SOA-C02 Reliability and Business Continuity Practice Question
A company wants to ensure that its Amazon RDS database can withstand the loss of an entire Availability Zone. Which feature should the SysOps administrator enable?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse a read replica with a Multi-AZ standby, assuming that a read replica in a different AZ can be promoted for failover, but read replicas are asynchronous and require manual promotion, whereas Multi-AZ provides automatic synchronous failover.
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
✓
Enable Multi-AZ deployment.
Multi-AZ deployment for Amazon RDS automatically provisions and maintains a synchronous standby replica in a different Availability Zone. If the primary AZ fails, Amazon RDS automatically fails over to the standby, ensuring database availability without manual intervention. This is the only option that directly protects against an entire AZ loss by maintaining a hot standby in a separate AZ.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Enable automated backups with a retention period of 35 days.
Why it's wrong here
Automated backups are stored in Amazon S3 and do not provide a standby replica in another Availability Zone, so they cannot survive an AZ loss. They are tempting because retention protects against data corruption, and would be correct for point-in-time recovery, not AZ resilience.
- ✓
Enable Multi-AZ deployment.
Why this is correct
Multi-AZ deployment maintains a synchronous standby replica in a separate Availability Zone, enabling automatic failover if one AZ is lost. This directly satisfies the requirement to survive an entire Availability Zone failure without manual intervention.
- ✗
Take manual snapshots and copy them to another Region.
Why it's wrong here
Manual snapshots copied to another Region provide cross-Region disaster recovery with a restoration delay measured in minutes or hours, not automatic failover within a Region. They suit regional disaster recovery or compliance retention rather than single-AZ resilience.
- ✗
Create a read replica in a different Availability Zone.
Why it's wrong here
A read replica in a different AZ serves read traffic and can be promoted, but promotion is manual and asynchronous, so it is not automatic AZ-failure resilience. Read replicas are intended for offloading read-heavy workloads and reducing primary load.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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