I do if I get this PAS-C01 question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Are there clue words in this question I should notice?
Yes — watch for: "minimum / minimize". Asks for the least resource use — fewest addresses, smallest subnet, lowest overhead. Eliminate over-provisioned options even if they would technically work.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Question Discussion
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