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SOA-C02 Practice Question: EBS snapshot restoration strategy for large…
This SOA-C02 practice question tests your understanding of ebs snapshot restoration strategy for large…. Read the scenario carefully and evaluate each option against the stated constraints before committing to an answer. A key principle to apply: eBS snapshot restoration. 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 EC2 instance runs a database on a 2 TB EBS gp3 volume. After a corruption event, the team must restore from a snapshot. When they detach the corrupted volume, attach a new volume restored from the snapshot, and start the database, performance is 10 to 20 times lower than normal for the first two hours. What causes this behavior, and what feature eliminates it?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Good practice is not just finding the correct option. The wrong answers often show the exact trap the exam wants you to fall into.
A
Distractor review
Run a full dd or fio pre-warm pass over the volume after attaching it but before starting the database
A sequential read pass (dd if=/dev/xvdf of=/dev/null) forces all blocks to be read from S3 and initialized in the EBS layer, which effectively pre-warms the volume. This is the manual alternative to FSR and adds hours of pre-warm time before the database can start — the downtime is traded for warm disk performance.
B
Distractor review
Increase the EBS volume size to 4 TB when restoring from the snapshot to get double the throughput baseline
For gp3, throughput and IOPS are configured independently of volume size (unlike gp2). Doubling the volume size does not affect lazy initialization. Each block on the larger volume still initializes lazily on first access.
C
Best answer
Enable Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) on the snapshot in the target Availability Zone before creating the replacement volume
FSR fully initializes the volume's block index immediately upon creation. The first I/O to any block is served from EBS at full throughput rather than waiting for lazy initialization from S3. For a 2 TB database volume where I/O latency determines restore time, FSR eliminates the 2-hour performance degradation period entirely.
D
Distractor review
Use a Provisioned IOPS (io2) volume type instead of gp3 to get higher IOPS during initialization
Provisioned IOPS affects the maximum IOPS ceiling of a volume, but lazy initialization still applies regardless of volume type. Until blocks are touched for the first time and loaded from S3, even an io2 volume will experience the same initialization latency per uninitialized block.
Common exam trap
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
Many certification questions include familiar terms but test a specific constraint. Read the exact wording before choosing an answer that is generally true but wrong for this case.
Technical deep dive
How to think about this question
Treat this as a scenario question. Identify the problem, the constraint, and the best action. Then compare each option against those facts.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- EBS snapshot restoration
- Fast Snapshot Restore
- EBS initialization
- lazy loading from S3
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
EBS snapshot restoration
Related practice questions
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More questions from this exam
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Question 1
A company uses Amazon CloudFront to deliver content to a global audience. The origin is an Application Load Balancer in us-east-1. The SysOps administrator wants to reduce costs by minimizing the number of requests that reach the origin server. Which action should the administrator take?
Question 2
A company runs a batch processing application on Amazon EC2 that runs for 2 hours every night. The workload can tolerate interruptions. Which EC2 purchasing option provides the lowest cost for this use case?
Question 3
A SysOps administrator needs to monitor the CPU utilization of an Amazon RDS DB instance and receive an alarm when CPU utilization exceeds 80% for 5 consecutive minutes. Which AWS service should be used to create this alarm?
Question 4
A company runs a critical web application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application uses session stickiness (sticky sessions) to maintain user sessions. The SysOps administrator notices that when instances are replaced during a scale-in or failure event, users lose their session data. The administrator needs to preserve session data across instance failures without losing stickiness benefits. What should the administrator do?
Question 5
A company runs a production web application on a single Amazon EC2 instance. The application experiences a predictable and steady workload 24/7. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize compute costs for this instance while ensuring it remains available during the expected workload. Which EC2 purchasing option should the administrator use?
Question 6
A company has a VPC with public and private subnets. The private subnets host application servers that need to make outbound HTTPS connections to the internet. The SysOps administrator must implement a solution that provides outbound internet connectivity while preventing inbound connections from the internet. Additionally, the solution must allow the company to control which domains the application servers can access. Which solution should the administrator implement?
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FAQ
Questions learners often ask
What does this SOA-C02 question test?
EBS snapshot restoration
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Enable Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) on the snapshot in the target Availability Zone before creating the replacement volume — When an EBS volume is created from a snapshot, its blocks are stored in S3 and loaded lazily on first access. Each block that hasn't been touched yet requires a round trip to S3, causing high latency until all blocks are initialized. This is EBS lazy initialization (formerly 'lazy loading'). Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) pre-initializes the volume's blocks immediately after creation, so the volume provides full performance from the first I/O. FSR is enabled per snapshot per Availability Zone and has an associated cost.
What should I do if I get this SOA-C02 question wrong?
Review eBS snapshot restoration, then practise related SOA-C02 questions on the same topic to reinforce the concept.
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