Practice for the Exams exam with 22 exam-style practice questions, instant answer reveals, and concise explanations of every correct answer. Topics include: A Customer relationship management (CRM) application is facing user experience issues with users reporting frequent sign. Follow @CertPunch and visit certpunch.com for more certification practice exams and study content.
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What you will practice
- A Customer relationship management (CRM) application is facing user experience issues with users reporting fr…
- A global e-commerce platform currently operates its order processing system in a single on-premises data cent…
- An enterprise runs a critical Oracle database workload in its on-premises environment. The company now plans…
- A company's cloud architect has set up a solution that uses Amazon Route 53 to configure the DNS records for…
- A retail company wants to establish encrypted network connectivity between its on-premises data center and th…
- A streaming solutions company is building a video streaming product by using an Application Load Balancer (AL…
Answers and explanations
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Q1. A Customer relationship management (CRM) application is facing user experience issues with users reporting frequent sign-in requests from the application. The application is currently hosted on multiple Amazon EC2 instances behind an Appli…
Answer: A. Use Amazon Elasticache for distributed in-memory cache based session management
Amazon ElastiCache provides a distributed in-memory data store that allows an Application Load Balancer to distribute traffic across all instances. Sticky sessions fail when an instance becomes unhealthy, while RDS and DynamoDB do not provide in-memory caching.
Q2. A global e-commerce platform currently operates its order processing system in a single on-premises data center located in Europe. As the company grows its customer base across Asia and North America, it plans to deploy the application acr…
Answer: D. Migrate the order data to Amazon DynamoDB and create a global table. Deploy the application in each Region and connect to the local DynamoDB replica for low-latency access
Amazon DynamoDB global tables provide a fully managed multi-Region, multi-active database with typical replication latency under one second. Aurora and RDS cross-Region read replicas force all writes through a single primary Region, increasing global latency.
Q3. An enterprise runs a critical Oracle database workload in its on-premises environment. The company now plans to replicate both existing records and continuous transactional changes to a managed Oracle environment in AWS. The target databas…
Answer: D. Configure an AWS DMS Serverless replication task to synchronize historical and ongoing changes between the on-premises Oracle database and Amazon RDS for Oracle
AWS DMS Serverless automatically provisions and scales compute capacity to match fluctuating database migration workloads. AWS Glue handles batch ETL rather than continuous transactional replication, and building custom EC2 scaling logic adds operational overhead.
Q4. A company's cloud architect has set up a solution that uses Amazon Route 53 to configure the DNS records for the primary website with the domain pointing to the Application Load Balancer (ALB). The company wants a solution where users will…
Answer: D. Set up Amazon Route 53 active-passive type of failover routing policy. If Amazon Route 53 health check determines the Application Load Balancer endpoint as unhealthy, the traffic will be diverted to a static error page, hosted on Amazon S3 bucket
Route 53 active-passive failover routing uses health checks to automatically divert traffic to a static S3 backup site during a primary outage. Latency and weighted routing cannot provide automatic failover, and Route 53 does not have an active-active failover policy type.
Q5. A retail company wants to establish encrypted network connectivity between its on-premises data center and the AWS Cloud. The company wants to get the solution up and running in the fastest possible time and it should also support encrypti…
Answer: C. Use AWS Site-to-Site VPN to establish encrypted network connectivity between the on-premises data center and AWS Cloud
An AWS Site-to-Site VPN establishes encrypted IPsec connections over the public internet and can be provisioned almost immediately. AWS Direct Connect provides dedicated bandwidth but does not natively encrypt traffic, while DataSync and Secrets Manager do not establish network connectivity.
Q6. A streaming solutions company is building a video streaming product by using an Application Load Balancer (ALB) that routes the requests to the underlying Amazon EC2 instances. The engineering team has noticed a peculiar pattern. The Appli…
Answer: B. The Auto Scaling group is using Amazon EC2 based health check and the Application Load Balancer is using ALB based health check
When an Auto Scaling group relies on EC2 health checks while an Application Load Balancer uses ALB health checks, a failed application can cause the ALB to drop the instance without triggering a replacement. Configuring the ASG to use ELB health checks ensures it detects application failures and provisions replacements.
Q7. An application with global users across AWS Regions had suffered an issue when the Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) in a Region malfunctioned thereby taking down the traffic with it. The manual intervention cost the company significant time an…
Answer: A. Set up AWS Global Accelerator and add endpoints to cater to users in different geographic locations
AWS Global Accelerator uses static anycast IP addresses and the AWS global network to route traffic to healthy regional endpoints with automatic failover. Route 53 geo-proximity routing relies on DNS caching, which slows down failover, and CloudFront only routes static content.
Q8. A digital content production company has transitioned all of its media assets to Amazon S3 in an effort to reduce storage costs. However, the rendering engine used in production continues to run in an on-premises data center and requires f…
Answer: C. Set up an Amazon S3 File Gateway to provide storage for the on-premises application
Amazon S3 File Gateway provides on-premises applications with low-latency access to S3 by caching frequently accessed files locally via standard NFS or SMB mounts. FSx for Lustre is optimized for cloud compute workloads, while Mountpoint lacks local caching capabilities.
Q9. A SaaS analytics company is deploying a microservices-based application on Amazon ECS using the Fargate launch type. The application requires access to a shared, POSIX-compliant file system that is available across multiple Availability Zo…
Answer: D. Use Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) with the Standard storage class and configure AWS Backup to create cross-Region backups on a scheduled basis
Amazon EFS provides a managed POSIX-compliant NFS file system with multi-AZ redundancy that integrates natively with AWS Backup for scheduled cross-Region replication. Mountpoint for S3 lacks POSIX compliance, and AWS Backup does not currently support automatic cross-Region replication for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP.
Q10. A mobile-based e-learning platform is migrating its backend storage layer to Amazon DynamoDB to support a rapidly increasing number of student users and learning transactions. The platform must ensure seamless availability and minimal disr…
Answer: B. Use DynamoDB global tables for automatic multi-Region replication. Enable provisioned capacity mode with auto scaling to optimize cost and ensure consistent availability
DynamoDB global tables provide native multi-Region replication, ensuring high availability and low latency. Provisioned capacity with auto scaling optimizes costs; custom Lambda replication or Data Pipeline adds operational overhead and risk.
Q11. Computer vision researchers at a university are trying to optimize the I/O bound processes for a proprietary algorithm running on Amazon EC2 instances. The ideal storage would facilitate high-performance IOPS when doing file processing in…
Answer: C. Use Amazon EC2 instances with Instance Store as the storage option
Instance store volumes provide temporary block-level storage physically attached to the host machine, delivering the highest performance and lowest latency for scratch data. EBS volumes cost extra and introduce additional latency compared to local instance storage.
Q12. A financial auditing firm uses Amazon S3 to store sensitive client records that are subject to write-once-read-many (WORM) regulations to prevent alteration or deletion of records for a specific retention period. The firm wants to enforce…
Answer: A. Use S3 Object Lock in Compliance Mode, which enforces retention policies strictly and prevents all users from modifying or deleting data during the retention period
S3 Object Lock in Compliance Mode enforces a strict retention period that prevents any user, including the root account, from deleting or overwriting the object. Governance Mode allows privileged users to bypass locks.
Q13. A fintech company currently operates a real-time search and analytics platform on-premises. This platform ingests streaming data from multiple data-producing systems and provides immediate search capabilities and interactive visualizations…
Answer: B. Ingest and process the streaming data using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, then index the data with Amazon OpenSearch Service for real-time search capabilities. Use Amazon QuickSight to build interactive dashboards and visualizations based on the indexed data
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams captures real-time streaming data, which OpenSearch indexes for low-latency full-text search and analytics. Amazon QuickSight connects to OpenSearch to provide interactive dashboards for end users.
Q14. A medical devices company uses Amazon S3 buckets to store critical data. Hundreds of buckets are used to keep the data segregated and well organized. Recently, the development team noticed that the lifecycle policies on the Amazon S3 bucke…
Answer: A. Use Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class to optimize the Amazon S3 storage costs
Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves data between access tiers based on usage patterns, optimizing storage costs without operational overhead. Manual tiering via lifecycle policies requires administration, while One-IA risks durability.
Q15. A media company operates a web application that enables users to upload photos. These uploads are stored in an Amazon S3 bucket located in the eu-west-2 Region. To enhance performance and provide secure access under a custom domain name, t…
Answer: A,C. Request a public certificate from AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) in the us-east-1 Region and associate it with the CloudFront distribution || Set up Amazon S3 to accept uploads from CloudFront by enabling origin access control (OAC)
CloudFront requires AWS Certificate Manager public certificates to be provisioned in the us-east-1 Region for custom HTTPS domains. Origin Access Control securely restricts S3 bucket access so only CloudFront can upload files.
Q16. A pharmaceutical company is considering moving to AWS Cloud to accelerate the research and development process. Most of the daily workflows would be centered around running batch jobs on Amazon EC2 instances with storage on Amazon Elastic…
Answer: A,B,F. Data at rest inside the volume is encrypted || Data moving between the volume and the instance is encrypted || Any snapshot created from the volume is encrypted
Encrypting an Amazon EBS volume secures data at rest and data moving between the volume and the EC2 instance. This encryption automatically applies to any snapshots created from that volume and volumes restored from those snapshots.
Q17. An application hosted on Amazon EC2 contains sensitive personal information about all its customers and needs to be protected from all types of cyber-attacks. The company is considering using the AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) to h…
Answer: A. Create Amazon CloudFront distribution for the application on Amazon EC2 instances. Deploy AWS WAF on Amazon CloudFront to provide the necessary safety measures
AWS WAF integrates directly with CloudFront, Application Load Balancers, and API Gateway to inspect web requests. Option A is likely the intended answer, but because WAF also attaches directly to an ALB, a reasonable test-taker could argue option B is partially valid despite its stated inaccuracy.
Q18. A medium-sized business has a taxi dispatch application deployed on an Amazon EC2 instance. Because of an unknown bug, the application causes the instance to freeze regularly. Then, the instance has to be manually restarted via the AWS man…
Answer: B. Setup an Amazon CloudWatch alarm to monitor the health status of the instance. In case of an Instance Health Check failure, an EC2 Reboot CloudWatch Alarm Action can be used to reboot the instance
CloudWatch alarms can directly trigger reboot, stop, or recover actions for failing EC2 instances without custom code. Using Lambda or EventBridge to poll status checks introduces unnecessary operational overhead compared to the native built-in alarm action.
Q19. An enterprise SaaS provider is currently operating a legacy web application hosted on a single Amazon EC2 instance within a public subnet. The same instance also hosts a MySQL database. DNS records for the application are configured throug…
Answer: D,E. Migrate the existing MySQL database to an Amazon Aurora MySQL cluster. Deploy the primary DB instance and one or more read replicas in different Availability Zones || Use an Auto Scaling group to deploy EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones within a single Region. Register the instances in a target group behind an Application Load Balancer to distribute web traffic evenly
Deploying EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones within a single Region using an Auto Scaling group and ALB ensures high availability. Migrating the database to Aurora MySQL with read replicas enhances fault tolerance and improves read scaling performance.
Q20. The infrastructure team at a company maintains 5 different VPCs (let's call these VPCs A, B, C, D, E) for resource isolation. Due to the changed organizational structure, the team wants to interconnect all VPCs together. To facilitate this…
Answer: A. Use AWS transit gateway to interconnect the VPCs
AWS Transit Gateway acts as a central hub, solving the transitive routing limitations of VPC peering. Full mesh peering is operationally complex, while internet gateways and VPC endpoints do not route private traffic between separate VPCs.
Q21. A company hosts a Microsoft SQL Server database on Amazon EC2 instances with attached Amazon EBS volumes. The operations team takes daily snapshots of these EBS volumes as backups. However, a recent incident occurred in which an automated…
Answer: B. Set up a 7-day EBS snapshot retention rule in Recycle Bin and apply the rule for all snapshots
Amazon EBS Snapshot Recycle Bin retains accidentally deleted snapshots for a specified period before permanent removal. It requires minimal setup, unlike Vault Lock which only protects resources explicitly managed by AWS Backup.
Q22. An e-commerce company uses Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queues to decouple their application architecture. The engineering team has observed message processing failures for some customer orders. As a solutions architect, which…
Answer: D. Use a dead-letter queue to handle message processing failures
A dead-letter queue isolates messages that cannot be processed successfully after a configured number of retries. Polling methods only control how messages are retrieved, and temporary queues handle short-lived request-response patterns rather than capturing failed messages.
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