Practice Test
True or False: Failover strategies are not essential for high availability and fault tolerance in AWS.
- True
- False
Answer: False.
Explanation: Failover strategies are important for high availability and fault tolerance in AWS. They ensure that if a primary resource fails, a standby resource is ready to take over.
Which of the following AWS services can be used to manage failover procedures?
- A. S3
- B. EC2
- C. Route 53
- D. DynamoDB
Answer: C. Route 53
Explanation: AWS Route 53 is a scalable and highly available Domain Name System (DNS) web service designed for reliability and cost-effectiveness. It helps to manage failover procedures by routing traffic to healthy endpoints.
What type of failover strategy does Amazon RDS use?
- A. Active-Passive
- B. Active-Active
- C. Manual
- D. None
Answer: A. Active-Passive
Explanation: Amazon RDS uses an active-passive failover strategy. If the primary database instance becomes unavailable, Amazon RDS automatically fails over to the standby so that database operations can resume quickly.
True or False: A Multi-AZ deployment in Amazon RDS is the best way to enable automatic failover.
- True
- False
Answer: True.
Explanation: With a Multi-AZ deployment, Amazon RDS automatically creates a primary DB instance and synchronously replicates the data to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone (AZ).
In an Amazon RDS failover, is there any data loss?
- A. Yes
- B. No
Answer: B. No
Explanation: Amazon RDS uses synchronous replication in a Multi-AZ deployment, ensuring that any write operation is made simultaneously in two different Availability Zones. This prevents data loss during failover.
True or False: Amazon EC2 instances cannot be configured for automatic failover.
- True
- False
Answer: False.
Explanation: EC2 instances can be configured for automatic failover using services like Elastic Load Balancer or Auto Scaling Groups.
Can Amazon S3 be used for failover strategies?
- A. Yes
- B. No
Answer: A. Yes
Explanation: S3, in combination with other services like Route 53 or CloudFront, can be used to implement failover strategies by routing traffic to backup resources if the primary resources fail.
Can you implement an active-active failover strategy with Amazon Route 53?
- A. Yes
- B. No
Answer: A. Yes
Explanation: Amazon Route 53 allows for different types of strategies, including active-active, where all resources are handling traffic. Route 53 can distribute the incoming traffic across healthy resources.
Which of the following can use application-level failover in AWS?
- A. EC2 Instances
- B. S3 Buckets
- C. Elastic Load Balancer
- D. RDS
Answer: A. EC2 Instances
Explanation: EC2 may leverage application-level failover to switch another instance if the primary fails. Other options like S3, ELB, and RDS use different methods for failover.
Is it mandatory to keep standby resources in a different region while implementing a failover strategy in AWS?
- A. Yes
- B. No
Answer: B. No
Explanation: While it is a best practice to keep standby resources in a separate region to guard against regional failures, it is not mandatory. Standby resources can also be placed in different Availability Zones within the same region.
Interview Questions
What is failover in AWS?
Failover in AWS is the process of switching to a redundant or standby computer server, system, hardware component, or network upon the failure or termination of the previously active application, server, system, or network.
What are the main types of failover strategies in AWS?
The main types of failover strategies in AWS are Active-Active failover and Active-Passive failover.
What is Active-Active failover in AWS?
Active-Active failover is a strategy where traffic is routed to multiple locations simultaneously that are operating and handling requests. If one site fails, the other active site continues to operate by handling all the traffic.
What is Active-Passive failover in AWS?
In an Active-Passive failover strategy, all requests are routed to the primary (active) location. The secondary (passive) location only comes into play if the primary location fails.
What AWS services are typically involved in creating failover strategies?
Services like Route 53, AWS Auto Scaling, ELB (Elastic Load Balancer), Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) and AWS CloudFormation can typically be involved in creating failover strategies.
How does Amazon RDS facilitate failover?
Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It facilitates failover by automatically replacing the compute instance powering your deployment in the event of a hardware failure.
How does AWS Route 53 contribute to a failover strategy?
AWS Route 53 can contribute to a failover strategy by routing traffic to healthy endpoints and by enabling DNS failover.
What is DNS Failover?
DNS Failover helps to reroute web traffic to an alternate location where your application is operating properly when the Route 53 detects a possible outage.
What role does ELB play in the failover strategy?
The Elastic Load Balancer automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances. It helps to increase the availability of your application.
What is the role of CloudFormation in a failover strategy?
AWS CloudFormation provides an easy way to create and manage a collection of AWS resources. It can play a role in a failover strategy by allowing you to create, update and delete a collection of resources together as a single unit (a stack), thus enabling the easy setup of redundant systems.
How does AWS Auto Scaling contribute to a failover strategy?
AWS Auto Scaling can contribute to a failover strategy by making sure that you maintain application availability and allows you to scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down automatically according to defined conditions.
Can Amazon S3 be used in a failover strategy?
Yes, Amazon S3 can be used in a failover strategy. It is a highly-scalable object storage for archiving data and backing up web applications, which can be used as a failover mechanism for rapid recovery.
How does AWS Aurora implement failover?
AWS Aurora automatically fails over to one of the up to 15 Amazon Aurora Replicas you have created in any of three Availability Zones.
Why are multiple Availability Zones recommended for failover strategies?
Multiple Availability Zones are recommended as they offer the ability to operate production applications and databases which are more highly available, fault-tolerant and scalable than would be possible from a single data center.
What is the AWS Well-Architected Framework’s reliability pillar’s recommendation regarding failover strategies?
According to the AWS Well-Architected Framework’s reliability pillar, a well-architected workload should be designed to automatically recover from failure. In the context of failover strategies, this means implementing automatic recovery from instance or service failures, such as failover to other regions and backup and restore capabilities.
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