AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 542

A company has received a notification in its AWS Personal Health Dashboard that one of its Amazon EBS-backed Amazon EC2 instances is on hardware that is scheduled for maintenance. The instance runs a critical production workload that must be available during normal business hours.
Which steps will ensure that the instance maintenance does not produce an outage?

Answer options

• A. Configure an Amazon Lambda function to automatically start the instance if it is stopped.
• B. Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) of the instance and use the AMI to launch a new instance once the existing instance is retired.
• C. Enable termination protection on the EC2 instance.
• D. Stop and start the EC2 instance during a maintenance window outside of normal business hours.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Configuring an AWS Lambda function to automatically restart the EC2 instance if it stops ensures maximum availability and automates recovery to prevent any extended outages during production hours. Other options, such as enabling termination protection or manually recreating the instance from an AMI after retirement, do not provide an automated mechanism to guarantee the instance remains running. While stopping and starting the instance on a schedule is a common practice, automating the recovery via Lambda directly addresses preventing unexpected downtime.