AWS Certified Associate SOA-C02 Updated Exam

To reduce latency in data transfer among EC2 instances, especially in high-performance computing (HPC) applications or applications requiring low network latency, using a placement group is the best approach:

Understanding Placement Groups:

A placement group in Amazon EC2 is a logical grouping of instances within a single Availability Zone. Using placement groups, you can achieve low-latency network performance necessary for tightly coupled node-to-node communication.

Types of Placement Groups:

Cluster Placement Group: Instances are physically located close together in the same Availability Zone to provide low-latency network performance.

Partition Placement Group: Instances are divided into logical segments called partitions, reducing the likelihood of simultaneous failures.

Spread Placement Group: Instances are placed on distinct underlying hardware to reduce correlated failures.

Creating and Using a Placement Group:

You can create a placement group using the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or AWS SDKs.

When launching instances, specify the placement group to ensure they are launched within the same group.

aws ec2 create-placement-group --group-name my-placement-group --strategy cluster

aws ec2 run-instances --image-id ami-12345678 --count 4 --instance-type c5.large --placement GroupName=my-placement-group

Relocating Existing Instances:

Stop the instances, modify the placement group settings, and then restart them. Note that not all instance types are supported within placement groups, so check the documentation for compatibility.

Placement Groups

Cluster Instances for Low-Latency

geolocation "Geolocation routing lets you choose the resources that serve your traffic based on the geographic location of your users, meaning the location that DNS queries originate from. For example, you might want all queries from Europe to be routed to an ELB load balancer in the Frankfurt region."

Could be confused with geoproximity - "Geoproximity routing lets Amazon Route 53 route traffic to your resources based on the geographic location of your users and your resources. You can also optionally choose to route more traffic or less to a given resource by specifying a value, known as a bias. A bias expands or shrinks the size of the geographic region from which traffic is routed to a resource" the use case is not needed as per question.

To enable automatic failover for RDS (MySQL in this case), you must configure it as a Multi-AZ deployment.

From Amazon RDS Multi-AZ documentation:

Multi-AZ deployments provide high availability and automatic failover support.

❌ Why other options are incorrect:

A: Changing engine to PostgreSQL does not help with failover.

C: Read replicas are used for scaling reads, not failover.

D: Automated backups help with point-in-time recovery, not failover.

To improve the high availability of an application that utilizes Amazon RDS and experiences failure when an Availability Zone becomes unavailable:

Multi-AZ Deployment for RDS: Enable Multi-AZ deployments for your Amazon RDS instance. This setting ensures that RDS automatically provisions and maintains a synchronous standby replica in a different Availability Zone.

Automatic Failover: In the event of a primary RDS instance failure, RDS will automatically failover to the standby so that database operations can resume quickly with minimal disruption.

High Availability Configuration: This configuration not only enhances the robustness of the database component but also ensures that the application remains operational even if one Availability Zone is experiencing issues.

Enabling Multi-AZ for RDS is crucial for maintaining high availability and ensuring that the application remains resilient in the face of AZ disruptions.