AWS Certified Database – Specialty — Question 316

A company is running a business-critical application on premises by using Microsoft SQL Server. A database specialist is planning to migrate the instance with several databases to the AWS Cloud. The database specialist will use SQL Server Standard edition hosted on Amazon EC2 Windows instances. The solution must provide high availability and must avoid a single point of failure in the SQL Server deployment architecture.
Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create Amazon RDS for SQL Server Multi-AZ DB instances. Use Amazon S3 as a shared storage option to host the databases.
• B. Set up Always On Failover Cluster Instances as a single SQL Server instance. Use Multi-AZ Amazon FSx for Windows File Server as a shared storage option to host the databases.
• C. Set up Always On availability groups to group one or more user databases that fail over together across multiple SQL Server instances. Use Multi-AZ Amazon FSx for Windows File Server as a shared storage option to host the databases.
• D. Create an Application Load Balancer to distribute database traffic across multiple EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones. Use Amazon S3 as a shared storage option to host the databases.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

SQL Server Standard edition does not support full Always On Availability Groups for multiple databases (it only supports Basic Availability Groups, which are limited to a single database). To achieve high availability for several databases on SQL Server Standard edition hosted on Amazon EC2, Always On Failover Cluster Instances (FCIs) must be used alongside a shared storage solution like Multi-AZ Amazon FSx for Windows File Server. Amazon RDS is incorrect because the scenario specifically requires EC2, and Amazon S3 cannot be used as active shared storage for SQL Server database files.