SOA-C02 Reliability and Business Continuity Practice Question
Which TWO actions should a SysOps administrator take to ensure high availability of a web application running on EC2 instances? (Choose two.)
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse termination protection (a safety feature) with high availability, or think that larger instance types inherently provide fault tolerance, when in fact only redundancy across multiple Availability Zones and automated health-based replacement ensure high availability.
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
✓
Configure an Auto Scaling group with a health check to replace unhealthy instances.
An Auto Scaling group with a health check can automatically detect and replace unhealthy EC2 instances, ensuring that the web application remains available even if an instance fails. The health check can be configured to use Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) health checks or EC2 status checks to determine instance health, and the Auto Scaling group will launch a new instance to replace any that fails the health check.
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 termination protection on all EC2 instances.
Why it's wrong here
Termination protection prevents manual deletion but does not replace unhealthy instances.
- ✗
Launch all EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone.
Why it's wrong here
Single AZ is a single point of failure.
- ✗
Use a larger instance type for all EC2 instances.
Why it's wrong here
Instance size does not affect availability.
- ✓
Configure an Auto Scaling group with a health check to replace unhealthy instances.
Why this is correct
Auto Scaling automatically replaces unhealthy instances.
- ✓
Deploy EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones.
Why this is correct
Distributing instances across AZs provides fault isolation.
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Same concept, more angles
1 more way this is tested on SOA-C02
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Variation 1. Which TWO actions improve the availability of an application running on EC2 instances in a single Auto Scaling group? (Choose 2)
medium- ✓ A.Use an Elastic Load Balancer with health checks to route traffic only to healthy instances.
- B.Increase the instance size to handle higher load.
- C.Create a CloudWatch alarm to notify when the CPU utilization exceeds 80%.
- D.Enable EBS optimization on the instances.
- ✓ E.Configure the Auto Scaling group to launch instances in multiple Availability Zones.
Why A: An Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) performs health checks against EC2 instances and automatically routes traffic only to instances that pass those checks. If an instance becomes unhealthy, the ELB stops sending traffic to it, preventing user requests from reaching a failing instance and thereby improving application availability.
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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.