AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer Associate SOA-C03 Practice Question

At 09:15 a DevOps engineer accidentally ran a DROP TABLE command on the company's production Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. Automated backups with a 7-day retention window are enabled. The business requires the database to be fully operational with data as it existed at 09:14 and back online within 2 hours (RTO 2 hours). Which action meets this requirement with the least downtime and operational effort?

Modify the existing DB instance and select Restore to point in time 09:14 so the current endpoint remains unchanged.
Initiate a point-in-time restore to 09:14, create a new DB instance, and update the application to use the new instance's endpoint.
Create an on-demand snapshot now, immediately restore it to a new instance, and switch the application over after the restore completes.
Restore the latest automated snapshot to a new DB instance, export the dropped table with mysqldump, and import it into the original instance.

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Answer Description

A point-in-time restore tells Amazon RDS to re-create the database from the continuous transaction logs up to the specified second-in this case 09:14. RDS performs the restore into a new DB instance; the original instance remains untouched. After the new instance becomes available (typically minutes for small-to-medium databases), the operations team only needs to direct the application to the new endpoint, keeping total recovery time well under 2 hours.

Restoring an automated snapshot and then exporting/importing data adds extra dump and import steps that extend downtime. RDS cannot restore in place to an earlier time, so attempting to modify the existing instance will fail. Creating an on-demand snapshot after the accidental deletion merely captures the already-damaged state and provides no viable recovery point.

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