SOA-C02 Reliability and Business Continuity Practice Question
This SOA-C02 practice question tests your understanding of reliability and business continuity. Match the stated requirement to the specific cloud service, access model, or configuration option — many options are valid in isolation but not for this scenario. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
An application uses an Amazon DynamoDB table with on-demand capacity. The SysOps administrator needs to ensure the table remains available during an AWS regional outage. Which strategy should be used?
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Use DynamoDB global tables.
DynamoDB global tables provide multi-region, multi-active replication, ensuring the table remains available during an AWS regional outage by automatically replicating data across selected AWS Regions. This is the only option that addresses regional fault tolerance by design, as it uses DynamoDB's built-in replication to maintain availability and data durability across regions.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
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 DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX).
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect. DAX is a cache that improves read performance but does not provide disaster recovery across regions.
✗
Create a read replica in another region.
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect. DynamoDB does not offer read replicas; the feature for multi-region replication is global tables.
✓
Use DynamoDB global tables.
Why this is correct
Correct. Global tables replicate data across multiple AWS Regions and provide automatic failover for high availability.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
Increase read and write capacity units.
Why it's wrong here
Incorrect. Capacity adjustment affects performance within a single region, not availability during a regional outage.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates often confuse read replicas (an RDS concept) with DynamoDB's global tables, or assume that DAX or scaling capacity can provide regional resilience, when in fact only global tables offer multi-region active-active replication for DynamoDB.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
DynamoDB global tables use a last-writer-wins (LWW) conflict resolution mechanism based on the timestamp of updates, and replication is asynchronous with a typical latency of under one second. Under the hood, each replica table is a fully independent DynamoDB table in its own region, and the service manages the replication stream using DynamoDB Streams with a global secondary index-like mechanism. In a real-world scenario, if the primary region fails, applications can be configured to fail over to another region by updating the DynamoDB client endpoint, and global tables ensure that data written before the outage is available in the replica region.
KKey Concepts to Remember
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
→Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
→Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
An e-commerce site experiences heavy traffic on Black Friday and near-zero traffic during off-peak weeks. Rather than provisioning permanent large VMs, the team uses auto-scaling groups that add capacity automatically under load and reduce it overnight. Questions like this test whether you understand elasticity, availability zones, and cloud compute scaling patterns.
What to study next
Got this wrong? Here's your next step.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Reliability and Business Continuity — This question tests Reliability and Business Continuity — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Use DynamoDB global tables. — DynamoDB global tables provide multi-region, multi-active replication, ensuring the table remains available during an AWS regional outage by automatically replicating data across selected AWS Regions. This is the only option that addresses regional fault tolerance by design, as it uses DynamoDB's built-in replication to maintain availability and data durability across regions.
What should I do if I get this SOA-C02 question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Question Discussion
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