AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 451

A company designed a stateless two-tier application that uses Amazon EC2 in a single Availability Zone and an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB instance. New company management wants to ensure the application is highly available.

What should a solutions architect do to meet this requirement?

Answer options

• A. Configure the application to use Multi-AZ EC2 Auto Scaling and create an Application Load Balancer
• B. Configure the application to take snapshots of the EC2 instances and send them to a different AWS Region
• C. Configure the application to use Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing to feed requests to the application
• D. Configure Amazon Route 53 rules to handle incoming requests and create a Multi-AZ Application Load Balancer

Correct answer: A

Explanation

To make a stateless EC2-based application highly available, the application tier needs to be distributed across multiple Availability Zones using an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer, which automatically routes traffic to healthy instances. The database tier is already highly available via Amazon RDS Multi-AZ. Other options like cross-region snapshots do not provide immediate high availability, while Route 53 options alone do not resolve the single Availability Zone bottleneck for the EC2 instances.