AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 788

A company wants to migrate two DNS servers to AWS. The servers host a total of approximately 200 zones and receive 1 million requests each day on average.
The company wants to maximize availability while minimizing the operational overhead that is related to the management of the two servers.
What should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create 200 new hosted zones in the Amazon Route 53 console. Import zone files.
• B. Launch a single large Amazon EC2 instance. Import zone files. Configure Amazon CloudWatch alarms and notifications to alert the company about any downtime.
• C. Migrate the servers to AWS by using AWS Server Migration Service (AWS SMS). Configure Amazon CloudWatch alarms and notifications to alert the company about any downtime.
• D. Launch an Amazon EC2 instance in an Auto Scaling group across two Availability Zones. Import zone files. Set the desired capacity to 1 and the maximum capacity to 3 for the Auto Scaling group. Configure scaling alarms to scale based on CPU utilization.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Deploying a single large Amazon EC2 instance with imported zone files provides a direct and simple migration path for the existing DNS servers. Configuring Amazon CloudWatch alarms and notifications ensures that the organization is immediately alerted to any downtime, helping to maintain availability with minimal operational complexity. This approach avoids the administrative overhead of managing multi-AZ Auto Scaling groups or re-platforming all 200 zones individually.