SOA-C02 Question #216: Real Exam Question with Answer & Explanation

Question

A company recently deployed an application in production. The production environment currently runs on a single Amazon EC2 instance that hosts the application's web application and a MariaDB database. Company policy states that all IT production environments must be highly available. What should a SysOps administrator do to meet this requirement?

Options

• AMigrate the database from the EC2 instance to an Amazon RDS for MariaDB Multi-AZ DB
• BMigrate the database from the EC2 instance to an Amazon RDS for MariaDB Multi-AZ DB
• CCopy the database to a different EC2 instance in a different Availability Zone. Use AWS Backup
• DMigrate the database to a different EC2 instance. Place the application EC2 instance in an Auto

Explanation

Option A is correct because RDS for MariaDB Multi-AZ automatically provisions a standby replica in a separate Availability Zone, with synchronous replication and automatic failover - this directly satisfies the high availability requirement for both the database tier (via RDS Multi-AZ) and typically pairs with an Auto Scaling group for the web tier.

Why the distractors fail:

• B appears identical in the truncated text but likely omits the web application HA component (e.g., no Auto Scaling group or load balancer), meaning only the database layer would be highly available - leaving a single point of failure on the app tier.
• C manually copying a database to another EC2 instance doesn't provide automatic failover; AWS Backup handles backup/restore, not active high availability.
• D placing only the app in Auto Scaling without migrating to RDS Multi-AZ leaves the database as a single point of failure - half the solution isn't high availability.

Memory tip: Think of HA as requiring no single point of failure at every tier. For AWS, that means RDS Multi-AZ (database tier) + Auto Scaling Group + Load Balancer (app tier) - if either tier is missing redundancy, the architecture isn't truly highly available. The phrase "Multi-AZ" is your signal for database-level HA on AWS.

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