AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 257

A company is using a content management system that runs on a single Amazon EC2 instance. The EC2 instance contains both the web server and the database software. The company must make its website platform highly available and must enable the website to scale to meet user demand.

What should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Move the database to Amazon RDS, and enable automatic backups. Manually launch another EC2 instance in the same Availability Zone. Configure an Application Load Balancer in the Availability Zone, and set the two instances as targets.
• B. Migrate the database to an Amazon Aurora instance with a read replica in the same Availability Zone as the existing EC2 instance. Manually launch another EC2 instance in the same Availability Zone. Configure an Application Load Balancer, and set the two EC2 instances as targets.
• C. Move the database to Amazon Aurora with a read replica in another Availability Zone. Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from the EC2 instance. Configure an Application Load Balancer in two Availability Zones. Attach an Auto Scaling group that uses the AMI across two Availability Zones.
• D. Move the database to a separate EC2 instance, and schedule backups to Amazon S3. Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from the original EC2 instance. Configure an Application Load Balancer in two Availability Zones. Attach an Auto Scaling group that uses the AMI across two Availability Zones.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Option C is correct because it suggests moving the database to Amazon Aurora with a read replica in a different Availability Zone, ensuring high availability and scalability. The other options either do not provide sufficient redundancy or scalability by keeping everything in a single Availability Zone, which could lead to a single point of failure.