Learn the AWS best practice for designing workloads resilient to component failures. Discover why “automatic failover to healthy resources” is key to passing the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02 exam.
Table of Contents
Question
When designing AWS workloads to be operational even when there are component failures, what is an AWS recommended practice?
A. Perform quarterly disaster recovery tests.
B. Place the core component in the us-east-1 Region.
C. Design for automatic failover to healthy resources.
D. Design workloads to fit on a single Amazon EC2 instance.
Answer
C. Design for automatic failover to healthy resources.
Explanation
Designing for automatic failover to healthy resources is an AWS recommended practice when designing AWS workloads to be operational even when there are component failures. This means that you should architect your system to handle the loss of one or more components without affecting the availability or performance of your application. You can use multiple AWS services and features to achieve this, such as Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Route 53, AWS CloudFormation, and AWS CloudWatch.
When designing workloads on AWS, ensuring operational continuity during component failures is a critical principle. AWS recommends designing for automatic failover to healthy resources as part of its Well-Architected Framework, specifically under the Reliability Pillar. This practice enhances resiliency by enabling workloads to recover quickly from disruptions, such as hardware failures or service outages.
Key Reasons Why C is Correct
Automatic Failover Mechanism
- Automatic failover ensures that when a resource (e.g., an EC2 instance, database, or Availability Zone) becomes unavailable, traffic or operations are seamlessly redirected to healthy resources without manual intervention.
- For example, services like Amazon RDS support multi-AZ deployments that automatically fail over to a standby replica in another availability zone during an outage.
High Availability and Low MTTR
- By implementing automatic failover, workloads achieve higher availability and minimize Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR), which is essential for mission-critical applications.
Alignment with AWS Best Practices
- AWS emphasizes designing systems that can withstand component failures by incorporating redundancy, monitoring, and automation. Automatic failover is a cornerstone of this approach.
Why Other Options Are Incorrect
A. Perform quarterly disaster recovery tests: While disaster recovery tests are important for validating recovery plans, they do not actively prevent downtime during real-time component failures.
B. Place the core component in the us-east-1 Region: Relying on a single region introduces a single point of failure. AWS recommends using multiple Availability Zones or Regions for redundancy.
D. Design workloads to fit on a single Amazon EC2 instance: This approach lacks fault tolerance because a single EC2 instance represents a single point of failure. AWS advises using distributed architectures with load balancing and auto-scaling.
Best Practices for Resilient Workloads on AWS
- Use services like Amazon Route 53 for DNS failover and Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) to distribute traffic across healthy resources.
- Implement multi-AZ deployments for databases and other critical services.
- Automate monitoring and recovery using tools like Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Auto Scaling.
By focusing on automatic failover mechanisms, you ensure your workloads remain operational even during unexpected failures—a fundamental skill for passing the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02 exam.
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