AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Practice Exam

What should you implement to ensure automatic failover for an RDS database?

1. Create an RDS read replica in another region

2. Enable Multi-AZ deployment for the RDS database

3. Use AWS Lambda for real-time monitoring

4. Implement manual backups daily

The correct answer is: Enable Multi-AZ deployment for the RDS database

Enabling Multi-AZ deployment for an RDS (Amazon Relational Database Service) database is the correct approach to ensure automatic failover. Multi-AZ deployment provides high availability and durability by automatically replicating the database across multiple Availability Zones. In the event of a failure in the primary zone, RDS can automatically switch to a standby instance in another zone without requiring any manual intervention. This failover process is seamless and helps maintain the availability of the database for applications that depend on it. Additionally, Multi-AZ configurations support synchronous data replication, which ensures data integrity and minimizes data loss during a failover. By fulfilling the requirement of automatic failover, Multi-AZ deployment serves critical production workloads by providing an effective disaster recovery option. Other options do not provide the same level of automatic failover capability. For example, creating a read replica in another region is mainly intended for read scalability and does not facilitate automatic failover for write operations. Using AWS Lambda for real-time monitoring, while it can help monitor the health of the database, does not provide a built-in mechanism for failover. Lastly, implementing manual backups daily is essential for data recovery but does not automatically handle failover during an outage.