AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer Associate SOA-C03 Practice Question

A company is running a business-critical on-premises PostgreSQL database. The team plans to migrate it to AWS and must meet the following requirements:

Automatic failover must complete in less than 35 seconds if an Availability Zone becomes unavailable.
The application must continue to use a single writer endpoint with no DNS or connection-string changes during failover.
The solution must add read capacity with minimal application changes and keep operational costs as low as possible.

Which migration strategy will best meet these requirements?

Migrate to an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL Multi-AZ DB cluster with one writer and two readable standbys across three AZs.
Create an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL Single-AZ instance and add two read replicas in different AZs, then enable automatic promotion on failure.
Launch a standard Amazon RDS PostgreSQL instance-based Multi-AZ deployment and add an external read replica for read scaling.
Lift-and-shift the PostgreSQL database to two self-managed Amazon EC2 instances in separate AZs using EBS Multi-Attach for shared storage.

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Answer Description

Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB clusters (supported for MySQL 8.0 and PostgreSQL 13 or later) create one writer and two readable standby DB instances in three separate AZs. The cluster exposes a single writer endpoint that automatically points to the promoted standby after a failure, typically in under 35 seconds. Because the two standbys are already provisioned and can accept read traffic, the same cluster adds read capacity without needing to create separate read replicas or change the application's write endpoint. Using fully managed Amazon RDS keeps administrative overhead and licensing costs low compared with self-managed databases on Amazon EC2. Standard instance-based Multi-AZ deployments meet the endpoint requirement but have slower failover and no built-in readers. Read-replica architectures do not provide automatic failover within 35 seconds. Self-managed EC2 deployments require the application to handle failover and incur higher operational cost.

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