AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner — Question 556

A company is running a critical workload on an Amazon RDS DB instance. The company needs the DB instance to be highly available with a recovery time of less than 5 minutes.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create a read replica of the DB instance.
• B. Create a template of the DB instance by using AWS CloudFormation.
• C. Take frequent snapshots of the DB instance. Store the snapshots in Amazon S3.
• D. Modify the DB instance to be a Multi-AZ deployment.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Modifying the Amazon RDS DB instance to a Multi-AZ deployment provides automatic failover to a standby replica in a different Availability Zone, which typically completes in 1 to 2 minutes and meets the under 5-minute RTO. Restoring from Amazon S3 snapshots or redeploying using AWS CloudFormation templates would take much longer than 5 minutes, resulting in significant downtime. Read replicas are designed for read scalability rather than synchronous high availability and automatic failover.