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 for point-in-time recovery, not failover.
- ✓
Enable Multi-AZ deployment.
Why this is correct
Multi-AZ provides automatic failover to a standby in another AZ.
- ✗
Take manual snapshots and copy them to another Region.
Why it's wrong here
Snapshots require manual restoration and do not provide automatic failover.
- ✗
Create a read replica in a different Availability Zone.
Why it's wrong here
Read replicas are not used for automatic failover.
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JA
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.