SOA-C02 Reliability and Business Continuity Practice Question
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?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates 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.
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
✓
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.
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
DAX is a Redis-compatible in-memory caching service that offloads read traffic from DynamoDB, reducing latency and throttling for hot keys. It is deployed within a single Region and does not copy table data to other AWS Regions, so if that Region suffers an outage the DAX cluster and the underlying table become unavailable together. Therefore DAX offers no disaster recovery or cross-Region failover capability.
- ✗
Create a read replica in another region.
Why it's wrong here
Unlike Amazon RDS, DynamoDB does not provide a read replica feature that lets you create a separate read-only copy of a table in a different Region. The only native way to replicate a DynamoDB table across Regions is to enable global tables, which replicate the entire table with read and write access in each selected Region. Without global tables, a regional failure leaves no remote table available to serve reads or writes, so read replicas are not a valid recovery solution.
- ✓
Use DynamoDB global tables.
Why this is correct
Global tables are DynamoDB's multi-Region replication feature, providing active-active copies of a table in up to six AWS Regions. When enabled, all data mutations are automatically propagated to every replica, and each replica supports both reads and writes with conflict resolution, so application traffic can be failed over to a healthy Region. This availability and automatic synchronization directly address the requirement to survive a regional outage.
- ✗
Increase read and write capacity units.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing read and write capacity units—even with on-demand scaling—only changes the throughput allocation within the table's current Region and does not create any redundant infrastructure elsewhere. It affects performance and throttling under load, but has no bearing on the table's recoverability if the entire AWS Region becomes unavailable. The application would still be completely dependent on the single-Region table, so this action cannot provide the required high availability or disaster recovery.
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