AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 512

A company wants to increase the availability and durability of a critical business application. The application currently uses a MySQL database running on an
Amazon EC2 instance. The company wants to minimize application changes.
How should the company meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Shut down the EC2 instance. Enable multi-AZ replication within the EC2 instance, then restart the instance.
• B. Launch a secondary EC2 instance running MySQL. Configure a cron job that backs up the database on the primary EC2 instance and copies it to the secondary instance every 30 minutes.
• C. Migrate the database to an Amazon RDS Aurora DB instance and create a Read Replica in another Availability Zone.
• D. Create an Amazon RDS Microsoft SQL DB instance and enable multi-AZ replication. Back up the existing data and import it into the new database.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Utilizing an Amazon RDS database with multi-AZ replication enabled provides synchronous replication to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone, ensuring high availability and durability. While a schema migration is required, migrating to a managed RDS instance minimizes the ongoing operational and maintenance changes needed for the application's infrastructure. Options A and B are incorrect because EC2 instances do not support native multi-AZ replication, and cron-based backups do not provide immediate failover or high availability.