SOA-C02 Reliability and Business Continuity Practice Question
A company is designing a disaster recovery strategy for its production database hosted on Amazon RDS for MySQL. The primary database is in us-east-1. The company requires an RPO of less than 5 minutes and an RTO of less than 1 hour in the event of a Regional failure. Which TWO actions should the company take to meet these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse Multi-AZ (which only protects against AZ failures within the same Region) with cross-Region disaster recovery, leading them to incorrectly select Option D as a solution for Regional failures.
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
✓
Create a cross-Region Read Replica in us-west-2 and promote it during a disaster.
A cross-Region Read Replica in us-west-2 can be promoted to a standalone primary database during a disaster, enabling failover with an RTO typically under 1 hour. The replication lag is usually seconds to a few minutes, meeting the RPO of less than 5 minutes. This approach provides a warm standby in another Region without requiring manual snapshot restores.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Take daily manual snapshots and copy them to us-west-2.
Why it's wrong here
Daily manual snapshots are captured only once every 24 hours, so the maximum interval between the last snapshot and a disaster is a full day, making the RPO at least 24 hours—far exceeding the sub-5-minute requirement. Copying the snapshot to us-west-2 also introduces additional delay because the copy job must complete before a restore can begin. This approach cannot provide continuous replication or automated point-in-time recovery, so it fails the stated recovery objective.
- ✓
Create a cross-Region Read Replica in us-west-2 and promote it during a disaster.
Why this is correct
A cross-Region Read Replica uses Amazon RDS's asynchronous replication to continuously stream transactions from the primary DB instance in the source Region to a read replica in us-west-2. In a disaster, you can promote the replica to a standalone primary instance within minutes, and the replication lag is typically well under 5 minutes when the network is healthy, meeting the RPO requirement. This gives you a warm standby database in the target Region, enabling fast failover without needing to restore from backups.
- ✓
Enable cross-Region automated backups.
Why this is correct
Cross-Region automated backups continuously take transaction logs and system snapshots and replicate them to a secondary Region—Amazon RDS stores these backups in us-west-2 and allows point-in-time recovery with an RPO of approximately 5 minutes. Unlike a read replica, this is not a live database endpoint, so recovery involves restoring a new DB instance from the backup, which takes longer than a promotion. However, the backups are fully managed and meet rigorous RPO targets, making this a valid disaster recovery strategy for lower-RTO-tolerant workloads.
- ✗
Enable Multi-AZ deployment for the RDS instance.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ deployment creates a synchronous standby replica in a different Availability Zone within the same AWS Region, but it does not replicate data to another geographic Region. A regional outage, such as a disaster affecting the entire Region, also takes down both the primary and the standby, so this configuration provides no cross-Region resilience. It protects against AZ-level failures and offers automatic failover, but it cannot satisfy a DR strategy that requires operating from us-west-2.
- ✗
Use a single-AZ RDS instance with automated backups.
Why it's wrong here
A single-AZ RDS instance with automated backups keeps the database and its backups within the same Region, so a Region-wide disaster would destroy the instance and leave the most recent backups inaccessible. Automated backups support point-in-time recovery to any second in the retention period with an RPO of roughly 5 minutes, but they are not automatically replicated to another Region. To restore from these backups, you would need to manually create a new DB instance in a different Region using a snapshot, which incurs significant RTO and does not provide a pre-provisioned standby.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SOA-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 SOA-C02 exam.