AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – AssociateReliability and Business ContinuityEasy

A company is running a critical application on Amazon EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone. The application processes real-time financial transactions and requires high availability. The company wants to improve the application's resilience to Availability Zone failures without significantly re-architecting the application. Which AWS service or feature should a SysOps Administrator recommend?

  1. AMigrate the application to AWS Lambda functions across multiple Availability Zones.
  2. BSet up an Amazon CloudFront distribution with multiple origin failover configurations.
  3. CConfigure an Auto Scaling group to distribute EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones.
  4. DImplement Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication for application data.
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: C. Configure an Auto Scaling group to distribute EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones.

Distributing EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones using an Auto Scaling group is a fundamental and effective way to achieve high availability and protect against single Availability Zone failures for EC2-based applications without extensive re-architecting.

Why the other options are wrong

  • A. Migrating to Lambda would be a significant re-architecture, which the question explicitly states to avoid.
  • B. CloudFront is a CDN and while it can improve performance and edge availability, it doesn't solve compute resilience against AZ failures directly for the backend application.
  • D. S3 replication addresses data durability, not compute availability for an active application.

Multi-AZ Deployment (EC2)

Distributing application resources, such as EC2 instances, across multiple Availability Zones within a region to ensure high availability and fault tolerance.

  • Protects against single Availability Zone failures.
  • Achieved using Auto Scaling Groups and Load Balancers.
  • Increases resilience without requiring complex re-architecture for many applications.

Memory trick: Spread your servers, spread your smiles, across the zones for miles!

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