AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer Associate SOA-C03 Practice Question

A company runs a production MySQL database on a single-AZ Amazon RDS instance. Backups are generated once each night by an AWS Backup plan. After a recent incident, 18 hours of data were lost. The operations team must achieve a maximum RPO of 5 minutes while minimizing cost and operational effort. Which solution meets these requirements?

Create a read replica in the same Region and promote it to primary after an incident to recover the latest data.
Configure AWS Backup to create manual DB snapshots every 5 minutes and delete snapshots older than one day.
Enable automated backups on the DB instance with a 7-day retention period and use point-in-time restore for recovery.
Convert the DB instance to a Multi-AZ deployment so a failover to the standby can be triggered during an outage.

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Answer Description

Enabling automated backups activates continuous transaction-log capture for the RDS instance. During recovery, Amazon RDS first restores the most recent daily snapshot and then applies the logs, allowing a point-in-time restore to any second within the retention window except the last five minutes. This limits potential data loss to under 5 minutes and requires no additional administration or infrastructure.

Manual snapshots taken every 5 minutes could meet the RPO but would create thousands of snapshots each day, increasing cost and management overhead.

A Multi-AZ deployment provides a synchronous standby and a zero-RPO failover, but it roughly doubles database cost and is unnecessary for a 5-minute RPO target.

A read replica is asynchronously updated; it can lag beyond five minutes and still involves extra cost and manual promotion steps, so it does not guarantee the stated RPO.

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