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Reliability and Business Continuity →hardMultiple ChoiceObjective-mapped

SOA-C02 Reliability and Business Continuity Practice Question

This SOA-C02 practice question tests your understanding of reliability and business continuity. Read the scenario carefully and evaluate each option against the stated constraints before committing to an answer. 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.

A company runs a stateful application on EC2 instances behind a Network Load Balancer (NLB). The application uses sticky sessions (session affinity) to maintain client state. During a deployment, the SysOps administrator needs to replace instances without disrupting active sessions. Which approach should be used?

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

✓

Deregister the old instances from the target group with connection draining enabled, then register new instances

Option B is correct because deregistering instances from the target group with connection draining enabled allows existing connections to complete gracefully before the instances are removed. The Network Load Balancer (NLB) continues to route new connections to the remaining healthy instances, and once draining finishes, new instances can be registered without disrupting active sessions. This approach maintains session affinity (sticky sessions) by ensuring that in-flight requests are completed before the instance is taken out of service.

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.

  • ✗

    Stop the NLB, replace instances, and restart the NLB

    Why it's wrong here

    Stopping the NLB causes complete outage.

  • ✓

    Deregister the old instances from the target group with connection draining enabled, then register new instances

    Why this is correct

    Connection draining allows existing sessions to finish.

    Related concept

    Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.

  • ✗

    Update the target group health check to remove old instances faster

    Why it's wrong here

    Health checks do not control session draining.

  • ✗

    Terminate the old instances immediately and launch new ones

    Why it's wrong here

    Immediate termination drops active sessions.

Common exam traps

Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword

The trap here is that candidates may think connection draining is only for Application Load Balancers (ALBs) or that stopping the NLB is required for maintenance, but NLB supports connection draining via target group deregistration delay, which is the correct method for zero-downtime deployments.

Detailed technical explanation

How to think about this question

Connection draining for an NLB target group is configured via the 'deregistration_delay.timeout_seconds' setting (default 300 seconds), which allows in-flight TCP connections to complete before the instance is removed. The NLB uses flow hash routing for sticky sessions, and during draining, new connections are not sent to the deregistering instance, while existing flows continue until the timeout expires. In a real-world scenario, if the application uses long-lived WebSocket connections, the draining timeout must be set to accommodate the maximum expected session duration.

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

A healthcare organisation deploys an application with a public-facing web tier and a private database tier. The database subnet has no public IP and only accepts connections from the web tier's security group. Questions like this test whether you can design cloud network isolation using VNets/VPCs, subnets, and security group rules.

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.

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FAQ

Questions learners often ask

What does this SOA-C02 question test?

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: Deregister the old instances from the target group with connection draining enabled, then register new instances — Option B is correct because deregistering instances from the target group with connection draining enabled allows existing connections to complete gracefully before the instances are removed. The Network Load Balancer (NLB) continues to route new connections to the remaining healthy instances, and once draining finishes, new instances can be registered without disrupting active sessions. This approach maintains session affinity (sticky sessions) by ensuring that in-flight requests are completed before the instance is taken out of service.

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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Last reviewed: Jul 4, 2026

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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.