SOA-C02 Reliability and Business Continuity Practice Question
A company has an Amazon DynamoDB table with on-demand capacity mode. The SysOps administrator needs to ensure that the table can survive a regional outage. The table is currently in us-east-1. Which feature should be configured to achieve regional resilience with minimal data loss?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse point-in-time recovery (PITR) with cross-Region disaster recovery, not realizing that PITR only protects against accidental deletes or corruption within a single Region, not a full regional outage.
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
✓
DynamoDB global tables
DynamoDB global tables provide multi-Region, fully replicated tables that automatically propagate writes to all configured Regions, enabling the table to survive a regional outage with minimal data loss. This feature uses DynamoDB Streams to replicate data asynchronously across Regions, offering recovery point objectives (RPO) of typically under one second. For the requirement of regional resilience, global tables are the correct choice because they maintain active copies in multiple AWS Regions.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)
Why it's wrong here
Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is an in-memory cache that sits in front of a DynamoDB table, reducing read latency from single-digit milliseconds to microseconds. However, DAX maintains its cached data only within the same Region and does not propagate writes or cached items to other Regions. During a regional outage, both the cache and the underlying table become unavailable, and DAX offers no mechanism for failover or data replication, so it does not satisfy disaster recovery requirements.
- ✓
DynamoDB global tables
Why this is correct
DynamoDB global tables replicate your table automatically across multiple AWS Regions using DynamoDB Streams, creating a multi-active, fully managed solution. In the event of a regional outage, applications can read and write to the table in another Region with minimal downtime because each replica is independently accessible. Global tables use last-writer-wins conflict resolution to reconcile concurrent updates, providing eventual consistency and effectively meeting disaster recovery needs with a low RTO and RPO.
- ✗
DynamoDB point-in-time recovery
Why it's wrong here
Point-in-time recovery (PITR) continuously backs up a DynamoDB table within the same Region, enabling you to restore it to any second during the last 35 days. However, PITR does not replicate live data to another Region; a restore operation creates a new table in the same Region and requires manual action. Because there is no automatic traffic failover or cross-Region copy, PITR alone cannot keep a workload available during a regional outage.
- ✗
DynamoDB auto scaling
Why it's wrong here
DynamoDB auto scaling adjusts provisioned read and write capacity in response to actual traffic, using target utilization policies to scale capacity up or down. This feature is only applicable to tables in provisioned capacity mode and affects performance, not data placement or durability. Auto scaling does not copy data to other Regions and provides no failover capability, so it cannot serve as a disaster recovery mechanism.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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