Changed SOA-C02 Exam Questions

For an RDS instance that needs high availability and automatic failover capabilities, setting it up as a Multi-AZ deployment is the most effective solution:

Multi-AZ Deployment: This feature allows Amazon RDS to automatically provision and manage a synchronous standby replica of your database in a different Availability Zone (AZ). The primary DB instance and the standby replica contain the same data, providing data redundancy and fail-safe mechanism.

Automatic Failover: In the event of a planned or unplanned outage of your primary DB instance (including DB instance failure, AZ failure, or network failure), RDS automatically fails over to the standby so that database operations can resume quickly without administrative intervention.

Data Integrity: This setup ensures no data loss for committed transactions, as the standby replica is always in sync with the primary.

By enabling Multi-AZ deployment, you ensure that your database environment has high availability and robustness, addressing both disaster recovery and operational continuity without losing any committed transactions.

To achieve maximum cost savings and flexibility for a 24/7 running application across different AWS regions and operating systems, the best approach is to use a Compute Savings Plan. Compute Savings Plans provide the most flexibility by automatically applying to any EC2 instance usage regardless of instance family, size, OS, tenancy, or AWS Region, and also apply to AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda usage.

Understand Compute Savings Plans:

Compute Savings Plans offer significant savings over On-Demand prices, with the flexibility to use the compute option that best suits your needs.

Purchase a Compute Savings Plan:

Login to the AWS Management Console.

Navigate to the Savings Plans section.

Choose Purchase Savings Plan and select Compute Savings Plan.

Define the hourly commitment amount and the term length (one or three years).

Monitor and Optimize Usage:

Ensure that your usage aligns with the Savings Plan to maximize savings.

Use AWS Cost Explorer and Savings Plans Utilization reports to monitor usage.

Savings Plans

Compute Savings Plans

Adding a Route to the Route Tables:

When new subnets are created, they need appropriate routing to ensure communication with on-premises networks.

Steps:

Go to the AWS Management Console.

Navigate to VPC.

Select the route table associated with the new subnets.

Choose "Edit routes."

Add a new route with the destination CIDR block of the on-premises network.

For the target, select the virtual private gateway (VGW).

This ensures that traffic destined for the on-premises network is routed correctly through the VPN connection.

AWS VPC Route Tables

To address high I/O requirements during the bootstrap process, increasing both IOPS and throughput on the EBS volume is recommended:

Increase EBS Volume IOPS: Enhances the instance’s ability to handle multiple read and write operations per second, essential for data-heavy tasks like downloading Docker images.

Increase EBS Volume Throughput: Provides higher data transfer rates, reducing bottlenecks during intensive I/O operations.

Increasing instance size is unnecessary if the primary issue is disk I/O, and changing from Nitro-based instances would not address the underlying storage performance need.