CV0-004 Operations and Support Practice Question
A cloud administrator is responsible for an application hosted on Amazon EC2 that stores session data in memory. The business requires that, in the event of an instance failure, a replacement instance can resume serving users with the existing session data intact and with minimal interruption. Which action should the administrator take to meet this requirement?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming that Auto Scaling or monitoring restores application session data, when those features only restore or observe compute capacity.
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
✓
Move session state to an external store such as Amazon ElastiCache for Redis and configure the application to use it.
Session data held only in instance memory is lost when that instance fails. Storing sessions in a shared external service such as Amazon ElastiCache for Redis lets any replacement instance retrieve the same session data. This decouples session state from compute, so failover restores both capacity and user continuity with minimal disruption.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Create an Amazon Machine Image of the instance after each user session is established.
Why it's wrong here
An AMI captures the disk image of an instance at a point in time. It does not capture in-memory session data, and creating an AMI per session is impractical and slow. A replacement instance launched from an AMI would start without the active session data, failing the requirement.
- ✓
Move session state to an external store such as Amazon ElastiCache for Redis and configure the application to use it.
Why this is correct
Externalizing session state to ElastiCache for Redis decouples the session data from any single instance. If an instance fails, a replacement instance can read the same session data from the shared store, allowing users to continue without losing their sessions. This directly satisfies the requirement for session continuity with minimal interruption.
- ✗
Enable detailed monitoring on the EC2 instances to capture session data in Amazon CloudWatch.
Why it's wrong here
Detailed monitoring increases the frequency of CloudWatch metrics such as CPU and network, but metrics are numeric time-series data, not application session contents. CloudWatch does not store or restore session state, so this does not enable a replacement instance to resume user sessions.
- ✗
Configure an Auto Scaling group with a minimum and maximum size of one to replace failed instances automatically.
Why it's wrong here
Auto Scaling replaces failed instances and restores capacity, but a newly launched instance starts with no knowledge of the previous instance's in-memory sessions. Without a shared session store, users would lose their sessions even though capacity is restored. Auto Scaling addresses availability, not session persistence.
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Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official CompTIA exam blueprint
This CV0-004 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA 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 CV0-004 exam.