SOA-C02 Reliability and Business Continuity Practice Question
A SysOps administrator is designing a disaster recovery plan for a web application. The application runs on EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone. What is the FIRST step to improve availability?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is that candidates often jump to adding a load balancer or database redundancy first, overlooking that the most fundamental step to improve availability is to eliminate the single point of failure at the compute layer by distributing instances across multiple Availability Zones.
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
✓
Deploy EC2 instances in at least two Availability Zones.
The application currently runs on EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone, which creates a single point of failure. The first step to improve availability is to eliminate this zone-level failure by deploying EC2 instances in at least two Availability Zones, as this provides fault isolation against an AZ outage. This foundational change directly addresses the root cause of the availability risk before adding other components like load balancers or database replication.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Deploy EC2 instances in at least two Availability Zones.
Why this is correct
Distributing EC2 instances across at least two Availability Zones ensures that the application layer remains operational even if an entire AZ experiences an outage, because each AZ is an isolated failure domain with independent power, networking, and cooling. This architecture allows a load balancer or DNS failover to route traffic to healthy instances in the remaining AZs, making it the foundational step for a resilient disaster recovery design that protects compute resources.
- ✗
Use an Application Load Balancer to distribute traffic.
Why it's wrong here
An Application Load Balancer is a regional service that distributes incoming traffic across targets, but it cannot create redundancy on its own; if all EC2 instances are placed in a single Availability Zone and that AZ fails, the ALB has no healthy targets to forward requests to, resulting in total application downtime. While the ALB can perform health checks and reroute traffic, it only works as intended when there are healthy instances in multiple AZs, so relying solely on the ALB does not satisfy disaster recovery requirements for compute availability.
- ✗
Enable Multi-AZ for the RDS database.
Why it's wrong here
Enabling Multi-AZ for an RDS database provides a synchronous standby replica in a different Availability Zone, which protects the database tier by enabling automatic failover during an AZ disruption or database instance failure. However, this does nothing to protect the EC2 instances running the application; if those instances are deployed in a single AZ and that AZ goes down, the application itself becomes unreachable even though the database remains available, so this measure alone is insufficient for a comprehensive disaster recovery plan.
- ✗
Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution for the application.
Why it's wrong here
Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network that caches static assets at edge locations, which improves latency and reduces load on the origin, but it does not provide compute redundancy or failover for dynamic application requests. If the application origin (EC2 instances) experiences an outage, CloudFront can still serve cached content, but any uncached or dynamic requests will fail because the origin is unavailable, so it cannot protect against compute failure and is not a substitute for deploying instances across multiple Availability Zones.
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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.