SOA-C02 Reliability and Business Continuity Practice Question
A company runs a critical application on Amazon EC2 instances with data stored on Amazon EBS volumes. The SysOps administrator needs to implement a backup strategy that supports point-in-time recovery with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 hour and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 4 hours. Which solution meets these requirements with the least operational overhead?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to choose DLM (Option B) because it can schedule snapshots, but they overlook the operational overhead of manually creating a CloudFormation template for recovery, whereas AWS Backup provides a fully managed restore workflow that meets the least operational overhead requirement.
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 AWS Backup to schedule hourly EBS snapshots and restore to a new volume when needed.
AWS Backup provides a fully managed, policy-based backup service that can schedule EBS snapshots hourly, meeting the 1-hour RPO. Restoring from an AWS Backup snapshot to a new EBS volume and attaching it to an EC2 instance can be completed within the 4-hour RTO, with minimal operational overhead as it eliminates the need for custom scripts or lifecycle management.
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 AWS Backup to schedule hourly EBS snapshots and restore to a new volume when needed.
Why this is correct
AWS Backup offers a fully managed, policy-based backup service that can create hourly EBS snapshots automatically. It provides centralized backup governance, retention management, and lifecycle policies, with the ability to restore a snapshot to a new EBS volume quickly. This minimizes RTO because restore is a native AWS operation and does not require custom scripting or additional orchestration.
- ✗
Use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) to take hourly snapshots and create an AWS CloudFormation template to launch a new instance from the snapshot.
Why it's wrong here
DLM can schedule hourly EBS snapshots, but it is a snapshot lifecycle automation tool only and does not include restore automation. Building a CloudFormation template to launch an instance from a snapshot adds complexity, because you must manually define resource mappings, handle snapshot IDs, and manage the stack update/creation process. Additionally, DLM lacks centralized backup policies, cross-account monitoring, and audit capabilities that AWS Backup provides, increasing operational overhead and making recovery less reliable.
- ✗
Use custom scripts to copy snapshots to an Amazon S3 bucket and restore from there.
Why it's wrong here
Writing custom scripts to copy snapshots to S3 and restore from them is fragile and inefficient. Snapshots are stored in Amazon S3 internally by AWS, but copying them to user-visible S3 buckets requires using the snapshot export API, which is asynchronous and not intended as a backup/recovery path. This approach must handle snapshot export, import, and volume creation manually, introducing significant risk of script failure, data corruption, and extended RTO, and it duplicates AWS Backup's existing capabilities without the managed compliance features.
- ✗
Use Amazon S3 Lifecycle policies to transition data to Amazon S3 Glacier.
Why it's wrong here
S3 Lifecycle policies apply only to objects in Amazon S3, not to EBS snapshots, which are AWS-managed entities stored as block-based snapshots. They can transition S3 objects to Glacier for archival, but do not provide point-in-time recovery for EBS volumes. Using this method would require first exporting snapshots to S3 objects (not a native restore mechanism), and then Lifecycle policies would only manage storage tiering, not recovery. It does not meet the RTO requirement and is conceptually incorrect for snapshot management.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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