AWS Solutions Architect Associate
Use EC2 hibernate
An AI research group at a university uses a proprietary speech synthesis application hosted on an EC2 instance. When started, the instance takes a long time to build a memory footprint for all the auxiliary software libraries required for the application to function. The research group would like to pre-warm the instances so they can launch the analysis right away when needed. Which of the following solutions would you recommend?
VPC with a public subnet only and AWS Site-to-Site VPN access
An e-commerce company is planning to migrate their two-tier application from on-premises infrastructure to AWS Cloud. As the engineering team at the company is new to the AWS Cloud, they are planning to use the Amazon VPC console wizard to set up the networking configuration for the two-tier application having public web servers and private database servers. Can you spot the configuration that is NOT supported by the Amazon VPC console wizard?
With cross-zone load balancing enabled, one instance in Availability Zone A receives 20% traffic and four instances in Availability Zone B receive 20% traffic each. With cross-zone load balancing disabled, one instance in Availability Zone A receives 50% traffic and four instances in Availability Zone B receive 12.5% traffic each
An e-commerce company is using an Elastic Load Balancer for its fleet of EC2 instances spread across two Availability Zones, with one instance as a target in Availability Zone A and four instances as targets in Availability Zone B. The company is doing benchmarking for server performance when cross-zone load balancing is enabled compared to the case when cross-zone load balancing is disabled. As a solutions architect, which of the following traffic distribution outcomes would you identify as correct?
Use a target tracking scaling policy based on a custom Amazon SQS queue metric
An e-commerce company runs its web application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group and it's configured to handle consumer orders in an SQS queue for downstream processing. The DevOps team has observed that the performance of the application goes down in case of a sudden spike in orders received. As a solutions architect, which of the following solutions would you recommend to address this use-case?
AWS Managed Microsoft AD
An e-commerce company uses Microsoft Active Directory to provide users and groups with access to resources on the on-premises infrastructure. The company has extended its IT infrastructure to AWS in the form of a hybrid cloud. The engineering team at the company wants to run directory-aware workloads on AWS for a SQL Server-based application. The team also wants to configure a trust relationship to enable single sign-on (SSO) for its users to access resources in either domain. As a solutions architect, which of the following AWS services would you recommend for this use-case?
This is a scale-up example of vertical scalability
A DevOps engineer at an IT company just upgraded an EC2 instance type from t2.nano (0.5G of RAM, 1 vCPU) to u-12tb1.metal (12.3 TB of RAM, 448 vCPUs). How would you categorize this upgrade?
AWS Snowmobile
A Hollywood production studio is looking at transferring their existing digital media assets of around 20PB to AWS Cloud in the shortest possible timeframe. Which of the following is an optimal solution for this requirement, given that the studio's data centers are located at a remote location?
Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1)
A big data analytics company is working on a real-time vehicle tracking solution. The data processing workflow involves both I/O intensive and throughput intensive database workloads. The development team needs to store this real-time data in a NoSQL database hosted on an EC2 instance and needs to support up to 25,000 IOPS per volume. As a solutions architect, which of the following EBS volume types would you recommend for this use-case?
AWS Step Functions
A big data consulting firm needs to set up a data lake on Amazon S3 for a retail client. The data lake is split in raw and refined zones. The source data arrives in the raw zone and is then processed via an AWS Glue based ETL job into the refined zone. The workflow also involves multiple lambda functions that perform data hygiene and data completeness checks in both the raw and refined zones. The firm is looking for an orchestration solution to manage this end to end workflow. As a solutions architect, which of the following AWS services involves the LEAST development effort for this use-case?
Use RAID 0 when I/O performance is more important than fault tolerance
A data analytics company is running a proprietary database on an EC2 instance using EBS volumes. The database is heavily I/O bound. As a solutions architect, which of the following RAID configurations would you recommend improving the I/O performance?
Use message timers to postpone the delivery of certain messages to the queue by one minute
A data analytics company is using SQS queues for decoupling the various processes of an application workflow. The company wants to postpone the delivery of certain messages to the queue by one minute while all other messages need to be delivered immediately to the queue. As a solutions architect, which of the following solutions would you suggest to the company?
Use AWS Config to review resource configurations to meet compliance guidelines and maintain a history of resource configuration changes
A financial services company has recently migrated from on-premises infrastructure to AWS Cloud. The DevOps team wants to implement a solution that allows all resource configurations to be reviewed and make sure that they meet compliance guidelines. Also, the solution should be able to offer the capability to look into the resource configuration history across the application stack. As a solutions architect, which of the following solutions would you recommend to the team?
Use EC2 dedicated hosts
A financial services company is looking to move its on-premises IT infrastructure to AWS Cloud. The company has multiple long-term server bound licenses across the application stack and the CTO wants to continue to utilize those licenses while moving to AWS. As a solutions architect, which of the following would you recommend as the MOST cost-effective solution?
Use SQS long polling to retrieve messages from your Amazon SQS queues
A financial services company is migrating their messaging queues from self-managed message-oriented middleware systems to Amazon SQS. The development team at the company wants to minimize the costs of using SQS. As a solutions architect, which of the following options would you recommend for the given use-case?
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
A freelance developer has built a Python based web application. The developer would like to upload his code to AWS Cloud and have AWS handle the deployment automatically. He also wants access to the underlying operating system for further enhancements. As a solutions architect, which of the following AWS services would you recommend for this use-case?
Amazon Aurora Serverless
A leading bank has moved its IT infrastructure to AWS Cloud and they have been using Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling for their web servers. This has helped them deal with traffic spikes effectively. But, their relational database has now become a bottleneck and they urgently need a fully managed auto scaling solution for their relational database to address any unpredictable changes in the traffic. Can you identify the AWS service that is best suited for this use-case?
AWS Kinesis Data Streams
A media company wants to use clickstream for data science tasks, develop algorithms, and create visualizations and dashboards to support the business stakeholders. Each of these groups work independently and would need real-time access to this clickstream data for their applications. Which of the following AWS services provides a highly available and fault-tolerant solution to capture the clickstream events from the source and then provide a simultaneous feed of the data stream to the downstream applications?
DynamoDB
A media streaming company is looking to migrate its on-premises infrastructure into the AWS Cloud. The engineering team is looking for a fully managed NoSQL persistent data store with in-memory caching to maintain low latency that is critical for real-time scenarios such as video streaming and interactive content. The team expects the number of concurrent users to touch up to a million so the database should be able to scale elastically. As a solutions architect, which of the following AWS services would you recommend for this use-case?
Use S3 Glacier vault to store the sensitive archived data and then use a vault lock policy to enforce compliance controls
A silicon valley based healthcare startup uses AWS Cloud for its IT infrastructure. The startup stores patient health records on Amazon S3. The engineering team needs to implement an archival solution based on Amazon S3 Glacier to enforce regulatory and compliance controls on data access. As a solutions architect, which of the following solutions would you recommend?
Use Elasticache for distributed cache-based session management
A CRM application is facing user experience issues with users reporting frequent sign-in requests from the application. The application is currently hosted on multiple EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The engineering team has identified the root cause as unhealthy servers causing session data to be lost. The team would like to implement a distributed in-memory cache-based session management solution. As a solutions architect, which of the following solutions would you recommend?
Delete the existing standard queue and recreate it as a FIFO queue Make sure that the name of the FIFO queue ends with the .fifo suffix Make sure that the throughput for the target FIFO queue does not exceed 3,000 messages per second
A leading hotel reviews business uses Amazon Web Services to store and process images for their website. The team uses Amazon EC2 and Amazon SQS in an integrated workflow to generate the sizes they need for each photo. SQS communicates the photos that need to be processed and the status of the jobs. Because of changes in the business processes, the engineering team is now migrating from SQS Standard queues to FIFO queues with batching. As a solutions architect, which of the following steps would you add to the migration checklist for the engineering team? (Select three)
Use AWS DataSync to migrate existing data to Amazon S3 and then use File Gateway to retain access to the migrated data for ongoing updates from the on-premises applications
A leading media company wants to do an accelerated online migration of hundreds of terabytes of files from their on-premises data center to Amazon S3 and then establish a mechanism to access the migrated data for ongoing updates from the on-premises applications. As a solutions architect, which of the following would you select as the MOST performant solution for the given use-case?
Use AWS CloudFormation StackSets to deploy the same template across AWS accounts and regions
A multi-national company uses AWS Cloud to manage its IT infrastructure. The company has set up "AWS Organizations" to manage several departments running their AWS accounts. The departments operate from different countries and are spread across various AWS regions. The company wants to set up a consistent resource provisioning process across departments so that each resource follows pre-defined configurations such as using a specific type of EC2 instances, specific IAM roles for Lambda functions, etc. As a solutions architect, which of the following options would you recommend for this use-case?
Create an inbound endpoint on Route 53 Resolver and then DNS resolvers on the on-premises network can forward DNS queries to Route 53 Resolver via this endpoint Create an outbound endpoint on Route 53 Resolver and then Route 53 Resolver can conditionally forward queries to resolvers on the on-premises network via this endpoint
A retail company has connected its on-premises data center to the AWS Cloud via AWS Direct Connect. The company wants to be able to resolve DNS queries for any resources in the on-premises network from the AWS VPC and also resolve any DNS queries for resources in the AWS VPC from the on-premises network. As a solutions architect, which of the following solutions would you recommend for this use-case? (Select two)
Connection Draining
A retail company has its flagship application running on a fleet of EC2 instances behind an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). The engineering team has been seeing recurrent issues wherein the in-flight requests from the ELB to the EC2 instances are getting dropped when an instance becomes unhealthy. Which of the following features can be used to address this issue?
Use VPC sharing to share one or more subnets with other AWS accounts belonging to the same parent organization from AWS Organizations
A retail company uses AWS Cloud to manage its IT infrastructure. The company has set up "AWS Organizations" to manage several departments running their AWS accounts and using resources such as EC2 instances and RDS databases. The company wants to provide shared and centrally-managed VPCs to all departments using applications that need a high degree of interconnectivity. As a solutions architect, which of the following options would you choose to facilitate this use-case?
Create an alias record for covid19survey.com that routes traffic to www.covid19survey.com
A startup has created a new web application for users to complete a risk assessment survey for COVID-19 symptoms via a self-administered questionnaire. The startup has purchased the domain covid19survey.com using Route 53. The web development team would like to create a Route 53 record so that all traffic for covid19survey.com is routed to www.covid19survey.com. As a solutions architect, which of the following is the MOST cost-effective solution that you would recommend to the web development team?
The instances launched by both Launch Configuration LC1 and Launch Configuration LC2 will have dedicated instance tenancy
A video conferencing application is hosted on a fleet of EC2 instances which are part of an Auto Scaling group (ASG). The ASG uses a Launch Configuration (LC1) with "dedicated" instance placement tenancy but the VPC (V1) used by the Launch Configuration LC1 has the instance tenancy set to default. Later the DevOps team creates a new Launch Configuration (LC2) with "default" instance placement tenancy but the VPC (V2) used by the Launch Configuration LC2 has the instance tenancy set to dedicated. Which of the following is correct regarding the instances launched via Launch Configuration LC1 and Launch Configuration LC2?
If a user or role has an IAM permission policy that grants access to an action that is either not allowed or explicitly denied by the applicable SCPs, the user or role can't perform that action SCPs affect all users and roles in attached accounts, including the root user SCPs do not affect service-linked role
An AWS Organization is using Service Control Policies (SCP) for central control over the maximum available permissions for all accounts in their organization. This allows the organization to ensure that all accounts stay within the organization's access control guidelines. Which of the given scenarios are correct regarding the permissions described below? (Select three)
You can change the tenancy of an instance from dedicated to host You can change the tenancy of an instance from host to dedicated
An IT company is looking to move its on-premises infrastructure to AWS Cloud. The company has a portfolio of applications with a few of them using server bound licenses that are valid for the next year. To utilize the licenses, the CTO wants to use dedicated hosts for a one year term and then migrate the given instances to default tenancy thereafter. As a solutions architect, which of the following options would you identify as CORRECT for changing the tenancy of an instance after you have launched it? (Select two)
Internet Gateway (I1)
The DevOps team at an IT company has created a custom VPC (V1) and attached an Internet Gateway (I1) to the VPC. The team has also created a subnet (S1) in this custom VPC and added a route to this subnet's route table (R1) that directs internet-bound traffic to the Internet Gateway. Now the team launches an EC2 instance (E1) in the subnet S1 and assigns a public IPv4 address to this instance. Next the team also launches a NAT instance (N1) in the subnet S1. Under the given infrastructure setup, which of the following entities is doing the Network Address Translation for the EC2 instance E1?
By default, basic monitoring is enabled when you use the AWS management console to create a launch configuration. Detailed monitoring is enabled by default when you create a launch configuration using the AWS CLI
The engineering team at a company manages the Auto Scaling group and the Launch Configuration for EC2 instances (in us-east-1 region) via a shell script using the AWS CLI. The billing department at the company has noticed that all instances created via this Launch Configuration have detailed monitoring enabled and have been incurring additional costs. To verify this behavior, the lead engineer logs into the AWS management console and creates another Launch Configuration with the same settings but finds that the instances created via this new Launch Configuration have only basic monitoring enabled. As a solutions architect, how would you explain this issue described in the use-case?
A recovered instance is identical to the original instance, including the instance ID, private IP addresses, Elastic IP addresses, and all instance metadata If your instance has a public IPv4 address, it retains the public IPv4 address after recovery
The engineering team at a social media company wants to use Amazon CloudWatch alarms to automatically recover EC2 instances if they become impaired. The team has hired you as a solutions architect to provide subject matter expertise. As a solutions architect, which of the following statements would you identify as CORRECT regarding this automatic recovery process? (Select two)