Practice for the Exams exam with 19 exam-style practice questions, instant answer reveals, and concise explanations of every correct answer. Topics include: As an e-sport tournament hosting company, you have servers that need to scale and be highly available. Therefore you hav. Follow @CertPunch and visit certpunch.com for more certification practice exams and study content.
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What you will practice
- As an e-sport tournament hosting company, you have servers that need to scale and be highly available. Theref…
- You have developed a new REST API leveraging the Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda and Amazon Aurora database se…
- As a solutions architect, you have created a solution that utilizes an Application Load Balancer with stickin…
- A media company operates a video rendering pipeline on Amazon EKS, where containerized jobs are scheduled usi…
- A startup's cloud infrastructure consists of a few Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon RDS instances and Amazon S3 s…
- For security purposes, a development team has decided to deploy the Amazon EC2 instances in a private subnet…
Answers and explanations
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Q1. As an e-sport tournament hosting company, you have servers that need to scale and be highly available. Therefore you have deployed an Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) with an Auto Scaling group (ASG) across 3 Availability Zones (AZs). When e-s…
Answer: A,D. Use Reserved Instances (RIs) for the minimum capacity || Set the minimum capacity to 2
Setting a minimum capacity of two instances across separate Availability Zones ensures high availability during a failure. Covering this constant baseline with Reserved Instances optimizes costs, whereas Dedicated Hosts or higher minimum capacities increase expenses without adding necessary value.
Q2. You have developed a new REST API leveraging the Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda and Amazon Aurora database services. Most of the workload on the website is read-heavy. The data rarely changes and it is acceptable to serve users outdated da…
Answer: C. Enable Amazon API Gateway Caching
Enabling API Gateway caching reduces the load on your backend database by serving repeated requests directly from the cache. Aurora Read Replicas would increase costs, and Lambda lacks native in-memory caching, making the caching feature the most effective solution.
Q3. As a solutions architect, you have created a solution that utilizes an Application Load Balancer with stickiness and an Auto Scaling Group (ASG). The Auto Scaling Group spans across 2 Availability Zones (AZs). AZ-A has 3 Amazon EC2 instanc…
Answer: A. The instance with the oldest launch template or launch configuration will be terminated in AZ-B
The default Auto Scaling termination policy balances instances across Availability Zones by terminating instances in the most populated zone first. Within that zone, it removes the instance using the oldest launch template or configuration to maintain updated configurations.
Q4. A media company operates a video rendering pipeline on Amazon EKS, where containerized jobs are scheduled using Kubernetes deployments. The application experiences bursty traffic patterns, particularly during peak streaming hours. The plat…
Answer: A. Deploy the Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler to the EKS cluster. Configure it to integrate with the existing EC2 Auto Scaling group to automatically launch or terminate nodes based on pending pod demands
The Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler automatically adjusts the underlying EC2 Auto Scaling Group when pods become unschedulable due to resource constraints. Dynamic CloudWatch alarms lack scheduling visibility, while custom Lambda functions and Fargate migrations introduce unnecessary operational overhead.
Q5. A startup's cloud infrastructure consists of a few Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon RDS instances and Amazon S3 storage. A year into their business operations, the startup is incurring costs that seem too high for their business requirements…
Answer: B. Use AWS Cost Optimization Hub to get a report of Amazon EC2 instances that are either idle or have low utilization and use AWS Compute Optimizer to look at instance type recommendations
Cost Optimization Hub identifies idle and underutilized EC2 instances, while Compute Optimizer recommends right-sized instance types to reduce expenses. Compute Optimizer does not handle purchasing options, S3 Analytics excludes Glacier, and Trusted Advisor cannot automatically renew instances.
Q6. For security purposes, a development team has decided to deploy the Amazon EC2 instances in a private subnet. The team plans to use VPC endpoints so that the instances can access some AWS services securely. The members of the team would li…
Answer: C,E. Amazon S3 || Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB are the only AWS services that support Gateway VPC Endpoints, which use route tables for private connectivity. SQS, Kinesis, and SNS rely on Interface Endpoints, which use Elastic Network Interfaces and PrivateLink instead of route tables.
Q7. A Big Data analytics company writes data and log files in Amazon S3 buckets. The company now wants to stream the existing data files as well as any ongoing file updates from Amazon S3 to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. As a Solutions Architec…
Answer: B. Leverage AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) as a bridge between Amazon S3 and Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
AWS Database Migration Service can stream existing data and ongoing changes from Amazon S3 to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams out of the box. The event-based alternatives require custom Lambda code to process files, making them slower to implement than a managed replication service.
Q8. An IT company has a large number of clients opting to build their application programming interface (API) using Docker containers. To facilitate the hosting of these containers, the company is looking at various orchestration services avai…
Answer: C,E. Use Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) with AWS Fargate for serverless orchestration of the containerized services || Use Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) with AWS Fargate for serverless orchestration of the containerized services
Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS are the native AWS container orchestration services. Pairing either with AWS Fargate provides a serverless compute engine, eliminating the need to manage underlying EC2 instances.
Q9. A media company uses Amazon ElastiCache Redis to enhance the performance of its Amazon RDS database layer. The company wants a robust disaster recovery strategy for its caching layer that guarantees minimal downtime as well as minimal data…
Answer: A. Opt for Multi-AZ configuration with automatic failover functionality to help mitigate failure
A Multi-AZ configuration with automatic failover guarantees high availability and low data loss during a cache failure. Scheduled backups or manual AOF retention incur significant recovery delays, and read replicas alone cannot provide automatic failover for writes.
Q10. A company has noticed that its Amazon EBS Elastic Volume (io1) accounts for 90% of the cost and the remaining 10% cost can be attributed to the Amazon EC2 instance. The Amazon CloudWatch metrics report that both the Amazon EC2 instance and…
Answer: B. Convert the Amazon EC2 instance EBS volume to gp2
General purpose SSD gp2 volumes provide cost-effective storage with the ability to burst to higher IOPS levels, perfectly matching the requirements. Provisioned IOPS volumes remain expensive and unnecessary for under-utilized workloads, and CloudFormation itself incurs no additional service charges.
Q11. The engineering team at a leading e-commerce company is anticipating a surge in the traffic because of a flash sale planned for the weekend. You have estimated the web traffic to be 10x. The content of your website is highly dynamic and ch…
Answer: C. Use an Auto Scaling Group
Auto Scaling Groups dynamically provision and terminate compute resources based on demand, providing the underlying scaling required. CloudFront is eliminated because the highly dynamic content is unsuitable for edge caching.
Q12. A digital media platform is preparing to launch a new interactive content service that is expected to receive sudden spikes in user engagement, especially during live events and media releases. The backend uses an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL…
Answer: B. Configure the Aurora cluster to use Aurora I/O-Optimized storage. This configuration delivers high throughput and low-latency I/O performance with predictable pricing and no I/O-based charges
Aurora I/O-Optimized storage provides consistent high throughput with predictable pricing, automatically handling spikes. Provisioned IOPS and Magnetic options are eliminated as they are unsupported configurations for Aurora clusters.
Q13. The engineering team at an e-commerce company has been tasked with migrating to a serverless architecture. The team wants to focus on the key points of consideration when using AWS Lambda as a backbone for this architecture. As a Solutions…
Answer: B,C,E. By default, AWS Lambda functions always operate from an AWS-owned VPC and hence have access to any public internet address or public AWS APIs. Once an AWS Lambda function is VPC-enabled, it will need a route through a Network Address Translation gateway (NAT gateway) in a public subnet to access public resources || Since AWS Lambda functions can scale extremely quickly, it's a good idea to deploy a Amazon CloudWatch Alarm that notifies your team when function metrics such as ConcurrentExecutions or Invocations exceeds the expected threshold || If you intend to reuse code in more than one AWS Lambda function, you should consider creating an AWS Lambda Layer for the reusable code
Lambda functions rely on Layers for shared code, require NAT gateways for public internet access inside a VPC, and need CloudWatch alarms to monitor concurrency. Timeout over-provisioning is discouraged because it incurs unexpected costs.
Q14. A digital media company needs to manage uploads of around 1 terabyte each from an application being used by a partner company. As a Solutions Architect, how will you handle the upload of these files to Amazon S3?
Answer: A. Use multi-part upload feature of Amazon S3
Amazon S3 multipart upload is the required method for uploading files larger than five gigabytes, allowing parallel transmission and recovery from network failures. AWS Snowball is intended for offline petabyte-scale migrations, and Direct Connect only provides bandwidth without addressing the file size limit.
Q15. A CRM web application was written as a monolith in PHP and is facing scaling issues because of performance bottlenecks. The CTO wants to re-engineer towards microservices architecture and expose their application from the same load balance…
Answer: C. Use Secure Sockets Layer certificate (SSL certificate) with SNI
Application Load Balancers use Server Name Indication (SNI) to serve multiple secure HTTPS applications, each with its own TLS certificate, behind a single listener. A wildcard certificate cannot cover entirely different base domains like mycorp and yourcorp.
Q16. You are working as a Solutions Architect for a photo processing company that has a proprietary algorithm to compress an image without any loss in quality. Because of the efficiency of the algorithm, your clients are willing to wait for a r…
Answer: B,C. Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) || Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
Amazon SQS decouples the application to buffer image compression jobs asynchronously, enabling built-in retries for failed tasks. Combining this with EC2 Spot Instances minimizes compute costs for asynchronous, interruptible workloads without requiring long-term commitments.
Q17. A small rental company had 5 employees, all working under the same AWS cloud account. These employees deployed their applications built for various functions- including billing, operations, finance, etc. Each of these employees has been op…
Answer: A. Use a VPC peering connection
VPC peering provides the most cost-effective way to route traffic privately between instances in separate VPCs within the same AWS account. Direct Connect is an expensive dedicated circuit for on-premises connectivity, while internet gateways and NAT gateways do not route internal traffic.
Q18. A systems administrator is creating IAM policies and attaching them to IAM identities. After creating the necessary identity-based policies, the administrator is now creating resource-based policies. Which is the only resource-based policy…
Answer: D. Trust policy
The IAM service only supports one type of resource-based policy, which is the role trust policy attached to an IAM role. Access control lists are external service-level policies, while permissions boundaries and Service Control Policies govern maximum entity permissions.
Q19. A financial services company is implementing two separate data retention policies to comply with regulatory standards: Policy A: Critical transaction records must be immediately available for audit and must not be deleted or overwritten fo…
Answer: G. Use Amazon S3 Object Lock in Compliance mode for Policy A, and S3 Glacier Vault Lock for Policy B
S3 Object Lock in Compliance mode enforces strict write-once-read-many protections for immediately accessible transaction records. S3 Glacier Vault Lock provides a tamper-proof policy for long-term, low-cost archival data, perfectly meeting both regulatory retention requirements.
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