An application already runs across three Availability Zones in one Region, with its data in S3 and its EBS volumes snapshotted nightly. The board now asks what would happen if that entire Region became unavailable. Which TWO changes actually address that risk?
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02), objective 3. Cloud technology and services hard
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The options
Choose 2.
Correct Deploy a copy of the application stack in a second Region and use Amazon Route 53 health checks to fail traffic over to it
Correct. Surviving the loss of a Region requires somewhere else to serve from, plus something that notices the failure and redirects users. DNS-level failover is the usual mechanism.
Correct Configure S3 Cross-Region Replication so the objects also exist in a bucket in the second Region
Correct. S3 is highly durable within its Region, but a bucket lives in one Region and does not follow you elsewhere. Replication is the explicit step that puts a copy outside the failure domain.
Not correct Add a fourth Availability Zone in the same Region
Wrong for this risk. More zones genuinely improve resilience to a data-centre event, which is why the application already uses three. If the Region is unavailable, every zone in it is unavailable with it.
Not correct Increase the frequency of the EBS snapshots
Wrong, and it is the trap. Snapshots are stored in the Region where they were taken, so a Region event removes the volumes and their backups together. Copying snapshots to another Region is the step that would help, and it is a separate action.
Not correct Put Amazon CloudFront in front of the application
Wrong. Cached objects at the edge might keep a static front page alive for a few minutes, but every request that misses the cache goes to an origin that no longer answers.
Why
Nearly everything in AWS is scoped to a Region: buckets, volumes, snapshots, AMIs, VPCs, most service endpoints. Nothing crosses a Region boundary unless you deliberately copy it — snapshot copy, AMI copy, cross-Region replication, a cross-Region read replica. That is the single most useful fact behind disaster-recovery questions. Remember it as: Availability Zones protect you from losing a building, Regions protect you from losing a country, and only an explicit copy gets your data from one to the other.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- AWS exam guide task statement 3.2
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