Amazon AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate SAA-C02 Exam Actual Questions

A manufacturing company wants to implement predictive maintenance on its machinery equipment. The company will install thousands of IoT sensors that will send data to AWS in real time. A solutions architect is tasked with implementing a solution that will receive events in an ordered manner for each machinery asset and ensure that data is saved for further processing at a later time. Which solution would be MOST efficient? A. Use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams for real-time events with a partition for each equipment asset. Use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to save data to Amazon S3. B. Use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams for real-time events with a shard for each equipment asset. Use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to save data to Amazon EBS. C. Use an Amazon SQS FIFO queue for real-time events with one queue for each equipment asset. Trigger an AWS Lambda function for the SQS queue to save data to Amazon EFS. D. Use an Amazon SQS standard queue for real-time events with one queue for each equipment asset. Trigger an AWS Lambda function from the SQS queue to save data to Amazon S3.

A

A company's web application uses an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL DB instance to store its application data. During the financial closing period at the start of every month. Accountants run large queries that impact the database's performance due to high usage. The company wants to minimize the impact that the reporting activity has on the web application. What should a solutions architect do to reduce the impact on the database with the LEAST amount of effort? A. Create a read replica and direct reporting traffic to the replica. B. Create a Multi-AZ database and direct reporting traffic to the standby. C. Create a cross-Region read replica and direct reporting traffic to the replica. D. Create an Amazon Redshift database and direct reporting traffic to the Amazon Redshift database.

A Amazon RDS uses the MariaDB, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL Server DB engines' built-in replication functionality to create a special type of DB instance called a read replica from a source DB instance. Updates made to the source DB instance are asynchronously copied to the read replica. You can reduce the load on your source DB instance by routing read queries from your applications to the read replica. When you create a read replica, you first specify an existing DB instance as the source. Then Amazon RDS takes a snapshot of the source instance and creates a read-only instance from the snapshot. Amazon RDS then uses the asynchronous replication method for the DB engine to update the read replica whenever there is a change to the source DB instance. The read replica operates as a DB instance that allows only read-only connections. Applications connect to a read replica the same way they do to any DB instance. Amazon RDS replicates all databases in the source DB instance. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_ReadRepl.html

A solutions architect is designing a high performance computing (HPC) workload on Amazon EC2. The EC2 instances need to communicate to each other frequently and require network performance with low latency and high throughput. Which EC2 configuration meets these requirements? A. Launch the EC2 instances in a cluster placement group in one Availability Zone. B. Launch the EC2 instances in a spread placement group in one Availability Zone. C. Launch the EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group in two Regions and peer the VPCs. D. Launch the EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group spanning multiple Availability Zones.

A Placement groups -When you launch a new EC2 instance, the EC2 service attempts to place the instance in such a way that all of your instances are spread out across underlying hardware to minimize correlated failures. You can use placement groups to influence the placement of a group of interdependent instances to meet the needs of your workload. Depending on the type of workload.Cluster "" packs instances close together inside an Availability Zone. This strategy enables workloads to achieve the low-latency network performance necessary for tightly-coupled node-to-node communication that is typical of HPC applications. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/placement-groups.html

A solutions architect is deploying a distributed database on multiple Amazon EC2 instances. The database stores all data on multiple instances so it can withstand the loss of an instance. The database requires block storage with latency and throughput to support several million transactions per second per server. Which storage solution should the solutions architect use? A. Amazon EBS B. Amazon EC2 instance store C. Amazon EFS D. Amazon S3

A Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/InstanceStorage.html

A company's website runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The website has a mix of dynamic and static content. Users around the globe are reporting that the website is slow. Which set of actions will improve website performance for users worldwide? A. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution and configure the ALB as an origin. Then update the Amazon Route 53 record to point to the CloudFront distribution. B. Create a latency-based Amazon Route 53 record for the ALB. Then launch new EC2 instances with larger instance sizes and register the instances with the ALB. C. Launch new EC2 instances hosting the same web application in different Regions closer to the users. Then register instances with the same ALB using cross- Region VPC peering. D. Host the website in an Amazon S3 bucket in the Regions closest to the users and delete the ALB and EC2 instances. Then update an Amazon Route 53 record to point to the S3 buckets.

A Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/routing-to-cloudfront-distribution.html

A solution architect has created a new AWS account and must secure AWS account root user access. Which combination of actions will accomplish this? (Choose two.) A. Ensure the root user uses a strong password. B. Enable multi-factor authentication to the root user. C. Store root user access keys in an encrypted Amazon S3 bucket. D. Add the root user to a group containing administrative permissions. E. Apply the required permissions to the root user with an inline policy document.

A, B

A company wants to migrate a high performance computing (HPC) application and data from on-premises to the AWS Cloud. The company uses tiered storage on premises with hot high-performance parallel storage to support the application during periodic runs of the application, and more economical cold storage to hold the data when the application is not actively running. Which combination of solutions should a solutions architect recommend to support the storage needs of the application? (Choose two.) A. Amazon S3 for cold data storage B. Amazon EFS for cold data storage C. Amazon S3 for high-performance parallel storage D. Amazon FSx for Lustre for high-performance parallel storage E. Amazon FSx for Windows for high-performance parallel storage

A, D - https://aws.amazon.com/fsx/lustre/ Amazon FSx for Lustre makes it easy and cost effective to launch and run the world's most popular high-performance file system. Use it for workloads where speed matters, such as machine learning, high performance computing (HPC), video processing, and financial modeling.

A solutions architect needs to ensure that API calls to Amazon DynamoDB from Amazon EC2 instances in a VPC do not traverse the internet. What should the solutions architect do to accomplish this? (Choose two.) A. Create a route table entry for the endpoint. B. Create a gateway endpoint for DynamoDB. C. Create a new DynamoDB table that uses the endpoint. D. Create an ENI for the endpoint in each of the subnets of the VPC. E. Create a security group entry in the default security group to provide access.

AB A VPC endpoint enables you to privately connect your VPC to supported AWS services and VPC endpoint services powered by AWS PrivateLink without requiring an internet gateway, NAT device, VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect connection. Instances in your VPC do not require public IP addresses to communicate with resources in the service. Traffic between your VPC and the other service does not leave the Amazon network. Gateway endpoints -A gateway endpoint is a gateway that you specify as a target for a route in your route table for traffic destined to a supported AWS service. The following AWS services are supported: Amazon S3 - DynamoDB - Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/vpc-endpoints.html

A solutions architect is designing a solution to access a catalog of images and provide users with the ability to submit requests to customize images. Image customization parameters will be in any request sent to an AWS API Gateway API. The customized image will be generated on demand, and users will receive a link they can click to view or download their customized image. The solution must be highly available for viewing and customizing images. What is the MOST cost-effective solution to meet these requirements? A. Use Amazon EC2 instances to manipulate the original image into the requested customization. Store the original and manipulated images in Amazon S3. Configure an Elastic Load Balancer in front of the EC2 instances. B. Use AWS Lambda to manipulate the original image to the requested customization. Store the original and manipulated images in Amazon S3. Configure an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the S3 bucket as the origin. C. Use AWS Lambda to manipulate the original image to the requested customization. Store the original images in Amazon S3 and the manipulated images in Amazon DynamoDB. Configure an Elastic Load Balancer in front of the Amazon EC2 instances. D. Use Amazon EC2 instances to manipulate the original image into the requested customization. Store the original images in Amazon S3 and the manipulated images in Amazon DynamoDB. Configure an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the S3 bucket as the origin.

B AWS Lambda is a compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. AWS Lambda executes your code only when needed and scales automatically, from a few requests per day to thousands per second. You pay only for the compute time you consume "" there is no charge when your code is not running. With AWS Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service "" all with zero administration. AWS Lambda runs your code on a high-availability compute infrastructure and performs all of the administration of the compute resources, including server and operating system maintenance, capacity provisioning and automatic scaling, code monitoring and logging. All you need to do is supply your code in one of the languages that AWS Lambda supports. Storing your static content with S3 provides a lot of advantages. But to help optimize your application's performance and security while effectively managing cost, we recommend that you also set up Amazon CloudFront to work with your S3 bucket to serve and protect the content. CloudFront is a content delivery network(CDN) service that delivers static and dynamic web content, video streams, and APIs around the world, securely and at scale. By design, delivering data out of CloudFront can be more cost effective than delivering it from S3 directly to your users. CloudFront serves content through a worldwide network of data centers called Edge Locations. Using edge servers to cache and serve content improves performance by providing content closer to where viewers are located. CloudFront has edge servers in locations all around the world. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/welcome.html https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/amazon-s3-amazon-cloudfront-a-match-made-in-the-cloud/

A product team is creating a new application that will store a large amount of data. The data will be analyzed hourly and modified by multiple Amazon EC2 Linux instances. The application team believes the amount of space needed will continue to grow for the next 6 months. Which set of actions should a solutions architect take to support these needs? A. Store the data in an Amazon EBS volume. Mount the EBS volume on the application instances. B. Store the data in an Amazon EFS file system. Mount the file system on the application instances. C. Store the data in Amazon S3 Glacier. Update the vault policy to allow access to the application instances. D. Store the data in Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA). Update the bucket policy to allow access to the application instances.

B Amazon Elastic File System -Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides a simple, scalable, fully managed elastic NFS file system for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. It is built to scale on demand to petabytes without disrupting applications, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, eliminating the need to provision and manage capacity to accommodate growth. Amazon EFS is designed to provide massively parallel shared access to thousands of Amazon EC2 instances, enabling your applications to achieve high levels of aggregate throughput and IOPS with consistent low latencies. Amazon EFS is well suited to support a broad spectrum of use cases from home directories to business-critical applications. Customers can use EFS to lift-and- shift existing enterprise applications to the AWS Cloud. Other use cases include: big data analytics, web serving and content management, application development and testing, media and entertainment workflows, database backups, and container storage. Amazon EFS is a regional service storing data within and across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) for high availability and durability. Amazon EC2 instances can access your file system across AZs, regions, and VPCs, while on-premises servers can access using AWS Direct Connect or AWS VPN. Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/efs/

A company is migrating from an on-premises infrastructure to the AWS Cloud. One of the company's applications stores files on a Windows file server farm that uses Distributed File System Replication (DFSR) to keep data in sync. A solutions architect needs to replace the file server farm. Which service should the solutions architect use? A. Amazon EFS B. Amazon FSx C. Amazon S3 D. AWS Storage Gateway

B Migrating Existing Files to Amazon FSx for Windows File Server Using AWS DataSync We recommend using AWS DataSync to transfer data between Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file systems. DataSync is a data transfer service that simplifies, automates, and accelerates moving and replicating data between on-premises storage systems and other AWS storage services over the internet or AWS Direct Connect. DataSync can transfer your file system data and metadata, such as ownership, time stamps, and access permissions. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/fsx/latest/WindowsGuide/migrate-files-to-fsx-datasync.html

A company has application running on Amazon EC2 instances in a VPC. One of the applications needs to call an Amazon S3 API to store and read objects. The company's security policies restrict any internet-bound traffic from the applications. Which action will fulfill these requirements and maintain security? A. Configure an S3 interface endpoint. B. Configure an S3 gateway endpoint. C. Create an S3 bucket in a private subnet. D. Create an S3 bucket in the same Region as the EC2 instance.

B VPC endpoints - A VPC endpoint enables you to privately connect your VPC to supported AWS services and VPC endpoint services powered by AWS PrivateLink without requiring an internet gateway, NAT device, VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect connection. Instances in your VPC do not require public IP addresses to communicate with resources in the service. Traffic between your VPC and the other service does not leave the Amazon network. An interface endpoint is an elastic network interface with a private IP address from the IP address range of your subnet that serves as an entry point for traffic destined to a supported service. Interface endpoints are powered by AWS PrivateLink, a technology that enables you to privately access services by using private IPaddresses. AWS PrivateLink restricts all network traffic between your VPC and services to the Amazon network. You do not need an internet gateway, a NAT device, or a virtual private gateway. Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-vpc-endpoint-for-amazon-s3/ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/vpc-endpoints.html

A company captures clickstream data from multiple websites and analyzes it using batch processing. The data is loaded nightly into Amazon Redshift and is consumed by business analysts. The company wants to move towards near-real-time data processing for timely insights. The solution should process the streaming data with minimal effort and operational overhead. Which combination of AWS services are MOST cost-effective for this solution? (Choose two.) A. Amazon EC2 B. AWS Lambda C. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams D. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose E. Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics

B,D Reference: https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/whitepaper-streaming-data-solutions-on-aws-with-amazon-kinesis.pdf

A solutions architect is designing a solution where users will be directed to a backup static error page if the primary website is unavailable. The primary website's DNS records are hosted in Amazon Route 53 where their domain is pointing to an Application Load Balancer (ALB).Which configuration should the solutions architect use to meet the company's needs while minimizing changes and infrastructure overhead? A. Point a Route 53 alias record to an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the ALB as one of its origins. Then, create custom error pages for the distribution. B. Set up a Route 53 active-passive failover configuration. Direct traffic to a static error page hosted within an Amazon S3 bucket when Route 53 health checks determine that the ALB endpoint is unhealthy. C. Update the Route 53 record to use a latency-based routing policy. Add the backup static error page hosted within an Amazon S3 bucket to the record so the traffic is sent to the most responsive endpoints. D. Set up a Route 53 active-active configuration with the ALB and an Amazon EC2 instance hosting a static error page as endpoints. Route 53 will only send requests to the instance if the health checks fail for the ALB.

B: Active-passive failover -Use an active-passive failover configuration when you want a primary resource or group of resources to be available the majority of the time and you want a secondary resource or group of resources to be on standby in case all the primary resources become unavailable. When responding to queries, Route 53 includes only the healthy primary resources. If all the primary resources are unhealthy, Route 53 begins to include only the healthy secondary resources in response toDNS queries. To create an active-passive failover configuration with one primary record and one secondary record, you just create the records and specify Failover for the routing policy. When the primary resource is healthy, Route 53 responds to DNS queries using the primary record. When the primary resource is unhealthy, Route53 responds to DNS queries using the secondary record. How Amazon Route 53 averts cascading failures As a first defense against cascading failures, each request routing algorithm (such as weighted and failover) has a mode of last resort. In this special mode, when all records are considered unhealthy, the Route 53 algorithm reverts to considering all records healthy. For example, if all instances of an application, on several hosts, are rejecting health check requests, Route 53 DNS servers will choose an answer anyway and return it rather than returning no DNS answer or returning an NXDOMAIN (non-existent domain) response. An application can respond to users but still fail health checks, so this provides some protection against misconfiguration. Similarly, if an application is overloaded, and one out of three endpoints fails its health checks, so that it's excluded from Route 53 DNS responses, Route 53 distributes responses between the two remaining endpoints. If the remaining endpoints are unable to handle the additional load and they fail, Route 53 reverts to distributing requests to all three endpoints. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/dns-failover-types.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/dns-failover-problems.html

A solutions architect is designing a new service behind Amazon API Gateway. The request patterns for the service will be unpredictable and can change suddenly from 0 requests to over 500 per second. The total size of the data that needs to be persisted in a database is currently less than 1 GB with unpredictable future growth. Data can be queried using simple key-value requests. Which combination of AWS services would meet these requirements? (Choose two.) A. AWS Fargate B. AWS Lambda C. Amazon DynamoDB D. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling E. MySQL-compatible Amazon Aurora

BC Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/(unpredictable) https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/11/amazon-api-gateway-supports-endpoint-integrations-with-private-vpcs

A company's application is running on Amazon EC2 instances in a single Region. In the event of a disaster, a solutions architect needs to ensure that the resources can also be deployed to a second Region. Which combination of actions should the solutions architect take to accomplish this? (Choose two.) A. Detach a volume on an EC2 instance and copy it to Amazon S3. B. Launch a new EC2 instance from an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) in a new Region. C. Launch a new EC2 instance in a new Region and copy a volume from Amazon S3 to the new instance. D. Copy an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) of an EC2 instance and specify a different Region for the destination. E. Copy an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume from Amazon S3 and launch an EC2 instance in the destination Region using that EBS volume.

BD Cross Region EC2 AMI Copy -We know that you want to build applications that span AWS Regions and we're working to provide you with the services and features needed to do so. We started out by launching the EBS Snapshot Copy feature late last year. This feature gave you the ability to copy a snapshot from Region to Region with just a couple of clicks. In addition, last month we made a significant reduction (26% to 83%) in the cost of transferring data between AWS Regions, making it less expensive to operate in more than one AWS region. Today we are introducing a new feature: Amazon Machine Image (AMI) Copy. AMI Copy enables you to easily copy your Amazon Machine Images between AWS Regions. AMI Copy helps enable several key scenarios including: Simple and Consistent Multi-Region Deployment "" You can copy an AMI from one region to another, enabling you to easily launch consistent instances based on the same AMI into different regions. Scalability "" You can more easily design and build world-scale applications that meet the needs of your users, regardless of their location. Performance "" You can increase performance by distributing your application and locating critical components of your application in closer proximity to your users. You can also take advantage of region-specific features such as instance types or other AWS services. Even Higher Availability "" You can design and deploy applications across AWS regions, to increase availability. Once the new AMI is in an Available state the copy is complete. Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-ami-copy-between-regions/ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/CopyingAMIs.html

A company is migrating a three-tier application to AWS. The application requires a MySQL database. In the past, the application users reported poor application performance when creating new entries. These performance issues were caused by users generating different real-time reports from the application during working hours. Which solution will improve the performance of the application when it is moved to AWS? A. Import the data into an Amazon DynamoDB table with provisioned capacity. Refactor the application to use DynamoDB for reports. B. Create the database on a compute optimized Amazon EC2 instance. Ensure compute resources exceed the on-premises database. C. Create an Amazon Aurora MySQL Multi-AZ DB cluster with multiple read replicas. Configure the application reader endpoint for reports. D. Create an Amazon Aurora MySQL Multi-AZ DB cluster. Configure the application to use the backup instance of the cluster as an endpoint for the reports.

C

A company serves content to its subscribers across the world using an application running on AWS. The application has several Amazon EC2 instances in a private subnet behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Due to a recent change in copyright restrictions, the chief information officer (CIO) wants to block access for certain countries. Which action will meet these requirements? A. Modify the ALB security group to deny incoming traffic from blocked countries. B. Modify the security group for EC2 instances to deny incoming traffic from blocked countries. C. Use Amazon CloudFront to serve the application and deny access to blocked countries. D. Use ALB listener rules to return access denied responses to incoming traffic from blocked countries.

C "block access for certain countries." You can use geo restriction, also known as geo blocking, to prevent users in specific geographic locations from accessing content that you're distributing through a CloudFront web distribution. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/georestrictions.html

An application running on AWS uses an Amazon Aurora Multi-AZ deployment for its database. When evaluating performance metrics, a solutions architect discovered that the database reads are causing high I/O and adding latency to the write requests against the database. What should the solutions architect do to separate the read requests from the write requests? A. Enable read-through caching on the Amazon Aurora database. B. Update the application to read from the Multi-AZ standby instance. C. Create a read replica and modify the application to use the appropriate endpoint. D. Create a second Amazon Aurora database and link it to the primary database as a read replica.

C Amazon RDS Read Replicas -Amazon RDS Read Replicas provide enhanced performance and durability for RDS database (DB) instances. They make it easy to elastically scale out beyond the capacity constraints of a single DB instance for read-heavy database workloads. You can create one or more replicas of a given source DB Instance and serve high-volume application read traffic from multiple copies of your data, thereby increasing aggregate read throughput. Read replicas can also be promoted when needed to become standalone DB instances. Read replicas are available in Amazon RDS for MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server as well as Amazon Aurora. For the MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server database engines, Amazon RDS creates a second DB instance using a snapshot of the source DB instance. It then uses the engines' native asynchronous replication to update the read replica whenever there is a change to the source DB instance. The read replica operates as a DB instance that allows only read-only connections; applications can connect to a read replica just as they would to any DB instance. Amazon RDS replicates all databases in the source DB instance. Amazon Aurora further extends the benefits of read replicas by employing an SSD-backed virtualized storage layer purpose-built for database workloads. Amazon Aurora replicas share the same underlying storage as the source instance, lowering costs and avoiding the need to copy data to the replica nodes. For more information about replication with Amazon Aurora, see the online documentation. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_ReadRepl.html https://aws.amazon.com/rds/features/read-replicas/

A company's legacy application is currently relying on a single-instance Amazon RDS MySQL database without encryption. Due to new compliance requirements, all existing and new data in this database must be encrypted. How should this be accomplished? A. Create an Amazon S3 bucket with server-side encryption enabled. Move all the data to Amazon S3. Delete the RDS instance. B. Enable RDS Multi-AZ mode with encryption at rest enabled. Perform a failover to the standby instance to delete the original instance. C. Take a Snapshot of the RDS instance. Create an encrypted copy of the snapshot. Restore the RDS instance from the encrypted snapshot. D. Create an RDS read replica with encryption at rest enabled. Promote the read replica to master and switch the over to the new master. Delete the old RDS instance.

C How do I encrypt Amazon RDS snapshots? The following steps are applicable to Amazon RDS for MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, or MariaDB. Important: If you use Amazon Aurora, you can restore an unencrypted Aurora DB cluster snapshot to an encrypted Aurora DB cluster if you specify an AWS KeyManagement Service (AWS KMS) encryption key when you restore from the unencrypted DB cluster snapshot. For more information, see Limitations of AmazonRDS Encrypted DB Instances. Open the Amazon RDS console, and then choose Snapshots from the navigation pane. Select the snapshot that you want to encrypt. Under Snapshot Actions, choose Copy Snapshot. Choose your Destination Region, and then enter your New DB Snapshot Identifier. Change Enable Encryption to Yes. Select your Master Key from the list, and then choose Copy Snapshot. After the snapshot status is available, the Encrypted field will be True to indicate that the snapshot is encrypted. You now have an encrypted snapshot of your DB. You can use this encrypted DB snapshot to restore the DB instance from the DB snapshot. Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/encrypt-rds-snapshots/

A company is planning to migrate a business-critical dataset to Amazon S3. The current solution design uses a single S3 bucket in the us-east-1 Region with versioning enabled to store the dataset. The company's disaster recovery policy states that all data multiple AWS Regions. How should a solutions architect design the S3 solution? A. Create an additional S3 bucket in another Region and configure cross-Region replication. B. Create an additional S3 bucket in another Region and configure cross-origin resource sharing (CORS). C. Create an additional S3 bucket with versioning in another Region and configure cross-Region replication. D. Create an additional S3 bucket with versioning in another Region and configure cross-origin resource (CORS).

C Object Versioning -[1] (version 222222) in a single bucket. S3 Versioning protects you from the consequences of unintended overwrites and deletions. You can also use it to archive objects so that you have access to previous versions. You must explicitly enable S3 Versioning on your bucket. By default, S3 Versioning is disabled. Regardless of whether you have enabled Versioning, each object in your bucket has a version ID. If you have not enabled Versioning, Amazon S3 sets the value of the version ID to null. If S3 Versioning is enabled, Amazon S3 assigns a version ID value for the object. This value distinguishes it from other versions of the same key. Enabling and suspending versioning is done at the bucket level. When you enable versioning on an existing bucket, objects that are already stored in the bucket are unchanged. The version IDs (null), contents, and permissions remain the same. After you enable S3 Versioning for a bucket, each object that is added to the bucket gets a version ID, which distinguishes it from other versions of the same key. Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS)Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) defines a way for client web applications that are loaded in one domain to interact with resources in a different domain. With CORS support, you can build rich client-side web applications with Amazon S3 and selectively allow cross-origin access to your Amazon S3 resources. Reference: https://medium.com/@KerrySheldon/s3-exercise-2-4-adding-objects-to-an-s3-bucket-with-cross-region-replication-a78b332b7697 https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/ObjectVersioning.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/cors.html

A company wants to host a scalable web application on AWS. The application will be accessed by users from different geographic regions of the world. Application users will be able to download and upload unique data up to gigabytes in size. The development team wants a cost-effective solution to minimize upload and download latency and maximize performance. What should a solutions architect do to accomplish this? A. Use Amazon S3 with Transfer Acceleration to host the application. B. Use Amazon S3 with CacheControl headers to host the application. C. Use Amazon EC2 with Auto Scaling and Amazon CloudFront to host the application. D. Use Amazon EC2 with Auto Scaling and Amazon ElastiCache to host the application.

C Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/autoscaling/

A recently acquired company is required to build its own infrastructure on AWS and migrate multiple applications to the cloud within a month. Each application has approximately 50 TB of data to be transferred. After the migration is complete, this company and its parent company will both require secure network connectivity with consistent throughput from their data centers to the applications. A solutions architect must ensure one-time data migration and ongoing network connectivity. Which solution will meet these requirements? A. AWS Direct Connect for both the initial transfer and ongoing connectivity. B. AWS Site-to-Site VPN for both the initial transfer and ongoing connectivity. C. AWS Snowball for the initial transfer and AWS Direct Connect for ongoing connectivity. D. AWS Snowball for the initial transfer and AWS Site-to-Site VPN for ongoing connectivity.

C Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/dms/latest/userguide/CHAP_LargeDBs.html https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/

A start-up company has a web application based in the us-east-1 Region with multiple Amazon EC2 instances running behind an Application Load Balancer across multiple Availability Zones. As the company's user base grows in the us-west-1 Region, it needs a solution with low latency and high availability. What should a solutions architect do to accomplish this? A. Provision EC2 instances in us-west-1. Switch the Application Load Balancer to a Network Load Balancer to achieve cross-Region load balancing. B. Provision EC2 instances and an Application Load Balancer in us-west-1. Make the load balancer distribute the traffic based on the location of the request. C. Provision EC2 instances and configure an Application Load Balancer in us-west-1. Create an accelerator in AWS Global Accelerator that uses an endpoint group that includes the load balancer endpoints in both Regions. D. Provision EC2 instances and configure an Application Load Balancer in us-west-1. Configure Amazon Route 53 with a weighted routing policy. Create alias records in Route 53 that point to the Application Load Balancer.

C Register endpoints for endpoint groups: You register one or more regional resources, such as Application Load Balancers, Network Load Balancers, EC2Instances, or Elastic IP addresses, in each endpoint group. Then you can set weights to choose how much traffic is routed to each endpoint. Endpoints in AWS Global Accelerator Endpoints in AWS Global Accelerator can be Network Load Balancers, Application Load Balancers, Amazon EC2 instances, or Elastic IP addresses. A static IP address serves as a single point of contact for clients, and Global Accelerator then distributes incoming traffic across healthy endpoints. Global Accelerator directs traffic to endpoints by using the port (or port range) that you specify for the listener that the endpoint group for the endpoint belongs to. Each endpoint group can have multiple endpoints. You can add each endpoint to multiple endpoint groups, but the endpoint groups must be associated with different listeners. Global Accelerator continually monitors the health of all endpoints that are included in an endpoint group. It routes traffic only to the active endpoints that are healthy. If Global Accelerator doesn't have any healthy endpoints to route traffic to, it routes traffic to all endpoints. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/about-endpoints.html https://aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/faqs/ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/introduction-benefits-of-migrating.html

A company's application runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The instances run in an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. On the first day of every month at midnight, the application becomes much slower when the month-end financial calculation batch executes. This causes the CPU utilization of the EC2 instances to immediately peak to 100%, which disrupts the application. What should a solutions architect recommend to ensure the application is able to handle the workload and avoid downtime? A. Configure an Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the ALB. B. Configure an EC2 Auto Scaling simple scaling policy based on CPU utilization. C. Configure an EC2 Auto Scaling scheduled scaling policy based on the monthly schedule. D. Configure Amazon ElastiCache to remove some of the workload from the EC2 instances.

C Scheduled Scaling for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Scheduled scaling allows you to set your own scaling schedule. For example, let's say that every week the traffic to your web application starts to increase on Wednesday, remains high on Thursday, and starts to decrease on Friday. You can plan your scaling actions based on the predictable traffic patterns of your web application. Scaling actions are performed automatically as a function of time and date. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/userguide/schedule_time.html

A company built an application that lets users check in to places they visit, rank the places, and add reviews about their experiences. The application is successful with a rapid increase in the number of users every month. The chief technology officer fears the database supporting the current Infrastructure may not handle the new load the following month because the single Amazon RDS for MySQL instance has triggered alarms related to resource exhaustion due to read requests. What can a solutions architect recommend to prevent service Interruptions at the database layer with minimal changes to code? A. Create RDS read replicas and redirect read-only traffic to the read replica endpoints. Enable a Multi-AZ deployment. B. Create an Amazon EMR cluster and migrate the data to a Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) with a replication factor of 3. C. Create an Amazon ElastiCache cluster and redirect all read-only traffic to the cluster. Set up the cluster to be deployed in three Availability Zones. D. Create an Amazon DynamoDB table to replace the RDS instance and redirect all read-only traffic to the DynamoDB table Enable DynamoDB Accelerator to offload traffic from the main table.

Correct Answer: A

A company is looking for a solution that can store video archives in AWS from old news footage. The company needs to minimize costs and will rarely need to restore these files. When the files are needed, they must be available in a maximum of five minutes. What is the MOST cost-effective solution? A. Store the video archives in Amazon S3 Glacier and use Expedited retrievals. B. Store the video archives in Amazon S3 Glacier and use Standard retrievals. C. Store the video archives in Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA). D. Store the video archives in Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA).

Correct Answer: A

A company is managing health records on-premises. The company must keep these records indefinitely, disable any modifications to the records once they are stored, and granularly audit access at all levels. The chief technology officer (CTO) is concerned because there are already millions of records not being used by any application, and the current infrastructure is running out of space. The CTO has requested a solutions architect design a solution to move existing data and support future records. Which services can the solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements? A. Use AWS DataSync to move existing data to AWS. Use Amazon S3 to store existing and new data. Enable Amazon S3 object lock and enable AWS CloudTrail with data events. B. Use AWS Storage Gateway to move existing data to AWS. Use Amazon S3 to store existing and new data. Enable Amazon S3 object lock and enable AWS CloudTrail with management events. C. Use AWS DataSync to move existing data to AWS. Use Amazon S3 to store existing and new data. Enable Amazon S3 object lock and enable AWS CloudTrail with management events. D. Use AWS Storage Gateway to move existing data to AWS. Use Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) to store existing and new data. Enable Amazon S3 object lock and enable Amazon S3 server access logging.

Correct Answer: A

A company recently implemented hybrid cloud connectivity using AWS Direct Connect and is migrating data to Amazon S3. The company is looking for a fully managed solution that will automate and accelerate the replication of data between the on-premises storage systems and AWS storage services. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend to keep the data private? A. Deploy an AWS DataSync agent tor the on-premises environment. Configure a sync job to replicate the data and connect it with an AWS service endpoint. B. Deploy an AWS DataSync agent for the on-premises environment. Schedule a batch job to replicate point-ln-time snapshots to AWS. C. Deploy an AWS Storage Gateway volume gateway for the on-premises environment. Configure it to store data locally, and asynchronously back up point-in- time snapshots to AWS. D. Deploy an AWS Storage Gateway file gateway for the on-premises environment. Configure it to store data locally, and asynchronously back up point-in-lime snapshots to AWS.

Correct Answer: A

A company runs a production application workload in a single AWS account that uses Amazon Route 53, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and Amazon RDS. In the event of a security incident, the Security team wants the application workload to fail over to a new AWS account. The Security team also wants to block all access to the original account immediately, with no access to any AWS resources in the original AWS account, during forensic analysis. What is the most cost-effective way to prepare to fail over to the second account prior to a security incident? A. Migrate the Amazon Route 53 configuration to a dedicated AWS account. Mirror the Elastic Beanstalk configuration in a different account. Enable RDS Database Read Replicas in a different account. B. Migrate the Amazon Route 53 configuration to a dedicated AWS account. Save/copy the Elastic Beanstalk configuration files in a different AWS account. Copy snapshots of the RDS Database to a different account. C. Save/copy the Amazon Route 53 configurations for use in a different AWS account after an incident. Save/copy Elastic Beanstalk configuration files to a different account. Enable the RDS database read replica in a different account. D. Save/copy the Amazon Route 53 configurations for use in a different AWS account after an incident. Mirror the configuration of Elastic Beanstalk in a different account. Copy snapshots of the RDS database to a different account.

Correct Answer: A

A healthcare company stores highly sensitive patient records. Compliance requires that multiple copies be stored in different locations. Each record must be stored for 7 years. The company has a service level agreement (SLA) to provide records to government agencies immediately for the first 30 days and then within4 hours of a request thereafter. What should a solutions architect recommend? A. Use Amazon S3 with cross-Region replication enabled. After 30 days, transition the data to Amazon S3 Glacier using lifecycle policy. B. Use Amazon S3 with cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) enabled. After 30 days, transition the data to Amazon S3 Glacier using a lifecycle policy. C. Use Amazon S3 with cross-Region replication enabled. After 30 days, transition the data to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Achieve using a lifecycle policy. D. Use Amazon S3 with cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) enabled. After 30 days, transition the data to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive using a lifecycle policy.

Correct Answer: A

An application runs on Amazon EC2 instances in private subnets. The application needs to access an Amazon DynamoDB table. What is the MOST secure way to access the table while ensuring that the traffic does not leave the AWS network? A. Use a VPC endpoint for DynamoDB. B. Use a NAT gateway in a public subnet. C. Use a NAT instance in a private subnet. D. Use the internet gateway attached to the VPC.

Correct Answer: A

A company is performing an AWS Well-Architected Framework review of an existing workload deployed on AWS. The review identified a public-facing website running on the same Amazon EC2 instance as a Microsoft Active Directory domain controller that was install recently to support other AWS services. A solutions architect needs to recommend a new design that would improve the security of the architecture and minimize the administrative demand on IT staff. What should the solutions architect recommend? A. Use AWS Directory Service to create a managed Active Directory. Uninstall Active Directory on the current EC2 instance. B. Create another EC2 instance in the same subnet and reinstall Active Directory on it. Uninstall Active Directory. C. Use AWS Directory Service to create an Active Directory connector. Proxy Active Directory requests to the Active domain controller running on the current EC2 instance. D. Enable AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) with Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 federation with the current Active Directory controller. Modify the EC2 instance's security group to deny public access to Active Directory.

Correct Answer: A AWS Managed Microsoft AD - AWS Directory Service lets you run Microsoft Active Directory (AD) as a managed service. AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also referred to as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, is powered by Windows Server 2012 R2. When you select and launch this directory type, it is created as a highly available pair of domain controllers connected to your virtual private cloud (VPC). The domain controllers run in different Availability Zones in a region of your choice. Host monitoring and recovery, data replication, snapshots, and software updates are automatically configured and managed for you. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/directoryservice/latest/admin-guide/directory_microsoft_ad.html

A company hosts a static website within an Amazon S3 bucket. A solutions architect needs to ensure that data can be recovered in case of accidental deletion. Which action will accomplish this? A. Enable Amazon S3 versioning. B. Enable Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering. C. Enable an Amazon S3 lifecycle policy. D. Enable Amazon S3 cross-Region replication.

Correct Answer: A Data can be recover if versioning enable, also it provide a extra protection like file delete, MFA delete. MFA. Delete only works for CLI or API interaction, not in theAWS Management Console. Also, you cannot make version DELETE actions with MFA using IAM user credentials. You must use your root AWS account. Object Versioning -[1](version 222222) in a single bucket. S3 Versioning protects you from the consequences of unintended overwrites and deletions. You can also use it to archive objects so that you have access to previous versions. You must explicitly enable S3 Versioning on your bucket. By default, S3 Versioning is disabled. Regardless of whether you have enabled Versioning, each object in your bucket has a version ID. If you have not enabled Versioning, Amazon S3 sets the value of the version ID to null. If S3 Versioning is enabled, Amazon S3 assigns a version ID value for the object. This value distinguishes it from other versions of the same key. Reference: https://books.google.com.sg/books?id=wv45DQAAQBAJ&pg=PA39&lpg=PA39&dq=hosts+a+static+website+within+an+Amazon+S3+bucket.+A+solutions+architect+needs+to+ensure+that+data+can+be+recovered+in+case+of+accidental+deletion&source=bl&ots=0NolP5igY5&sig=ACfU3U3opL9Jha6jM2EI8x7EcjK4rigQHQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiS9e3yy7vpAhVx73MBHZNoDnQQ6AEwAH oECBQQAQ#v=onepage&q=hosts%20a%20static%20website%20within%20an%20Amazon%20S3%20bucket.%20A%20solutions%20architect%20needs%20to%20ensure%20that%20data%20can%20be%20recovered%20in%20case%20of%20accidental%20deletion&f=false https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/securing-access-to-aws-using-mfa-part-3/ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/ObjectVersioning.html

A company has on-premises servers running a relational database. The current database serves high read traffic for users in different locations. The company wants to migrate to AWS with the least amount of effort. The database solution should support disaster recovery and not affect the company's current traffic flow. Which solution meets these requirements? A. Use a database in Amazon RDS with Multi-AZ and at least one read replica. B. Use a database in Amazon RDS with Multi-AZ and at least one standby replica. C. Use databases hosted on multiple Amazon EC2 instances in different AWS Regions. D. Use databases hosted on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer in different Availability Zones.

Correct Answer: A Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/implementing-a-disaster-recovery-strategy-with-amazon-rds/

A solutions architect is optimizing a website for an upcoming musical event. Videos of the performances will be streamed in real time and then will be available on demand. The event is expected to attract a global online audience. Which service will improve the performance of both the real-time and on-demand steaming? A. Amazon CloudFront B. AWS Global Accelerator C. Amazon Route S3 D. Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration

Correct Answer: A Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/on-demand-streaming-video.html

A company runs an internal browser-based application. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The instances run in an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. The Auto Scaling group scales up to 20 instances during work hours, but scales down to2 instances overnight. Staff are complaining that the application is very slow when the day begins, although it runs well by mid-morning. How should the scaling be changed to address the staff complaints and keep costs to a minimum? A. Implement a scheduled action that sets the desired capacity to 20 shortly before the office opens. B. Implement a step scaling action triggered at a lower CPU threshold, and decrease the cooldown period. C. Implement a target tracking action triggered at a lower CPU threshold, and decrease the cooldown period. D. Implement a scheduled action that sets the minimum and maximum capacity to 20 shortly before the office opens.

Correct Answer: A Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/userguide/asg-purchase-options.html

A company hosts its product information webpages on AWS. The existing solution uses multiple Amazon C2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer in anAuto Scaling group. The website also uses a custom DNS name and communicates with HTTPS only using a dedicated SSL certificate. The company is planning a new product launch and wants to be sure that users from around the world have the best possible experience on the new website. What should a solutions architect do to meet these requirements? A. Redesign the application to use Amazon CloudFront. B. Redesign the application to use AWS Elastic Beanstalk. C. Redesign the application to use a Network Load Balancer. D. Redesign the application to use Amazon S3 static website hosting.

Correct Answer: A What Is Amazon CloudFront? Amazon CloudFront is a web service that speeds up distribution of your static and dynamic web content, such as .html, .css, .js, and image files, to your users. CloudFront delivers your content through a worldwide network of data centers called edge locations. When a user requests content that you're serving with CloudFront, the user is routed to the edge location that provides the lowest latency (time delay), so that content is delivered with the best possible performance. If the content is already in the edge location with the lowest latency, CloudFront delivers it immediately. If the content is not in that edge location, CloudFront retrieves it from an origin that you've defined "" such as an Amazon S3 bucket, a MediaPackage channel, or an HTTP server (for example, a web server) that you have identified as the source for the definitive version of your content. As an example, suppose that you're serving an image from a traditional web server, not from CloudFront. For example, you might serve an image,[1]Your users can easily navigate to this URL and see the image. But they probably don't know that their request was routed from one network to another "" through the complex collection of interconnected networks that comprise the internet "" until the image was found. CloudFront speeds up the distribution of your content by routing each user request through the AWS backbone network to the edge location that can best serve your content. Typically, this is a CloudFront edge server that provides the fastest delivery to the viewer. Using the AWS network dramatically reduces the number of networks that your users' requests must pass through, which improves performance. Users get lower latency "" the time it takes to load the first byte of the file "" and higher data transfer rates. You also get increased reliability and availability because copies of your files (also known as objects) are now held (or cached) in multiple edge locations around the world. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/Introduction.html

A solutions architect is designing a two-tier web application. The application consists of a public-facing web tier hosted on Amazon EC2 in public subnets. The database tier consists of Microsoft SQL Server running on Amazon EC2 in a private subnet. Security is a high priority for the company. How should security groups be configured in this situation? (Choose two.) A. Configure the security group for the web tier to allow inbound traffic on port 443 from 0.0.0.0/0. B. Configure the security group for the web tier to allow outbound traffic on port 443 from 0.0.0.0/0. B. Configure the security group for the database tier to allow inbound traffic on port 1433 from the security group for the web tier. C. Configure the security group for the database tier to allow outbound traffic on ports 443 and 1433 to the security group for the web tier. D. Configure the security group for the database tier to allow inbound traffic on ports 443 and 1433 from the security group for the web tier.

Correct Answer: AB

A company recently deployed a new auditing system to centralize information about operating system versions, patching, and installed software for Amazon EC2 instances. A solutions architect must ensure all instances provisioned through EC2 Auto Scaling groups successfully send reports to the auditing system as soon as they are launched and terminated. Which solution achieves these goals MOST efficiently? A. Use a scheduled AWS Lambda function and execute a script remotely on all EC2 instances to send data to the audit system. B. Use EC2 Auto Scaling lifecycle hooks to execute a custom script to send data to the audit system when instances are launched and terminated. C. Use an EC2 Auto Scaling launch configuration to execute a custom script through user data to send data to the audit system when instances are launched and terminated. D. Execute a custom script on the instance operating system to send data to the audit system. Configure the script to be executed by the EC2 Auto Scaling group when the instance starts and is terminated.

Correct Answer: B

An application runs on Amazon EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones. The instances run in an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group behind an ApplicationLoad Balancer. The application performs best when the CPU utilization of the EC2 instances is at or near 40%. What should a solutions architect do to maintain the desired performance across all instances in the group? A. Use a simple scaling policy to dynamically scale the Auto Scaling group. B. Use a target tracking policy to dynamically scale the Auto Scaling group. C. Use an AWS Lambda function to update the desired Auto Scaling group capacity. D. Use scheduled scaling actions to scale up and scale down the Auto Scaling group.

Correct Answer: B

The Deployment team has grown substantially in recent months and so has the number of projects that use separate code repositories. The current process involves configuring AWS CodePipeline manually, and there have been service limit alerts for the count of Amazon S3 buckets. Which pipeline option will reduce S3 bucket sprawl alerts? A. Combine the multiple separate code repositories into a single one, and deploy using a global AWS CodePipeline that has logic for each project. B. Create new pipelines by using the AWS API or AWS CLI, and configure them to use a single global S3 bucket with separate prefixes for each project. C. Create a new pipeline in a different region for each project to bypass the service limits for S3 buckets in a single region. D. Create a new pipeline and for S3 bucket for each project by using the AWS API or AWS CLI to bypass the service limits for S3 buckets in a single account.

Correct Answer: B

A company runs an application in a branch office within a small data closet with no virtualized compute resources. The application data is stored on an NFS volume. Compliance standards require a daily offsite backup of the NFS volume. Which solution meet these requirements? A. Install an AWS Storage Gateway file gateway on premises to replicate the data to Amazon S3. B. Install an AWS Storage Gateway file gateway hardware appliance on premises to replicate the data to Amazon S3. C. Install an AWS Storage Gateway volume gateway with stored volumes on premises to replicate the data to Amazon S3. D. Install an AWS Storage Gateway volume gateway with cached volumes on premises to replicate the data to Amazon S3.

Correct Answer: B AWS Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance Hardware Appliance - Storage Gateway is available as a hardware appliance, adding to the existing support for VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Amazon EC2. This means that you can now make use of Storage Gateway in situations where you do not have a virtualized environment, server-class hardware or IT staff with the specialized skills that are needed to manage them. You can order appliances from Amazon.com for delivery to branch offices, warehouses, and "outpost" offices that lack dedicated IT resources. Setup (as you will see in a minute) is quick and easy, and gives you access to three storage solutions:File Gateway "" A file interface to Amazon S3, accessible via NFS or SMB. The files are stored as S3 objects, allowing you to make use of specialized S3 features such as lifecycle management and cross-region replication. You can trigger AWS Lambda functions, run Amazon Athena queries, and use Amazon Macie to discover and classify sensitive data. Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-storage-gateway-hardware-appliance/ https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/file/

A company has a multi-tier application that runs six front-end web servers in an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group in a single Availability Zone behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). A solutions architect needs to modify the infrastructure to be highly available without modifying the application. Which architecture should the solutions architect choose that provides high availability? A. Create an Auto Scaling group that uses three instances across each of two Regions. B. Modify the Auto Scaling group to use three instances across each of two Availability Zones. C. Create an Auto Scaling template that can be used to quickly create more instances in another Region. D. Change the ALB in front of the Amazon EC2 instances in a round-robin configuration to balance traffic to the web tier.

Correct Answer: B Expanding Your Scaled and Load-Balanced Application to an Additional Availability Zone. When one Availability Zone becomes unhealthy or unavailable, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling launches new instances in an unaffected zone. When the unhealthy Availability Zone returns to a healthy state, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling automatically redistributes the application instances evenly across all of the zones for your Auto Scaling group. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling does this by attempting to launch new instances in the Availability Zone with the fewest instances. If the attempt fails, however, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling attempts to launch in other Availability Zones until it succeeds. You can expand the availability of your scaled and load-balanced application by adding an Availability Zone to your Auto Scaling group and then enabling that zone for your load balancer. After you've enabled the new Availability Zone, the load balancer begins to route traffic equally among all the enabled zones. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/userguide/as-add-availability-zone.html

A solutions architect is designing storage for a high performance computing (HPC) environment based on Amazon Linux. The workload stores and processes a large amount of engineering drawings that require shared storage and heavy computing. Which storage option would be the optimal solution? A. Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) B. Amazon FSx for Lustre C. Amazon EC2 instance store D. Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1)

Correct Answer: B Explanation - Amazon FSx for Lustre - Amazon FSx for Lustre is a new, fully managed service provided by AWS based on the Lustre file system. Amazon FSx for Lustre provides a high-performance file system optimized for fast processing of workloads such as machine learning, high performance computing (HPC), video processing, financial modeling, and electronic design automation (EDA). FSx for Lustre allows customers to create a Lustre filesystem on demand and associate it to an Amazon S3 bucket. As part of the filesystem creation, Lustre reads the objects in the buckets and adds that to the file system metadata. Any Lustre client in your VPC is then able to access the data, which gets cached on the high- speed Lustre filesystem. This is ideal for HPC workloads, because you can get the speed of an optimized Lustre file system without having to manage the complexity of deploying, optimizing, and managing the Lustre cluster. Additionally, having the filesystem work natively with Amazon S3 means you can shut down the Lustre filesystem when you don't need it but still access objects in Amazon S3 via other AWS Services. FSx for Lustre also allows you to also write the output of your HPC job back to Amazon S3. Reference: https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/AWS%20Partner%20Network_HPC%20Storage%20Options_2019_FINAL.pdf(p.8)

A company wants to adopt a methodology for handling security threats from leaked and compromised IAM access keys. The DevOps Engineer has been asked to automate the process of acting upon compromised access keys, which includes identifying users, revoking their permissions, and sending a notification to the Security team. Which of the following would achieve this goal? A. Use the AWS Trusted Advisor generated security report for access keys. Use Amazon EMR to run analytics on the report. Identify compromised IAM access keys and delete them. Use Amazon CloudWatch with an EMR Cluster State Change event to notify the Security team. B. Use AWS Trusted Advisor to identify compromised access keys. Create an Amazon CloudWatch Events rule with Trusted Advisor as the event source, and AWS Lambda and Amazon SNS as targets. Use AWS Lambda to delete compromised IAM access keys and Amazon SNS to notify the Security team. C. Use the AWS Trusted Advisor generated security report for access keys. Use AWS Lambda to scan through the report. Use scan result inside AWS Lambda and delete compromised IAM access keys. Use Amazon SNS to notify the Security team. D. Use AWS Lambda with a third-party library to scan for compromised access keys. Use scan result inside AWS Lambda and delete compromised IAM access keys. Create Amazon CloudWatch custom metrics for compromised keys. Create a CloudWatch alarm on the metrics to notify the Security team.

Correct Answer: B Reference - https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-security-whitepaper.pdf

A company's website is used to sell products to the public. The site runs on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer(ALB). There is also an Amazon CloudFront distribution, and AWS WAF is being used to protect against SQL injection attacks. The ALB is the origin for the CloudFront distribution. A recent review of security logs revealed an external malicious IP that needs to be blocked from accessing the website. What should a solutions architect do to protect the application? A. Modify the network ACL on the CloudFront distribution to add a deny rule for the malicious IP address. B. Modify the configuration of AWS WAF to add an IP match condition to block the malicious IP address. C. Modify the network ACL for the EC2 instances in the target groups behind the ALB to deny the malicious IP address. D. Modify the security groups for the EC2 instances in the target groups behind the ALB to deny the malicious IP address.

Correct Answer: B Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-web-application-firewall-waf-for-application-load-balancers/

A company's production application runs online transaction processing (OLTP) transactions on an Amazon RDS MySQL DB instance. The company is launching a new reporting tool that will access the same data. The reporting tool must be highly available and not impact the performance of the production application. How can this be achieved? A. Create hourly snapshots of the production RDS DB instance. B. Create a Multi-AZ RDS Read Replica of the production RDS DB instance. C. Create multiple RDS Read Replicas of the production RDS DB instance. Place the Read Replicas in an Auto Scaling group. D. Create a Single-AZ RDS Read Replica of the production RDS DB instance. Create a second Single-AZ RDS Read Replica from the replica.

Correct Answer: B Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/best-storage-practices-for-running-production-workloads-on-hosted-databases-with-amazon-rds-or-amazon- ec2/

A company has an application that calls AWS Lambda functions. A recent code review found database credentials stored in the source code. The database credentials need to be removed from the Lambda source code. The credentials must then be securely stored and rotated on an ongoing basis to meet security policy requirements. What should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements? A. Store the password in AWS CloudHSM. Associate the Lambda function with a role that can retrieve the password from CloudHSM given its key ID. B. Store the password in AWS Secrets Manager. Associate the Lambda function with a role that can retrieve the password from Secrets Manager given its secret ID. C. Move the database password to an environment variable associated with the Lambda function. Retrieve the password from the environment variable upon execution. D. Store the password in AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Associate the Lambda function with a role that can retrieve the password from AWS KMS given its key ID.

Correct Answer: B Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-use-aws-secrets-manager-rotate-credentials-amazon-rds-database-types-oracle/

A solutions architect needs to design a managed storage solution for a company's application that includes high-performance machine learning. This application runs on AWS Fargate, and the connected storage needs to have concurrent access to files and deliver high performance. Which storage option should the solutions architect recommend? A. Create an Amazon S3 bucket for the application and establish an IAM role for Fargate to communicate with Amazon S3. B. Create an Amazon FSx for Lustre file share and establish an IAM role that allows Fargate to communicate with FSx for Lustre. C. Create an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file share and establish an IAM role that allows Fargate to communicate with Amazon EFS. D. Create an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume for the application and establish an IAM role that allows Fargate to communicate with Amazon EBS.

Correct Answer: B Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/efs/

A company's application is running on Amazon EC2 instances within an Auto Scaling group behind an Elastic Load Balancer. Based on the application's history the company anticipates a spike in traffic during a holiday each year. A solutions architect must design a strategy to ensure that the Auto Scaling group proactively increases capacity to minimize any performance impact on application users. Which solution will meet these requirements? A. Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm to scale up the EC2 instances when CPU utilization exceeds 90%. B. Create a recurring scheduled action to scale up the Auto Scaling group before the expected period of peak demand. C. Increase the minimum and maximum number of EC2 instances in the Auto Scaling group during the peak demand period. D. Configure an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notification to send alerts when there are autoscaling EC2_INSTANCE_LAUNCH events.

Correct Answer: B Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/userguide/as-dg.pdf

A solutions architect at an ecommerce company wants to back up application log data to Amazon S3. The solutions architect is unsure how frequently the logs will be accessed or which logs will be accessed the most. The company wants to keep costs as low as possible by using the appropriate S3 storage class. Which S3 storage class should be implemented to meet these requirements? A. S3 Glacier B. S3 Intelligent-Tiering C. S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) D. S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA)

Correct Answer: B S3 Intelligent-Tiering - S3 Intelligent-Tiering is a new Amazon S3 storage class designed for customers who want to optimize storage costs automatically when data access patterns change, without performance impact or operational overhead. S3 Intelligent-Tiering is the first cloud object storage class that delivers automatic cost savings by moving data between two access tiers "" frequent access and infrequent access "" when access patterns change, and is ideal for data with unknown or changing access patterns.S3 Intelligent-Tiering stores objects in two access tiers: one tier that is optimized for frequent access and another lower-cost tier that is optimized for infrequent access. For a small monthly monitoring and automation fee per object, S3 Intelligent-Tiering monitors access patterns and moves objects that have not been accessed for 30 consecutive days to the infrequent access tier. There are no retrieval fees in S3 Intelligent-Tiering. If an object in the infrequent access tier is accessed later, it is automatically moved back to the frequent access tier. No additional tiering fees apply when objects are moved between access tiers within theS3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class. S3 Intelligent-Tiering is designed for 99.9% availability and 99.999999999% durability, and offers the same low latency and high throughput performance of S3 Standard. Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/11/s3-intelligent-tiering/

A company hosts a static website on-premises and wants to migrate the website to AWS. The website should load as quickly as possible for users around the world. The company also wants the most cost-effective solution. What should a solutions architect do to accomplish this? A. Copy the website content to an Amazon S3 bucket. Configure the bucket to serve static webpage content. Replicate the S3 bucket to multiple AWS Regions. B. Copy the website content to an Amazon S3 bucket. Configure the bucket to serve static webpage content. Configure Amazon CloudFront with the S3 bucket as the origin. C. Copy the website content to an Amazon EBS-backed Amazon EC2 instance running Apache HTTP Server. Configure Amazon Route 53 geolocation routing policies to select the closest origin. D. Copy the website content to multiple Amazon EBS-backed Amazon EC2 instances running Apache HTTP Server in multiple AWS Regions. Configure Amazon CloudFront geolocation routing policies to select the closest origin.

Correct Answer: B What Is Amazon CloudFront? Amazon CloudFront is a web service that speeds up distribution of your static and dynamic web content, such as .html, .css, .js, and image files, to your users. CloudFront delivers your content through a worldwide network of data centers called edge locations. When a user requests content that you're serving with CloudFront, the user is routed to the edge location that provides the lowest latency (time delay), so that content is delivered with the best possible performance. Using Amazon S3 Buckets for Your Origin When you use Amazon S3 as an origin for your distribution, you place any objects that you want CloudFront to deliver in an Amazon S3 bucket. You can use any method that is supported by Amazon S3 to get your objects into Amazon S3, for example, the Amazon S3 console or API, or a third-party tool. You can create a hierarchy in your bucket to store the objects, just as you would with any other Amazon S3 bucket. Using an existing Amazon S3 bucket as your CloudFront origin server doesn't change the bucket in any way; you can still use it as you normally would to store and access Amazon S3 objects at the standard Amazon S3 price. You incur regular Amazon S3 charges for storing the objects in the bucket. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/Introduction.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/DownloadDistS3AndCustomOrigins.html

A solutions architect is implementing a document review application using an Amazon S3 bucket for storage. The solution must prevent an accidental deletion of the documents and ensure that all versions of the documents are available. Users must be able to download, modify, and upload documents. Which combination of actions should be taken to meet these requirements? (Choose two.) A. Enable a read-only bucket ACL. B. Enable versioning on the bucket. C. Attach an IAM policy to the bucket. D. Enable MFA Delete on the bucket. E. Encrypt the bucket using AWS KMS.

Correct Answer: BD Object Versioning -[1](version 222222) in a single bucket. S3 Versioning protects you from the consequences of unintended overwrites and deletions. You can also use it to archive objects so that you have access to previous versions. To customize your data retention approach and control storage costs, use object versioning with Object lifecycle management. For information about creating S3Lifecycle policies using the AWS Management Console, see How Do I Create a Lifecycle Policy for an S3 Bucket? in the Amazon Simple Storage Service Console User Guide. If you have an object expiration lifecycle policy in your non-versioned bucket and you want to maintain the same permanent delete behavior when you enable versioning, you must add a noncurrent expiration policy. The noncurrent expiration lifecycle policy will manage the deletes of the noncurrent object versions in the version-enabled bucket. (A version-enabled bucket maintains one current and zero or more noncurrent object versions.)You must explicitly enable S3 Versioning on your bucket. By default, S3 Versioning is disabled. Regardless of whether you have enabled Versioning, each object in your bucket has a version ID. If you have not enabled Versioning, Amazon S3 sets the value of the version ID to null. If S3 Versioning is enabled, Amazon S3 assigns a version ID value for the object. This value distinguishes it from other versions of the same key. Enabling and suspending versioning is done at the bucket level. When you enable versioning on an existing bucket, objects that are already stored in the bucket are unchanged. The version IDs (null), contents, and permissions remain the same. After you enable S3 Versioning for a bucket, each object that is added to the bucket gets a version ID, which distinguishes it from other versions of the same key. Only Amazon S3 generates version IDs, and they can't be edited. Version IDs are Unicode, UTF-8 encoded, URL-ready, opaque strings that are no more than1,024 bytes long. The following is an example: 3/L4kqtJlcpXroDTDmJ+rmSpXd3dIbrHY+MTRCxf3vjVBH40Nr8X8gdRQBpUMLUo.Using MFA delete -If a bucket's versioning configuration is MFA Delete""enabled, the bucket owner must include the x-amz-mfa request header in requests to permanently delete an object version or change the versioning state of the bucket. Requests that include x-amz-mfa must use HTTPS. The header's value is the concatenation of your authentication device's serial number, a space, and the authentication code displayed on it. If you do not include this request header, the request fails. Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/features/https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/ObjectVersioning.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/UsingMFADelete.html

A company has a two-tier application architecture that runs in public and private subnets. Amazon EC2 instances running the web application are in the public subnet and a database runs on the private subnet. The web application instances and the database are running in a single Availability Zone (AZ). Which combination of steps should a solutions architect take to provide high availability for this architecture? (Choose two.) A. Create new public and private subnets in the same AZ for high availability. B. Create an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group and Application Load Balancer spanning multiple AZs. C. Add the existing web application instances to an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. D. Create new public and private subnets in a new AZ. Create a database using Amazon EC2 in one AZ. E. Create new public and private subnets in the same VPC, each in a new AZ. Migrate the database to an Amazon RDS multi-AZ deployment.

Correct Answer: BE

A company has deployed an API in a VPC behind an internet-facing Application Load Balancer (ALB). An application that consumes the API as a client is deployed in a second account in private subnets behind a NAT gateway. When requests to the client application increase, the NAT gateway costs are higher than expected. A solutions architect has configured the ALB to be internal. Which combination of architectural changes will reduce the NAT gateway costs? (Choose two.) A. Configure a VPC peering connection between the two VPCs. Access the API using the private address. B. Configure an AWS Direct Connect connection between the two VPCs. Access the API using the private address. C. Configure a ClassicLink connection for the API into the client VPC. Access the API using the ClassicLink address. D. Configure a PrivateLink connection for the API into the client VPC. Access the API using the PrivateLink address. E. Configure an AWS Resource Access Manager connection between the two accounts. Access the API using the private address.

Correct Answer: BE

A company has created a VPC with multiple private subnets in multiple Availability Zones (AZs) and one public subnet in one of the AZs. The public subnet is used to launch a NAT gateway. There is instance in the private subnet that use a NAT gateway to connect to the internet. In case of an AZ failure, the company wants to ensure that the instance is not all experiencing internet connectivity issues and that there is a backup plan ready. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend that is MOST highly available? A. Create a new public subnet with a NAT gateway in the same AZ. Distribute the traffic between the two NAT gateways. B. Create an Amazon EC2 NAT instance in a now public subnet. Distribute the traffic between the NAT gateway and the NAT instance. C. Create public subnets. In each AZ and launch a NAT gateway in each subnet. Configure the traffic from the private subnets in each AZ to the respective NAT gateway. D. Create an Amazon EC2 NAT instance in the same public subnet. Replace the NAT gateway with the NAT instance and associate the instance with an Auto Scaling group with an appropriate scaling policy.

Correct Answer: C

A company wants to use Amazon S3 for the secondary copy of its on-premises dataset. The company would rarely need to access this copy. The storage solution's cost should be minimal. Which storage solution meets these requirements? A. S3 Standard B. S3 Intelligent-Tiering C. S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) D. S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA)

Correct Answer: C

An Amazon EC2 administrator created the following policy associated with an IAM group containing several users: What is the effect of this policy? { "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [ { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": "ec2:TerminateInstances", "Resources": "*", "Condition": { "IpAddress": { "aws:SourceIp": "10.100.100.0/24" } } }, { "Effect": "Deny", "Action": "ec2:*", "Resources": "*", "Condition": { "StringNotEquals": { "ec2:Region": "us-east-1" } } } ] } A. Users can terminate an EC2 instance in any AWS Region except us-east-1. B. Users can terminate an EC2 instance with the IP address 10.100.100.1 in the us-east-1 Region. C. Users can terminate an EC2 instance in the us-east-1 Region when the user's source IP is 10.100. 100.254. D. Users cannot terminate an EC2 instance in the us-east-1 Region when the user's source IP is 10.100. 100.254.

Correct Answer: C

A company has been storing analytics data in an Amazon RDS instance for the past few years. The company asked a solutions architect to find a solution that allows users to access this data using an API. The expectation is that the application will experience periods of inactivity but could receive bursts of traffic within seconds. Which solution should the solutions architect suggest? A. Set up an Amazon API Gateway and use Amazon ECS. B. Set up an Amazon API Gateway and use AWS Elastic Beanstalk. C. Set up an Amazon API Gateway and use AWS Lambda functions. D. Set up an Amazon API Gateway and use Amazon EC2 with Auto Scaling.

Correct Answer: C AWS Lambda -With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service "" all with zero administration. Just upload your code and Lambda takes care of everything required to run and scale your code with high availability. You can set up your code to automatically trigger from other AWS services or call it directly from any web or mobile app. How it works -Amazon API Gateway -Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. APIs act as the "front door" for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your backend services. Using API Gateway, you can create RESTful APIs and WebSocket APIs that enable real-time two-way communication applications. API Gateway supports containerized and serverless workloads, as well as web applications. API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, CORS support, authorization and access control, throttling, monitoring, and API version management. API Gateway has no minimum fees or startup costs. You pay for the API calls you receive and the amount of data transferred out and, with the API Gateway tiered pricing model, you can reduce your cost as your API usage scales. Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/

A company is hosting a web application on AWS using a single Amazon EC2 instance that stores user-uploaded documents in an Amazon EBS volume. For better scalability and availability, the company duplicated the architecture and created a second EC2 instance and EBS volume in another Availability Zone, placing both behind an Application Load Balancer. After completing this change, users reported that each time they refreshed the website, they could see one subset of their documents or the other, but never all of the documents at the same time. What should a solutions architect propose to ensure users see all of their documents at once? A. Copy the data so both EBS volumes contain all the documents. B. Configure the Application Load Balancer to direct a user to the server with the documents. C. Copy the data from both EBS volumes to Amazon EFS. Modify the application to save new documents to Amazon EFS. D. Configure the Application Load Balancer to send the request to both servers. Return each document from the correct server.

Correct Answer: C Amazon EFS provides file storage in the AWS Cloud. With Amazon EFS, you can create a file system, mount the file system on an Amazon EC2 instance, and then read and write data to and from your file system. You can mount an Amazon EFS file system in your VPC, through the Network File System versions 4.0 and4.1 (NFSv4) protocol. We recommend using a current generation Linux NFSv4.1 client, such as those found in the latest Amazon Linux, Redhat, and Ubuntu AMIs, in conjunction with the Amazon EFS Mount Helper. For instructions, see Using the amazon-efs-utils Tools. For a list of Amazon EC2 Linux Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that support this protocol, see NFS Support. For some AMIs, you'll need to install an NFS client to mount your file system on your Amazon EC2 instance. For instructions, see Installing the NFS Client. You can access your Amazon EFS file system concurrently from multiple NFS clients, so applications that scale beyond a single connection can access a file system. Amazon EC2 instances running in multiple Availability Zones within the same AWS Region can access the file system, so that many users can access and share a common data source. How Amazon EFS Works with Amazon EC2 Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/efs/latest/ug/how-it-works.html#how-it-works-ec2

A solutions architect is designing the cloud architecture for a new application being deployed on AWS. The process should run in parallel while adding and removing application nodes as needed based on the number of jobs to be processed. The processor application is stateless. The solutions architect must ensure that the application is loosely coupled and the job items are durably stored. Which design should the solutions architect use? A. Create an Amazon SNS topic to send the jobs that need to be processed. Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that consists of the processor application. Create a launch configuration that uses the AMI. Create an Auto Scaling group using the launch configuration. Set the scaling policy for the Auto Scaling group to add and remove nodes based on CPU usage. B. Create an Amazon SQS queue to hold the jobs that need to be processed. Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that consists of the processor application. Create a launch configuration that uses the AMI. Create an Auto Scaling group using the launch configuration. Set the scaling policy for the Auto Scaling group to add and remove nodes based on network usage. C. Create an Amazon SQS queue to hold the jobs that need to be processed. Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that consists of the processor application. Create a launch template that uses the AMI. Create an Auto Scaling group using the launch template. Set the scaling policy for the Auto Scaling group to add and remove nodes based on the number of items in the SQS queue. D. Create an Amazon SNS topic to send the jobs that need to be processed. Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that consists of the processor application. Create a launch template that uses the AMI. Create an Auto Scaling group using the launch template. Set the scaling policy for the Auto Scaling group to add and remove nodes based on the number of messages published to the SNS topic.

Correct Answer: C Amazon Simple Queue Service - Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. SQS eliminates the complexity and overhead associated with managing and operating message oriented middleware, and empowers developers to focus on differentiating work. Using SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available. Get started with SQS in minutes using the AWS console, Command Line Interface or SDK of your choice, and three simple commands. SQS offers two types of message queues. Standard queues offer maximum throughput, best-effort ordering, and at-least-once delivery. SQS FIFO queues are designed to guarantee that messages are processed exactly once, in the exact order that they are sent. Scaling Based on Amazon SQS -There are some scenarios where you might think about scaling in response to activity in an Amazon SQS queue. For example, suppose that you have a web app that lets users upload images and use them online. In this scenario, each image requires resizing and encoding before it can be published. The app runs on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group, and it's configured to handle your typical upload rates. Unhealthy instances are terminated and replaced to maintain current instance levels at all times. The app places the raw bitmap data of the images in an SQS queue for processing. It processes the images and then publishes the processed images where they can be viewed by users. The architecture for this scenario works well if the number of image uploads doesn't vary over time. But if the number of uploads changes over time, you might consider using dynamic scaling to scale the capacity of your Auto Scaling group. Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/sqs/#:~:text=Amazon%20SQS%20leverages%20the%20AWS,queues%20provide%20nearly%20unlimited%20throughput https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/userguide/as-using-sqs-queue.html

A company's web application is using multiple Linux Amazon EC2 instances and storing data on Amazon EBS volumes. The company is looking for a solution to increase the resiliency of the application in case of a failure and to provide storage that complies with atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID). What should a solutions architect do to meet these requirements? A. Launch the application on EC2 instances in each Availability Zone. Attach EBS volumes to each EC2 instance. B. Create an Application Load Balancer with Auto Scaling groups across multiple Availability Zones. Mount an instance store on each EC2 instance. C. Create an Application Load Balancer with Auto Scaling groups across multiple Availability Zones. Store data on Amazon EFS and mount a target on each instance. D. Create an Application Load Balancer with Auto Scaling groups across multiple Availability Zones. Store data using Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA).

Correct Answer: C How Amazon EFS Works with Amazon EC2 The following illustration shows an example VPC accessing an Amazon EFS file system. Here, EC2 instances in the VPC have file systems mounted. In this illustration, the VPC has three Availability Zones, and each has one mount target created in it. We recommend that you access the file system from a mount target within the same Availability Zone. One of the Availability Zones has two subnets. However, a mount target is created in only one of the subnets. Benefits of Auto Scaling -Better fault tolerance. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling can detect when an instance is unhealthy, terminate it, and launch an instance to replace it. You can also configure Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to use multiple Availability Zones. If one Availability Zone becomes unavailable, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling can launch instances in another one to compensate. Better availability. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps ensure that your application always has the right amount of capacity to handle the current traffic demand. Better cost management. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling can dynamically increase and decrease capacity as needed. Because you pay for the EC2 instances you use, you save money by launching instances when they are needed and terminating them when they aren't. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/efs/latest/ug/how-it-works.html#how-it-works-ec2 https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/userguide/auto-scaling-benefits.html

A company currently operates a web application backed by an Amazon RDS MySQL database. It has automated backups that are run daily and are not encrypted. A security audit requires future backups to be encrypted and the unencrypted backups to be destroyed. The company will make at least one encrypted backup before destroying the old backups. What should be done to enable encryption for future backups? A. Enable default encryption for the Amazon S3 bucket where backups are stored. B. Modify the backup section of the database configuration to toggle the Enable encryption check box. C. Create a snapshot of the database. Copy it to an encrypted snapshot. Restore the database from the encrypted snapshot. D. Enable an encrypted read replica on RDS for MySQL. Promote the encrypted read replica to primary. Remove the original database instance.

Correct Answer: C However, because you can encrypt a copy of an unencrypted DB snapshot, you can effectively add encryption to an unencrypted DB instance. That is, you can create a snapshot of your DB instance, and then create an encrypted copy of that snapshot. You can then restore a DB instance from the encrypted snapshot, and thus you have an encrypted copy of your original DB instance. DB instances that are encrypted can't be modified to disable encryption. You can't have an encrypted read replica of an unencrypted DB instance or an unencrypted read replica of an encrypted DB instance. Encrypted read replicas must be encrypted with the same key as the source DB instance when both are in the same AWS Region. You can't restore an unencrypted backup or snapshot to an encrypted DB instance. To copy an encrypted snapshot from one AWS Region to another, you must specify the KMS key identifier of the destination AWS Region. This is because KMS encryption keys are specific to the AWS Region that they are created in. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Overview.Encryption.html

A media streaming company collects real-time data and stores it in a disk-optimized database system. The company is not getting the expected throughput and wants an in-memory database storage solution that performs faster and provides high availability using data replication. Which database should a solutions architect recommend? A. Amazon RDS for MySQL B. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. C. Amazon ElastiCache for Redis D. Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached

Correct Answer: C In-memory databases on AWS Amazon Elasticache for Redis. Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is a blazing fast in-memory data store that provides submillisecond latency to power internet-scale, real-time applications. Developers can use ElastiCache for Redis as an in-memory nonrelational database. The ElastiCache for Redis cluster configuration supports up to 15 shards and enables customers to run Redis workloads with up to 6.1 TB of in-memory capacity in a single cluster. ElastiCache for Redis also provides the ability to add and remove shards from a running cluster. You can dynamically scaleout and even scale in your Redis cluster workloads to adapt to changes in demand. Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/redis/faqs/ https://aws.amazon.com/nosql/in-memory/

A solutions architect is designing a web application that will run on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The company strictly requires that the application be resilient against malicious internet activity and attacks, and protect against new common vulnerabilities and exposures. What should the solutions architect recommend? A. Leverage Amazon CloudFront with the ALB endpoint as the origin. B. Deploy an appropriate managed rule for AWS WAF and associate it with the ALB. C. Subscribe to AWS Shield Advanced and ensure common vulnerabilities and exposures are blocked. D. Configure network ACLs and security groups to allow only ports 80 and 443 to access the EC2 instances.

Correct Answer: C Reference: https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Security/DDoS_White_Paper.pdf

A solutions architect is designing an application for a two-step order process. The first step is synchronous and must return to the user with little latency. The second step takes longer, so it will be implemented in a separate component. Orders must be processed exactly once and in the order in which they are received. How should the solutions architect integrate these components? A. Use Amazon SQS FIFO queues. B. Use an AWS Lambda function along with Amazon SQS standard queues. C. Create an SNS topic and subscribe an Amazon SQS FIFO queue to that topic. D. Create an SNS topic and subscribe an Amazon SQS Standard queue to that topic.

Correct Answer: C Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSDeveloperGuide/FIFO-queues.html

A company is hosting a website behind multiple Application Load Balancers. The company has different distribution rights for its content around the world. A solutions architect needs to ensure that users are served the correct content without violating distribution rights. Which configuration should the solutions architect choose to meet these requirements? A. Configure Amazon CloudFront with AWS WAF. B. Configure Application Load Balancers with AWS WAF. C. Configure Amazon Route 53 with a geolocation policy. D. Configure Amazon Route 53 with a geoproximity routing policy.

Correct Answer: C Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/routing-policy.html(geolocation routing)

A marketing company is storing CSV files in an Amazon S3 bucket for statistical analysis. An application on an Amazon EC2 instance needs permission to efficiently process the CSV data stored in the S3 bucket. Which action will MOST securely grant the EC2 instance access to the S3 bucket? A. Attach a resource-based policy to the S3 bucket. B. Create an IAM user for the application with specific permissions to the S3 bucket. C. Associate an IAM role with least privilege permissions to the EC2 instance profile. D. Store AWS credentials directly on the EC2 instance for applications on the instance to use for API calls. Hide Solution Discussion 35

Correct Answer: C Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/dms/latest/userguide/CHAP_Target.S3.html

An application hosted on AWS is experiencing performance problems, and the application vendor wants to perform an analysis of the log file to troubleshoot further. The log file is stored on Amazon S3 and is 10 GB in size. The application owner will make the log file available to the vendor for a limited time. What is the MOST secure way to do this? A. Enable public read on the S3 object and provide the link to the vendor. B. Upload the file to Amazon WorkDocs and share the public link with the vendor. C. Generate a presigned URL and have the vendor download the log file before it expires. D. Create an IAM user for the vendor to provide access to the S3 bucket and the application. Enforce multi-factor authentication.

Correct Answer: C Share an object with others - All objects by default are private. Only the object owner has permission to access these objects. However, the object owner can optionally share objects with others by creating a presigned URL, using their own security credentials, to grant time-limited permission to download the objects. When you create a presigned URL for your object, you must provide your security credentials, specify a bucket name, an object key, specify the HTTP method(GET to download the object) and expiration date and time. The presigned URLs are valid only for the specified duration. Anyone who receives the presigned URL can then access the object. For example, if you have a video in your bucket and both the bucket and the object are private, you can share the video with others by generating a presigned URL. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/ShareObjectPreSignedURL.html

A web application is deployed in the AWS Cloud. It consists of a two-tier architecture that includes a web layer and a database layer. The web server is vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. What should a solutions architect do to remediate the vulnerability? A. Create a Classic Load Balancer. Put the web layer behind the load balancer and enable AWS WAF. B. Create a Network Load Balancer. Put the web layer behind the load balancer and enable AWS WAF. C. Create an Application Load Balancer. Put the web layer behind the load balancer and enable AWS WAF. D. Create an Application Load Balancer. Put the web layer behind the load balancer and use AWS Shield Standard.

Correct Answer: C Working with cross-site scripting match conditions Attackers sometimes insert scripts into web requests in an effort to exploit vulnerabilities in web applications. You can create one or more cross-site scripting match conditions to identify the parts of web requests, such as the URI or the query string, that you want AWS WAF Classic to inspect for possible malicious scripts. Later in the process, when you create a web ACL, you specify whether to allow or block requests that appear to contain malicious scripts. Web Application Firewall -You can now use AWS WAF to protect your web applications on your Application Load Balancers. AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications from common web exploits that could affect application availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/classic-web-acl-xss-conditions.html https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/features/

A company wants to use Amazon ECS to provide a Docker container runtime environment. For compliance reasons, all Amazon EBS volumes used in the ECS cluster must be encrypted. Rolling updates will be made to the cluster instances and the company wants the instances drained of all tasks before being terminated. How can these requirements be met? (Select TWO.) A. Modify the default ECS AMI user data to create a script that executes docker rm ""f {id} for all running container instances. Copy the script to the /etc/ init.d/rc.d directory and execute chconfig enabling the script to run during operating system shutdown. B. Use AWS CodePipeline to build a pipeline that discovers the latest Amazon-provided ECS AMI, then copies the image to an encrypted AMI outputting the encrypted AMI ID. Use the encrypted AMI ID when deploying the cluster. C. Copy the default AWS CloudFormation template that ECS uses to deploy cluster instances. Modify the template resource EBS configuration setting to set "˜Encrypted: True' and include the AWS KMS alias: "˜aws/ebs' to encrypt the AMI. D. Create an Auto Scaling lifecycle hook backed by an AWS Lambda function that uses the AWS SDK to mark a terminating instance as DRAINING. Prevent the lifecycle hook from completing until the running tasks on the instance are zero. E. Create an IAM role that allows the action ECS::EncryptedImage. Configure the AWS CLI and a profile to use this role. Start the cluster using the AWS CLI providing the --use-encrypted-image and --kms-key arguments to the create-cluster ECS command.

Correct Answer: CD

A gaming company has multiple Amazon EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone for its multiplayer game that communicates with users on Layer 4. The chief technology officer (CTO) wants to make the architecture highly available and cost-effective. Which should a solutions architect do to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)? A. Increase the number of EC2 instances. B. Decrease the number of EC2 instances. C. Configure a Network Load Balancer in front of the EC2 instances. D. Configure an Application Load Balancer in front of the EC2 instances. E. Configure an Auto Scaling group to add or remove instances in multiple Availability Zones automatically.

Correct Answer: CE Network Load Balancer overview - A Network Load Balancer functions at the fourth layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. It can handle millions of requests per second. After the load balancer receives a connection request, it selects a target from the target group for the default rule. It attempts to open a TCP connection to the selected target on the port specified in the listener configuration. When you enable an Availability Zone for the load balancer, Elastic Load Balancing creates a load balancer node in the Availability Zone. By default, each load balancer node distributes traffic across the registered targets in its Availability Zone only. If you enable cross-zone load balancing, each load balancer node distributes traffic across the registered targets in all enabled Availability Zones. For more information, see Availability Zones. If you enable multiple Availability Zones for your load balancer and ensure that each target group has at least one target in each enabled Availability Zone, this increases the fault tolerance of your applications. For example, if one or more target groups does not have a healthy target in an Availability Zone, we remove the IP address for the corresponding subnet from DNS, but the load balancer nodes in the other Availability Zones are still available to route traffic. If a client doesn't honor the time-to-live (TTL) and sends requests to the IP address after it is removed from DNS, the requests fail. For TCP traffic, the load balancer selects a target using a flow hash algorithm based on the protocol, source IP address, source port, destination IP address, destination port, and TCP sequence number. The TCP connections from a client have different source ports and sequence numbers, and can be routed to different targets. Each individual TCP connection is routed to a single target for the life of the connection. For UDP traffic, the load balancer selects a target using a flow hash algorithm based on the protocol, source IP address, source port, destination IP address, and destination port. A UDP flow has the same source and destination, so it is consistently routed to a single target throughout its lifetime. Different UDP flows have different source IP addresses and ports, so they can be routed to different targets. An Auto Scaling group contains a collection of Amazon EC2 instances that are treated as a logical grouping for the purposes of automatic scaling and management. An Auto Scaling group also enables you to use Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling features such as health check replacements and scaling policies. Both maintaining the number of instances in an Auto Scaling group and automatic scaling are the core functionality of the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling service. The size of an Auto Scaling group depends on the number of instances that you set as the desired capacity. You can adjust its size to meet demand, either manually or by using automatic scaling. An Auto Scaling group starts by launching enough instances to meet its desired capacity. It maintains this number of instances by performing periodic health checks on the instances in the group. The Auto Scaling group continues to maintain a fixed number of instances even if an instance becomes unhealthy. If an instance becomes unhealthy, the group terminates the unhealthy instance and launches another instance to replace it. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/network/introduction.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/userguide/AutoScalingGroup.html

A company built a food ordering application that captures user data and stores it for future analysis. The application's static front end is deployed on an AmazonEC2 instance. The front-end application sends the requests to the backend application running on separate EC2 instance. The backend application then stores the data in Amazon RDS. What should a solutions architect do to decouple the architecture and make it scalable? A. Use Amazon S3 to serve the front-end application, which sends requests to Amazon EC2 to execute the backend application. The backend application will process and store the data in Amazon RDS. B. Use Amazon S3 to serve the front-end application and write requests to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. Subscribe Amazon EC2 instances to the HTTP/HTTPS endpoint of the topic, and process and store the data in Amazon RDS. C. Use an EC2 instance to serve the front end and write requests to an Amazon SQS queue. Place the backend instance in an Auto Scaling group, and scale based on the queue depth to process and store the data in Amazon RDS. D. Use Amazon S3 to serve the static front-end application and send requests to Amazon API Gateway, which writes the requests to an Amazon SQS queue. Place the backend instances in an Auto Scaling group, and scale based on the queue depth to process and store the data in Amazon RDS.

Correct Answer: D

A company has a three-tier image-sharing application. It uses an Amazon EC2 instance for the front-end layer, another for the backend tier, and a third for the MySQL database. A solutions architect has been tasked with designing a solution that is highly available, and requires the least amount of changes to the application Which solution meets these requirements? A. Use Amazon S3 to host the front-end layer and AWS Lambda functions for the backend layer. Move the database to an Amazon DynamoDB table and use Amazon S3 to store and serve users' images. B. Use load-balanced Multi-AZ AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments for the front-end and backend layers. Move the database to an Amazon RDS instance with multiple read replicas to store and serve users' images. C. Use Amazon S3 to host the front-end layer and a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group for the backend layer. Move the database to a memory optimized instance type to store and serve users' images. D. Use load-balanced Multi-AZ AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments for the front-end and backend layers. Move the database to an Amazon RDS instance with a Multi-AZ deployment. Use Amazon S3 to store and serve users' images.

Correct Answer: D

A company runs a three-tier web application in its production environment, which is built on a single AWS CloudFormation template made up of Amazon EC2 instances behind an ELB Application Load Balancer. The instances run in an EC2 Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. Data is stored in an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB instance with read replicas. Amazon Route 53 manages the application's public DNS record. A DevOps Engineer must create a workflow to mitigate a failed software deployment by rolling back changes in the production environment when a software cutover occurs for new application software. What steps should the Engineer perform to meet these requirements with the LEAST amount of downtime? A. Use CloudFormation to deploy an additional staging environment and configure the Route 53 DNS with weighted records. During cutover, change the Route 53 A record weights to achieve an even traffic distribution between the two environments. Validate the traffic in the new environment and immediately terminate the old environment if tests are successful. B. Use a single AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment to deploy the staging and production environments. Update the environment by uploading the ZIP file with the new application code. Swap the Elastic Beanstalk environment CNAME. Validate the traffic in the new environment and immediately terminate the old environment if tests are successful. C. Use a single AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment and an AWS OpsWorks environment to deploy the staging and production environments. Update the environment by uploading the ZIP file with the new application code into the Elastic Beanstalk environment deployed with the OpsWorks stack. Validate the traffic in the new environment and immediately terminate the old environment if tests are successful. D. Use AWS CloudFormation to deploy an additional staging environment, and configure the Route 53 DNS with weighted records. During cutover, increase the weight distribution to have more traffic directed to the new staging environment as workloads are successfully validated. Keep the old production environment in place until the new staging environment handles all traffic.

Correct Answer: D

A company's operations teams have an existing Amazon S3 bucket configured to notify an Amazon SQS queue when new object is created within the bucket. The development team also wants to receive events when new objects are created. The existing operations team workflow must remain intact. Which solution would satisfy these requirements? A. Create another SQS queue. Update the S3 events in bucket to also update the new queue when a new object is created. B. Create a new SQS queue that only allows Amazon S3 to access the queue. Update Amazon S3 update this queue when a new object is created. C. Create an Amazon SNS topic and SQS queue for the Update. Update the bucket to send events to the new topic. Updates both queues to poll Amazon SNS. D. Create an Amazon SNS topic and SQS queue for the bucket updates. Update the bucket to send events to the new topic Add subscription for both queue in the topic.

Correct Answer: D

A financial services company has a web application that serves users in the United States and Europe. The application consists of a database tier and a web server tier. The database tier consists of a MySQL database hosted in us-east-1. Amazon Route 53 geoproximity routing is used to direct traffic to instances in the closest Region. A performance review of the system reveals that European users are not receiving the same level of query performance as those in the UnitedStates. Which changes should be made to the database tier to improve performance? A. Migrate the database to Amazon RDS for MySQL. Configure Multi-AZ in one of the European Regions. B. Migrate the database to Amazon DynamoDB. Use DynamoDB global tables to enable replication to additional Regions. C. Deploy MySQL instances in each Region. Deploy an Application Load Balancer in front of MySQL to reduce the load on the primary instance. D. Migrate the database to an Amazon Aurora global database in MySQL compatibility mode. Configure read replicas in one of the European Regions.

Correct Answer: D

A startup company is developing a web application on AWS. It plans to use Amazon RDS for persistence and deploy the application to Amazon EC2 with an AutoScaling group. The company would also like to separate the environments for development, testing, and production. What is the MOST secure and flexible approach to manage the application configuration? A. Create a property file to include the configuration and the encrypted passwords. Check in the property file to the source repository, package the property file with the application, and deploy the application. Create an environment tag for the EC2 instances and tag the instances respectively. The application will extract the necessary property values based on the environment tag. B. Create a property file for each environment to include the environment-specific configuration and an encrypted password. Check in the property files to the source repository. During deployment, use only the environment-specific property file with the application. The application will read the needed property values from the deployed property file. C. Create a property file for each environment to include the environment-specific configuration. Create a private Amazon S3 bucket and save the property files in the bucket. Save the passwords in the bucket with AWS KMS encryption. During deployment, the application will read the needed property values from the environment-specific property file in the S3 bucket. D. Create a property file for each environment to include the environment-specific configuration. Create a private Amazon S3 bucket and save the property files in the bucket. Save the encrypted passwords in the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. Create an environment tag for the EC2 instances and tag the instances respectively. The application will read the needed property values from the environment-specific property file in the S3 bucket and the parameter store.

Correct Answer: D

Two teams are working together on different portions of an architecture and are using AWS CloudFormation to manage their resources. One team administers operating system-level updates and patches, while the other team manages application-level dependencies and updates. The Application team must take the most recent AMI when creating new instances and deploying the application. What is the MOST scalable method for linking these two teams and processes? A. The Operating System team uses CloudFormation to create new versions of their AMIs and lists the Amazon Resource names (ARNs) of the AMIs in an encrypted Amazon S3 object as part of the stack output section. The Application team uses a cross-stack reference to load the encrypted S3 object and obtain the most recent AMI ARNs. B. The Operating System team uses CloudFormation stack to create an AWS CodePipeline pipeline that builds new AMIs, then places the latest AMI ARNs in an encrypted Amazon S3 object as part of the pipeline output. The Application team uses a cross-stack reference within their own CloudFormation template to get that S3 object location and obtain the most recent AMI ARNs to use when deploying their application. C. The Operating System team uses CloudFormation stack to create an AWS CodePipeline pipeline that builds new AMIs. The team then places the AMI ARNs as parameters in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store as part of the pipeline output. The Application team specifies a parameter of type ssm in their CloudFormation stack to obtain the most recent AMI ARN from the Parameter Store. D. The Operating System team maintains a nested stack that includes both the operating system and Application team templates. The Operating System team uses a stack update to deploy updates to the application stack whenever the Application team changes the application code.

Correct Answer: D

A company is planning to use Amazon S3 to store images uploaded by its users. The images must be encrypted at rest in Amazon S3. The company does not want to spend time managing and rotating the keys, but it does want to control who can access those keys. What should a solutions architect use to accomplish this? A. Server-Side Encryption with keys stored in an S3 bucket B. Server-Side Encryption with Customer-Provided Keys (SSE-C) C. Server-Side Encryption with Amazon S3-Managed Keys (SSE-S3) D. Server-Side Encryption with AWS KMS-Managed Keys (SSE-KMS)

Correct Answer: D "Server-Side Encryption with Customer Master Keys (CMKs) Stored in AWS Key Management Service (SSE-KMS) is similar to SSE-S3, but with some additional benefits and charges for using this service. There are separate permissions for the use of a CMK that provides added protection against unauthorized access of your objects in Amazon S3. SSE-KMS also provides you with an audit trail that shows when your CMK was used and by whom. "Server-Side Encryption: Using SSE-KMS You can protect data at rest in Amazon S3 by using three different modes of server-side encryption: SSE-S3, SSE-C, or SSE-KMS.SSE-S3 requires that Amazon S3 manage the data and master encryption keys. For more information about SSE-S3, see Protecting Data Using Server-Side Encryption with Amazon S3-Managed Encryption Keys (SSE-S3).SSE-C requires that you manage the encryption key. For more information about SSE-C, see Protecting Data Using Server-Side Encryption with Customer-Provided Encryption Keys (SSE-C).SSE-KMS requires that AWS manage the data key but you manage the customer master key (CMK) in AWS KMS. The remainder of this topic discusses how to protect data by using server-side encryption with AWS KMS-managed keys (SSE-KMS).You can request encryption and select a CMK by using the Amazon S3 console or API. In the console, check the appropriate box to perform encryption and select your CMK from the list. For the Amazon S3 API, specify encryption and choose your CMK by setting the appropriate headers in a GET or PUT request. Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/kms/faqs/https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/serv-side-encryption.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/developerguide/services-s3.html#sse

A company's website is using an Amazon RDS MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance for its transactional data storage. There are other internal systems that query this DB instance to fetch data for internal batch processing. The RDS DB instance slows down significantly the internal systems fetch data. This impacts the website's read and write performance, and the users experience slow response times. Which solution will improve the website's performance? A. Use an RDS PostgreSQL DB instance instead of a MySQL database. B. Use Amazon ElastiCache to cache the query responses for the website. C. Add an additional Availability Zone to the current RDS MySQL Multi.AZ DB instance. D. Add a read replica to the RDS DB instance and configure the internal systems to query the read replica.

Correct Answer: D Amazon RDS Read Replicas -Enhanced performance - You can reduce the load on your source DB instance by routing read queries from your applications to the read replica. Read replicas allow you to elastically scale out beyond the capacity constraints of a single DB instance for read-heavy database workloads. Because read replicas can be promoted to master status, they are useful as part of a sharding implementation. To further maximize read performance, Amazon RDS for MySQL allows you to add table indexes directly to Read Replicas, without those indexes being present on the master. Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/features/read-replicas

A company runs an application on a group of Amazon Linux EC2 instances. The application writes log files using standard API calls. For compliance reasons, all log files must be retained indefinitely and will be analyzed by a reporting tool that must access all files concurrently. Which storage service should a solutions architect use to provide the MOST cost-effective solution? A. Amazon EBS B. Amazon EFS C. Amazon EC2 instance store D. Amazon S3

Correct Answer: D Amazon S3 -Requests to Amazon S3 can be authenticated or anonymous. Authenticated access requires credentials that AWS can use to authenticate your requests. When making REST API calls directly from your code, you create a signature using valid credentials and include the signature in your request. Amazon Simple StorageService (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. This means customers of all sizes and industries can use it to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics. Amazon S3 provides easy-to-use management features so you can organize your data and configure finely-tuned access controls to meet your specific business, organizational, and compliance requirements. Amazon S3 is designed for 99.999999999%(11 9's) of durability, and stores data for millions of applications for companies all around the world. Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/

A company must generate sales reports at the beginning of every month. The reporting process launches 20 Amazon EC2 instances on the first of the month. The process runs for 7 days and cannot be interrupted. The company wants to minimize costs. Which pricing model should the company choose? A. Reserved Instances B. Spot Block Instances C. On-Demand Instances D. Scheduled Reserved Instances

Correct Answer: D Explanation - Scheduled Reserved Instances - Scheduled Reserved Instances (Scheduled Instances) enable you to purchase capacity reservations that recur on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, with a specified start time and duration, for a one-year term. You reserve the capacity in advance, so that you know it is available when you need it. You pay for the time that the instances are scheduled, even if you do not use them. Scheduled Instances are a good choice for workloads that do not run continuously, but do run on a regular schedule. For example, you can use Scheduled Instances for an application that runs during business hours or for batch processing that runs at the end of the week. If you require a capacity reservation on a continuous basis, Reserved Instances might meet your needs and decrease costs. How Scheduled Instances Work -Amazon EC2 sets aside pools of EC2 instances in each Availability Zone for use as Scheduled Instances. Each pool supports a specific combination of instance type, operating system, and network.To get started, you must search for an available schedule. You can search across multiple pools or a single pool. After you locate a suitable schedule, purchase it.You must launch your Scheduled Instances during their scheduled time periods, using a launch configuration that matches the following attributes of the schedule that you purchased: instance type, Availability Zone, network, and platform. When you do so, Amazon EC2 launches EC2 instances on your behalf, based on the specified launch specification. Amazon EC2 must ensure that the EC2 instances have terminated by the end of the current scheduled time period so that the capacity is available for any other Scheduled Instances it is reserved for. Therefore, Amazon EC2 terminates the EC2 instances three minutes before the end of the current scheduled time period.You can't stop or reboot Scheduled Instances, but you can terminate them manually as needed. If you terminate a Scheduled Instance before its current scheduled time period ends, you can launch it again after a few minutes. Otherwise, you must wait until the next scheduled time period.The following diagram illustrates the lifecycle of a Scheduled Instance.Reference:https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-scheduled-instances.html

A bicycle sharing company is developing a multi-tier architecture to track the location of its bicycles during peak operating hours. The company wants to use these data points in its existing analytics platform. A solutions architect must determine the most viable multi-tier option to support this architecture. The data points must be accessible from the REST API. Which action meets these requirements for storing and retrieving location data? A. Use Amazon Athena with Amazon S3. B. Use Amazon API Gateway with AWS Lambda. C. Use Amazon QuickSight with Amazon Redshift. D. Use Amazon API Gateway with Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics.

Correct Answer: D Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/data-analytics/

A data science team requires storage for nightly log processing. The size and number of logs is unknown and will persist for 24 hours only. What is the MOST cost-effective solution? A. Amazon S3 Glacier B. Amazon S3 Standard C. Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering D. Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA)

Correct Answer: D Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/#Unknown_or_changing_access

A solutions architect is designing a system to analyze the performance of financial markets while the markets are closed. The system will run a series of compute- intensive jobs for 4 hours every night. The time to complete the compute jobs is expected to remain constant, and jobs cannot be interrupted once started. Once completed, the system is expected to run for a minimum of 1 year. Which type of Amazon EC2 instances should be used to reduce the cost of the system? A. Spot instances B. On-Demand instances C. Standard Reserved Instances D. Scheduled Reserved Instances

Correct Answer: D Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-scheduled-instances.html

A company hosts an application on multiple Amazon EC2 instances. The application processes messages from an Amazon SQS queue, writes for an AmazonRDS table, and deletes -the message from the queue. Occasional duplicate records are found in the RDS table. The SQS queue does not contain any duplicate messages. What should a solutions architect do to ensure messages are being processed once only? A. Use the CreateQueue API call to create a new queue. B. Use the AddPermission API call to add appropriate permissions. C. Use the ReceiveMessage API call to set an appropriate wait time. D. Use the ChangeMessageVisibility API call to increase the visibility timeout.

Correct Answer: D Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSDeveloperGuide/FIFO-queues.html#FIFO-queues-exactly-once-processing

A company allows its developers to attach existing IAM policies to existing IAM roles to enable faster experimentation and agility. However, the security operations team is concerned that the developers could attach the existing administrator policy, which would allow the developers to circumvent any other security policies. How should a solutions architect address this issue? A. Create an Amazon SNS topic to send an alert every time a developer creates a new policy. B. Use service control policies to disable IAM activity across all account in the organizational unit. C. Prevent the developers from attaching any policies and assign all IAM duties to the security operations team. D. Set an IAM permissions boundary on the developer IAM role that explicitly denies attaching the administrator policy.

Correct Answer: D Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access_policies_boundaries.html

A solutions architect is tasked with transferring 750 TB of data from a network-attached file system located at a branch office Amazon S3 Glacier. The solution must avoid saturating the branch office's low-bandwidth internet connection. What is the MOST cost-effective solution? A. Create a site-to-site VPN tunnel to an Amazon S3 bucket and transfer the files directly. Create a bucket VPC endpoint. B. Order 10 AWS Snowball appliances and select an S3 Glacier vault as the destination. Create a bucket policy to enforce VPC endpoint. C. Mount the network-attached file system to Amazon S3 and copy the files directly. Create a lifecycle policy to S3 objects to Amazon S3 Glacier. D. Order 10 AWS Snowball appliances and select an Amazon S3 bucket as the destination. Create a lifecycle policy to transition the S3 objects to Amazon S3 Glacier.

Correct Answer: D Regional Limitations for AWS Snowball The AWS Snowball service has two device types, the standard Snowball and the Snowball Edge. The following table highlights which of these devices are available in which regions. Limitations on Jobs in AWS Snowball The following limitations exist for creating jobs in AWS Snowball: For security purposes, data transfers must be completed within 90 days of the Snowball being prepared. Currently, AWS Snowball Edge device doesn't support server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C). AWS Snowball Edge device does support server-side encryption with Amazon S3""managed encryption keys (SSE-S3) and server-side encryption with AWS Key Management Service "" managed keys(SSE-KMS). For more information, see Protecting Data Using Server-Side Encryption in the Amazon Simple Storage Service Developer Guide. In the US regions, Snowballs come in two sizes: 50 TB and 80 TB. All other regions have the 80 TB Snowballs only. If you're using Snowball to import data, and you need to transfer more data than will fit on a single Snowball, create additional jobs. Each export job can use multiple Snowballs. The default service limit for the number of Snowballs you can have at one time is 1. If you want to increase your service limit, contact AWS Support. All objects transferred to the Snowball have their metadata changed. The only metadata that remains the same is filename and filesize. All other metadata is set as in the following example: -rw-rw-r-- 1 root root [filesize] Dec 31 1969 [path/filename].Object lifecycle management -To manage your objects so that they are stored cost effectively throughout their lifecycle, configure their Amazon S3 Lifecycle. An S3 Lifecycle configuration is a set of rules that define actions that Amazon S3 applies to a group of objects. There are two types of actions: Transition actions "" Define when objects transition to another storage class. For example, you might choose to transition objects to the S3 Standard-IA storage class 30 days after you created them, or archive objects to the S3 Glacier storage class one year after creating them. Expiration actions "" Define when objects expire. Amazon S3 deletes expired objects on your behalf. The lifecycle expiration costs depend on when you choose to expire objects. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/snowball/latest/ug/limits.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/object-lifecycle-mgmt.html

A company is running an ecommerce application on Amazon EC2. The application consists of a stateless web tier that requires a minimum of 10 instances, and a peak of 250 instances to support the application's usage. The application requires 50 instances 80% of the time. Which solution should be used to minimize costs? A. Purchase Reserved Instances to cover 250 instances. B. Purchase Reserved Instances to cover 80 instances. Use Spot Instances to cover the remaining instances. C. Purchase On-Demand Instances to cover 40 instances. Use Spot Instances to cover the remaining instances. D. Purchase Reserved Instances to cover 50 instances. Use On-Demand and Spot Instances to cover the remaining instances.

Correct Answer: D Reserved Instances -Having 50 EC2 RIs provide a discounted hourly rate and an optional capacity reservation for EC2 instances. AWS Billing automatically applies your RI's discounted rate when attributes of EC2 instance usage match attributes of an active RI. If an Availability Zone is specified, EC2 reserves capacity matching the attributes of the RI. The capacity reservation of an RI is automatically utilized by running instances matching these attributes. You can also choose to forego the capacity reservation and purchase an RI that is scoped to a region. RIs that are scoped to a region automatically apply the RI's discount to instance usage across AZs and instance sizes in a region, making it easier for you to take advantage of the RI's discounted rate. On-Demand Instance - On-Demand instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour or second (minimum of 60 seconds) with no long-term commitments. This frees you from the costs and complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware and transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs. The pricing below includes the cost to run private and public AMIs on the specified operating system ("Windows Usage" prices apply to Windows Server 2003 R2,2008, 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, and 2019). Amazon also provides you with additional instances for Amazon EC2 running Microsoft Windows with SQL Server, Amazon EC2 running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Amazon EC2 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Amazon EC2 running IBM that are priced differently. Spot Instances - A Spot Instance is an unused EC2 instance that is available for less than the On-Demand price. Because Spot Instances enable you to request unused EC2 instances at steep discounts, you can lower your Amazon EC2 costs significantly. The hourly price for a Spot Instance is called a Spot price. The Spot price of each instance type in each Availability Zone is set by Amazon EC2, and adjusted gradually based on the long-term supply of and demand for Spot Instances. Your Spot Instance runs whenever capacity is available and the maximum price per hour for your request exceeds the Spot price. Reference:https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-spot-instances.html

A security team to limit access to specific services or actions in all of the team's AWS accounts. All accounts belong to a large organization in AWS Organizations. The solution must be scalable and there must be a single point where permission can be maintained. What should a solutions architect do to accomplish this? A. Create an ACL to provide access to the services or actions. B. Create a security group to allow accounts and attach it to user groups. C. Create cross-account roles in each account to deny access to the services or actions. D. Create a service control policy in the root organizational unit to deny access to the services or actions.

Correct Answer: D Service Control Policy concepts - SCPs offer central access controls for all IAM entities in your accounts. You can use them to enforce the permissions you want everyone in your business to follow. Using SCPs, you can give your developers more freedom to manage their own permissions because you know they can only operate within the boundaries you define. You create and apply SCPs through AWS Organizations. When you create an organization, AWS Organizations automatically creates a root, which forms the parent container for all the accounts in your organization. Inside the root, you can group accounts in your organization into organizational units (OUs) to simplify management of these accounts. You can create multiple OUs within a single organization, and you can create OUs within other OUs to form a hierarchical structure. You can attach SCPs to the organization root, OUs, and individual accounts. SCPs attached to the root and OUs apply to all OUs and accounts inside of them. SCPs use the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy language; however, they do not grant permissions. SCPs enable you set permission guardrails by defining the maximum available permissions for IAM entities in an account. If a SCP denies an action for an account, none of the entities in the account can take that action, even if their IAM permissions allow them to do so. The guardrails set in SCPs apply to all IAM entities in the account, which include all users, roles, and the account root user. Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-use-service-control-policies-to-set-permission-guardrails-across-accounts-in-your-aws-organization/#:~:text=Central%20security%20administrators%20use%20service,users%20and%20roles)%20adhere%20to.&text=Now%2C%20using%20SCPs%2C%20you%20can,your%20organization%20or%20organizational%20unit https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/orgs_manage_policies_scp.html

A DevOps Engineer is using AWS CodeDeploy across a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances in an EC2 Auto Scaling group. The associated CodeDeploy deployment group, which is integrated with EC2 Auto Scaling, is configured to perform in-place deployments with CodeDeployDefault. OneAtATime. During an ongoing new deployment, the Engineer discovers that, although the overall deployment finished successfully, two out of five instances have the previous application revision deployed. The other three instances have the newest application revision. What is likely causing this issue? A. The two affected instances failed to fetch the new deployment. B. A failed AfterInstall lifecycle event hook caused the CodeDeploy agent to roll back to the previous version on the affected instances. C. The CodeDeploy agent was not installed in two affected instances. D. EC2 Auto Scaling launched two new instances while the new deployment had not yet finished, causing the previous version to be deployed on the affected instances.

Correct Answer: D https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codedeploy/latest/userguide/troubleshooting-auto-scaling.html#troubleshooting-auto-scaling-provision-termination-loop

Organizers for a global event want to put daily reports online as static HTML pages. The pages are expected to generate millions of views from users around the world. The files are stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. A solutions architect has been asked to design an efficient and effective solution. Which action should the solutions architect take to accomplish this? A. Generate presigned URLs for the files. B. Use cross-Region replication to all Regions. C. Use the geoproximity feature of Amazon Route 53. D. Use Amazon CloudFront with the S3 bucket as its origin.

D Using Amazon S3 Origins, MediaPackage Channels, and Custom Origins for Web Distributions Using Amazon S3 Buckets for Your Origin When you use Amazon S3 as an origin for your distribution, you place any objects that you want CloudFront to deliver in an Amazon S3 bucket. You can use any method that is supported by Amazon S3 to get your objects into Amazon S3, for example, the Amazon S3 console or API, or a third-party tool. You can create a hierarchy in your bucket to store the objects, just as you would with any other Amazon S3 bucket. Using an existing Amazon S3 bucket as your CloudFront origin server doesn't change the bucket in any way; you can still use it as you normally would to store and access Amazon S3 objects at the standard Amazon S3 price. You incur regular Amazon S3 charges for storing the objects in the bucket. Using Amazon S3 Buckets Configured as Website Endpoints for Your Origin You can set up an Amazon S3 bucket that is configured as a website endpoint as custom origin with CloudFront. When you configure your CloudFront distribution, for the origin, enter the Amazon S3 static website hosting endpoint for your bucket. This value appears in the Amazon S3 console, on the Properties tab, in the Static website hosting pane. For example: http://bucket-name.s3-website-region.amazonaws.comFor more information about specifying Amazon S3 static website endpoints, see Website endpoints in the Amazon Simple Storage Service Developer Guide. When you specify the bucket name in this format as your origin, you can use Amazon S3 redirects and Amazon S3 custom error documents. For more information about Amazon S3 features, see the Amazon S3 documentation. Using an Amazon S3 bucket as your CloudFront origin server doesn't change it in any way. You can still use it as you normally would and you incur regular Amazon S3 charges. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/DownloadDistS3AndCustomOrigins.html

A company has a legacy application that process data in two parts. The second part of the process takes longer than the first, so the company has decided to rewrite the application as two microservices running on Amazon ECS that can scale independently. How should a solutions architect integrate the microservices? A. Implement code in microservice 1 to send data to an Amazon S3 bucket. Use S3 event notifications to invoke microservice 2. B. Implement code in microservice 1 to publish data to an Amazon SNS topic. Implement code in microservice 2 to subscribe to this topic. C. Implement code in microservice 1 to send data to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. Implement code in microservice 2 to read from Kinesis Data Firehose. D. Implement code in microservice 1 to send data to an Amazon SQS queue. Implement code in microservice 2 to process messages from the queue.

D (C) Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/sqs/ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/welcome.html

A company runs a multi-tier web application that hosts news content. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The instances run in an EC2 Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones and use an Amazon Aurora database. A solutions architect needs to make the application more resilient to periodic increases in request rates. Which architecture should the solutions architect implement? (Choose two.) A. Add AWS Shield. B. Add Aurora Replica. C. Add AWS Direct Connect. D. Add AWS Global Accelerator. E. Add an Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the Application Load Balancer.

DE AWS Global Accelerator -Acceleration for latency-sensitive applications Many applications, especially in areas such as gaming, media, mobile apps, and financials, require very low latency for a great user experience. To improve the user experience, Global Accelerator directs user traffic to the application endpoint that is nearest to the client, which reduces internet latency and jitter. GlobalAccelerator routes traffic to the closest edge location by using Anycast, and then routes it to the closest regional endpoint over the AWS global network. GlobalAccelerator quickly reacts to changes in network performance to improve your users' application performance. Amazon CloudFront -Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment. Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/introduction-benefits-of-migrating.html