AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02)Cloud Technology and ServicesMedium
A retail company runs its production database on Amazon RDS and wants automatic failover to a standby copy in a different Availability Zone if the primary database instance becomes unavailable, with minimal manual intervention. Which RDS feature should the company enable?
- AAutomated backups
- BRead Replicas
- CRDS Proxy
- DMulti-AZ deployment
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: D. Multi-AZ deployment
RDS Multi-AZ deployments maintain a synchronously replicated standby instance in a different Availability Zone and automatically fail over to it if the primary instance fails, providing high availability with minimal downtime.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Automated backups protect against data loss but do not provide automatic failover.
- B. Read Replicas are for scaling read traffic asynchronously, not automatic failover for high availability.
- C. RDS Proxy manages database connection pooling, not failover between AZs.
RDS Multi-AZ
An RDS high-availability feature that maintains a synchronous standby replica in a different AZ and automatically fails over during an outage.
- Synchronous replication to standby AZ
- Automatic failover, typically under a minute or two
- Different from Read Replicas, which are for read scaling, not HA
Memory trick: Multi-AZ = 'always a backup twin standing by.'