DOP-C02 - Resilient Cloud Solutions (15% of the exam) - Section 3.4

Select and automate disaster recovery strategies (backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, multi-site active/active) to meet recovery time and recovery point objectives across Regions.

Compare the four disaster recovery strategies - backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site active/active - against their cost and achievable recovery time objective and recovery point objective values. Choose the lowest-cost strategy that still meets the stated RTO and RPO for a cross-Region recovery scenario.

Pilot lightWarm standbyRecovery time objectiveRecovery point objective

Practice question for this objective

Free sampleResilient Cloud Solutionshard

A payments platform requires that a Regional failure cause effectively no downtime and effectively no data loss, and the business has accepted the cost of running production capacity in two Regions at once. The data layer must accept writes in both Regions concurrently. The DevOps team must choose the disaster recovery strategy that satisfies a near-zero recovery time and near-zero recovery point objective. Which strategy fits?

AMulti-site active/active, serving live traffic from both Regions with a multi-Region database accepting writes in each, so a Regional loss removes one active site while the other keeps serving uninterrupted. Correct
BBackup and restore using frequent AWS Backup copies to the second Region, restoring the platform there within the recovery window whenever the primary Region becomes unavailable for an extended period.
CPilot light, holding replicated data in the second Region while the application tier stays off until a failover starts it, so capacity is summoned on demand when the primary fails.
DWarm standby, running a scaled-down always-on copy in the second Region that is scaled up and promoted to take writes when the primary Region is declared unavailable during an incident.

Select multi-site active/active when near-zero recovery time and recovery point are required and dual-Region production cost with concurrent writes is accepted. Multi-site active/active keeps full production capacity live in two Regions with a multi-active data layer that accepts writes in both, so a Regional failure removes one active endpoint while the other continues serving without a restore or scale-up step, giving recovery time and recovery point objectives close to zero.

Why A is correct: Multi-site active/active runs full production in both Regions with a database that takes writes in each, so losing one Region simply drops a live site while the survivor keeps serving, delivering the near-zero recovery time and recovery point the business has paid for.

Why B is wrong: Backup and restore is the slowest pattern with a recovery point bounded by the backup interval, so it cannot deliver near-zero downtime or near-zero data loss no matter how frequent the copies are.

Why C is wrong: Pilot light keeps the data current but leaves compute off, so the time to launch and scale the application tier produces noticeable downtime, which violates the near-zero recovery time objective.

Why D is wrong: Warm standby recovers in minutes by scaling a smaller fleet and promoting the standby, but that scale-up and promotion still introduces a short outage, so it falls short of the near-zero recovery time the payments platform demands.

See more DOP-C02 practice questions, answers explained.

Exam traps in Resilient Cloud Solutions

Answers that look right on this material and are not. Each one is a distractor from a different question in the DOP-C02 bank for this domain.

Move to a backup and restore strategy, taking periodic AWS Backup snapshots of the database into the second Region and restoring everything from those snapshots when the primary Region fails.
Why it is wrong: Backup and restore is cheaper still, but periodic snapshots leave the recovery point at the snapshot interval rather than within minutes, so the data-freshness requirement is broken even though cost falls.
Run DynamoDB in a single primary Region and configure on-demand backups copied to the second Region for restore into a new table if the primary Region fails.
Why it is wrong: A single-Region table with cross-Region backups is a backup and restore pattern that cannot accept writes in both Regions and would lose recent data and time on restore, breaching the near-zero objectives.
Backup and restore, taking AWS Backup copies of the database and machine images into the second Region and rebuilding the load balancer and instances from those copies only after the primary Region is declared lost.
Why it is wrong: Backup and restore is the cheapest pattern, which makes it tempting on cost, but rebuilding the whole stack from copies takes hours, so it cannot meet a ten-minute recovery objective or a few-seconds data-loss target.

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