SOA-C02 Reliability and Business Continuity Practice Question
A SysOps administrator is designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical RDS MySQL database. The database must be available with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 1 hour and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 2 hours. The primary region is us-east-1. Which solution meets these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Multi-AZ (high availability within a region) with cross-region disaster recovery, or assume that automated backups or manual snapshots can be restored quickly enough to meet aggressive RPO/RTO targets, ignoring the time required for cross-region data transfer and restore operations.
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 in under 2 hours, and the replication lag is typically less than 1 hour, meeting both RPO and RTO requirements. This solution provides continuous asynchronous replication from the primary region, ensuring minimal data loss and fast failover without needing to restore from backups.
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 Multi-AZ deployment in the primary region
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ deployment maintains a synchronous standby in a different Availability Zone, not a different Region. It is designed for high availability within the primary Region, automatically failing over to the standby if the primary instance or its AZ becomes unavailable. Because both the primary and standby reside in us-west-2 (or whatever the primary Region is), a regional disaster would take down both copies, leaving you without any resilient copy to fail over to. Thus, Multi-AZ is an HA feature, not a cross-Region DR solution.
- ✗
Enable automated backups and restore to a new region when needed
Why it's wrong here
Automated backups are stored in the same Region as the source DB instance. While you can copy a snapshot to another Region, that manually initiated copy must complete before a restore can begin, and the restore itself involves provisioning a new instance and applying all changes, which can take tens of minutes to hours depending on the database size. That process is far too slow to meet a strict recovery time objective, and automated backup retention is typically limited (e.g., 35 days) rather than a continuously available cross-Region standby.
- ✗
Take daily manual snapshots and copy them to another region
Why it's wrong here
Taking manual snapshots once per day and copying them to another Region yields a point-in-time recovery objective of up to 24 hours — meaning you could lose an entire day's data. Even if the cross-Region snapshot copy is pre-staged, a restore from snapshot must still be performed, which is not a failover but a full restore of a backup and therefore takes significant time. This fails the RPO requirement because the most recent consistent recovery point could be nearly 24 hours old, and it also adds restore time to the RTO.
- ✓
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 in us-west-2 uses RDS's asynchronous replication from the primary DB instance, which typically incurs only seconds of lag. Because the replica is already hydrated with data, promoting it via the 'Promote Read Replica' operation is a single metadata change that transitions it to a standalone writable instance, avoiding the time-consuming restore of a backup. This makes it the only option that can satisfy a tight RTO while also offering a very low RPO (near-real-time) under normal operation.
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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.