AWS Certified Database – Specialty — Question 341

A company stores critical data for a department in Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instances. The department was closed for 3 weeks and notified a database specialist that access to the RDS DB instances should not be granted to anyone during this time. To meet this requirement, the database specialist stopped all the
DB instances used by the department but did not select the option to create a snapshot. Before the 3 weeks expired, the database specialist discovered that users could connect to the database successfully.
What could be the reason for this?

Answer options

• A. When stopping the DB instance, the option to create a snapshot should have been selected.
• B. When stopping the DB instance, the duration for stopping the DB instance should have been selected.
• C. Stopped DB instances will automatically restart if the number of attempted connections exceeds the threshold set.
• D. Stopped DB instances will automatically restart if the instance is not manually started after 7 days.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

In Amazon RDS, a stopped DB instance is automatically restarted by AWS after 7 days so that it does not fall behind on critical maintenance updates. To keep a database stopped for longer than 7 days, a database specialist should take a snapshot, delete the instance, and restore it from the snapshot when needed. The other options are incorrect because snapshot selection, stop duration settings, or connection thresholds do not trigger an automatic restart of a stopped RDS instance.