AWS Practice Exam

An online media company has created an application which provides analytical data to its clients. The application is hosted on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling Group. You have been brought on as a consultant and add an Application Load Balancer to front the Auto Scaling Group and distribute the load between the instances. The VPC which houses this architecture is running IPv4 and IPv6. The last thing you need to do to complete the configuration is point the domain name to the Application Load Balancer. Using Route 53, which record type at the zone apex will you use to point the DNS name of the Application Load Balancer? Choose two.

1. Alias with AAAA type record set 2. Alias with A type record set

You have just been hired by a large organization which uses many different AWS services in their environment. Some of the services which handle data include: RDS, Redshift, ElastiCache, DynamoDB, S3, and Glacier. You have been instructed to configure a web application using stateless web servers. Which services can you use to handle session state data?

1. Amazon DynamoDB 2. Amazon RDS 3. Amazon ElastiCache

After an IT Steering Committee meeting, you have been put in charge of configuring a hybrid environment for the company's compute resources. You weigh the pros and cons of various technologies based on the requirements you are given. The main requirements to drive this selection are overall cost considerations and the ability to reuse existing internet connections. Which technology best meets these requirements?

AWS VPN

You have joined a newly formed software company as a Solutions Architect. It is a small company, and you are the only employee with AWS experience. The owner has asked for your recommendations to ensure that the AWS resources are deployed to proactively remain within budget. Which AWS service can you use to help ensure you don't have cost overruns for your AWS resources?

AWS Budgets

After an IT Steering Committee meeting you have been put in charge of configuring a hybrid environment for the company's compute resources. You weigh the pros and cons of various technologies based on the requirements you are given. Your primary requirement is the necessity for a private, dedicated connection, which bypasses the Internet and can provide throughput of 10 Gbps. Which option will you select?

AWS Direct Connect

Your company has gotten back results from an audit. One of the mandates from the audit is that your application, which is hosted on EC2, must encrypt the data before writing this data to storage. Which service could you use to meet this requirement?

AWS KMS

Your company is slowly migrating to the cloud and is currently in a hybrid environment. The server team has been using Puppet for deployment automations. The decision has been made to continue using Puppet in the AWS environment if possible. If possible, which AWS service provides integration with Puppet

AWS OpsWorks

Your company has decided to go to a hybrid cloud environment. Part of this effort will be to move a large data warehouse to the cloud. The warehouse is 50TB, and will take over a month to migrate given the current bandwidth available. What is the best option available to perform this migration considering both cost and performance aspects?

AWS Snowball Edge

You have recently migrated your small company to AWS and are looking for some general best practice guidance within the platform. Which AWS service can help you optimize your AWS environment by giving recommendations to reduce cost, increase security, and improve performance.

AWS Trusted Advisor

A travel company has deployed a website in a single Amazon RDS DB instance. The database is very read-heavy and may have some latency issues at certain times of the year. What can you do scale beyond the compute or I/O capacity of your single DB instance?

Add read replicas

You have been tasked to review your company disaster recovery plan due to some new requirements. The driving factor is that the Recovery Time Objective has become very aggressive. Because of this, it has been decided to configure Multi-AZ deployments for the RDS MySQL databases. Unrelated to DR, it has been determined that some read traffic needs to be offloaded from the master database. What step can be taken to meet this requirement?

Add read replicas to offload some read traffic.

A company has a great deal of data in S3 buckets for which they want to create a database. Creating the RDS database, normalizing the data, and migrating to the RDS database will take time and is the long-term plan. But there's an immediate need to query this data to retrieve information necessary for an audit. Which AWS service will enable querying data in S3 using standard SQL commands?

Amazon Athena

A company has created a mobile application that is hugely popular. The initial plan was to give each user login credentials to the application. But due to the volume of users, this idea has become impractical. What service can you use to allow outside users to login through a third party such as Facebook, Amazon, Google or Apple?

Amazon Cognito

Your company uses IoT devices installed in businesses to provide those business real-time data for analysis. You have decided to use AWS Kinesis Data Firehose to stream the data to multiple backend storing services for analytics. Which service listed is not a viable solution to stream the real time data to?

Athena

Your company is using a hybrid configuration because there are some legacy applications which are not easily converted and migrated to AWS. And with this configuration comes a typical scenario where the legacy apps must maintain the same private IP address and MAC address. You are attempting to convert the application to the cloud and have configured an EC2 instance to house the application. What you are currently testing is removing the ENI from the legacy instance and attaching it to the EC2 instance. You want to attempt a cold attach. What does this mean?

Attach ENI when the instance is being launched.

Your company has recently converted to a hybrid cloud environment and will slowly be migrating to a fully AWS cloud environment. The AWS side is in need of some steps to prepare for disaster recovery. A disaster recovery plan needs drawn up and disaster recovery drills need to be performed for compliance reasons. The company wants to establish Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives. The RTO and RPO can be pretty relaxed. The main point is to have a plan in place, with as much cost savings as possible. Which AWS disaster recovery pattern will best meet these requirements?

Backup and restore

You are managing S3 buckets in your organization. This management of S3 extends to Amazon Glacier. For auditing purposes you would like to be informed if an object is restored to S3 from Glacier. What is the most efficient way you can do this?

Configure S3 notifications for restore operations from Glacier.

Your company security team has planned to do penetration testing on EC2 instances. Which policy will provide information on performing penetration testing on your EC2 instances?

Customer Service Policy for Penetration Testing

A professional baseball league has chosen to use a key-value and document database for storage, processing, and data delivery. Many of the data requirements involve high-speed processing of data such as a Doppler radar system which samples the position of the baseball 2000 times per second. Which AWS data storage can meet these requirements?

DynamoDB

Your company has asked you to look into some latency issues with the company web app. The application is backed by an AWS RDS database. Your analysis has determined that the requests made of the application are very read heavy, and this is where improvements can be made. Which service can you use to store frequently accessed data in-memory?

ElastiCache

A small startup company has begun using AWS for all of its IT infrastructure. The company has one AWS Solutions Architect and the demands for their time are overwhelming. The software team has been given permission to deploy their Python and PHP applications on their own. They would like to deploy these applications without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Which AWS service would they use for deployments?

Elastic Beanstalk

You have multiple EC2 instances housing applications in a VPC in a single Availability Zone. Your EC2 workloads need low-latency network performance, high network throughput, and a tightly-coupled node-to-node communication. What's the best measure you can do to ensure this throughput?

Launch your instances in a cluster placement group

The company you work for has reshuffled teams a bit and you've been moved from the AWS IAM team to the AWS network team. One of your first assignments is to review the subnets in the main VPCs. You have recommended that the company add some private subnets and segregate databases from public traffic. What differentiates a public subnet from a private subnet?

If a subnet's traffic is routed to an internet gateway, the subnet is known as a public subnet.

You work for an oil and gas company as a lead in data analytics. The company is using IoT devices to better understand their assets in the field (for example, pumps, generators, valve assemblies, and so on). Your task is to monitor the IoT devices in real-time to provide valuable insight that can help you maintain the reliability, availability, and performance of your IoT devices. What tool can you use to process streaming data in real time with standard SQL without having to learn new programming languages or processing frameworks?

Kinesis Data Analytics

A large, big-box hardware chain is setting up a new inventory management system. They have developed a system using IoT sensors which captures the removal of items from the store shelves in real-time and want to use this information to update their inventory system. The company wants to analyze this data in the hopes of being ahead of demand and properly managing logistics and delivery of in-demand items. Which AWS service can be used to capture this data as close to real-time as possible, while being able to both transform and load the streaming data into Amazon S3 or ElasticSearch?

Kinesis Data Firehose

Your company has recently converted to a hybrid cloud environment and will slowly be migrating to a fully AWS cloud environment. The AWS side is in need of some steps to prepare for disaster recovery. A disaster recovery plan needs drawn up and disaster recovery drills need to be performed. The company wants to establish Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives, with a major component being a very aggressive RTO, with cost not being a major factor. You have determined and will recommend that the best DR configuration to meet cost and RTO/RPO objectives will be to run a second AWS architecture in another Region in an active-active configuration. Which AWS disaster recovery pattern will best meet these requirements?

Multi-site

Your company is slowly migrating to the cloud and is currently in a hybrid environment. The server team has been provisioning servers to their exact specifications using Chef recipes. These recipes can be reused in AWS. Which AWS service employs a configuration management model based on concepts such as stacks and layers that supports multiple versions of Chef?

OpsWorks

You have been assigned to create an architecture which uses load balancers to direct traffic to an Auto Scaling Group of EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones. You were considering using an Application Load Balancer, but some of the requirements you have been given seem to point to a Classic Load Balancer. Which requirement would be better served by an Application Load Balancer?

Path-based routing

A new startup company decides to use AWS to host their web application. They configure a VPC as well as two subnets within the VPC. They also attach an internet gateway to the VPC. In the first subnet, they create an EC2 instance to host a web application. There is a network ACL and a security group, which both have the proper ingress and egress to and from the internet. There is a route in the route table to the internet gateway. The EC2 instances added to the subnet need to have a globally unique IP address to ensure internet access. Which is not a globally unique IP address?

Private IP address

Your company has performed a Disaster Recovery drill which failed to meet the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) desired by executive management. The failure was due in large part by the amount of time taken to restore proper functioning on the database side. You have given management a recommendation of implementing synchronous data replication for the RDS database to help meet the RTO. Which of these options can perform synchronous data replication in RDS?

RDS Mutli-AZ

A news media company is using an S3 bucket as a website to serve photos of television personalities within the company. The photos are intended to be served nationwide to local affiliates across the company. But you have found that these photos are being accessed and pi

Remove public read access from your bucket, then provide your users with presigned URLs to access the photos.

You have configured an Auto Scaling Group of EC2 instances fronted by an Application Load Balancer. The back-end database is a MySQL RDS database. Your dev team has created a new AMI which has been hardened to meet company security standards, and this AMI needs to be deployed on all EC2 instances in the organization. What step or steps do you need to take to deploy this AMI?

Replace the launch configuration by a launch template using the new AMI.

You work for a Defense contracting company. The company develops software applications which perform intensive calculations in the area of Mechanical Engineering related to metals for ship building. The company competes for and wins contracts that typically range from 1 year to up to 5 years. These long-term contracts mean that the duration of your need for EC2 instances can be matched to the length of these contracts, and then extended if necessary. The main requirement is consistent performance for the duration of the contract. Which EC2 purchasing option provides the best value, given these long-term contracts?

Reserved

A software company has produced several stateless applications. The software team now needs servers to act as test servers for these applications. These servers are not mission-critical, so occasional downtime is acceptable. What type of EC2 servers can be used to meet these requirements at the lowest cost?

Spot

You have been evaluating the NACLs in your company. Currently, you are looking at the default network ACL. Which statement is true about NACLs?

The default configuration of the default NACL is Allow, and the default configuration of a custom NACL is Deny.

An Application Load Balancer is fronting an Auto Scaling Group of EC2 instances, and the instances are backed by an RDS database. The Auto Scaling Group has been configured to use the Default Termination Policy. You are testing the Auto Scaling Group and have triggered a scale-in. Which instance will be terminated first?

The instance launched from the oldest launch configuration

Your company has a small web application hosted on an EC2 instance. The application has just been deployed but no one is able to connect to the web application from a browser. You had recently ssh'd into this EC2 instance to perform a small update, but you also cannot browse to the application from Google Chrome. You have checked and there is an internet gateway attached to the VPC and a route in the route table to the internet gateway. Which situation most likely exists?

The instance security group has ingress on port 22 but not port 80.

A new startup company decides to use AWS to host their web application. They configure a VPC as well as two subnets within the VPC. They also attach an internet gateway to the VPC. In the first subnet, they create the EC2 instance which will host their web application. They finish the configuration by making the application accessible from the Internet. The second subnet has an instance hosting a smaller, secondary application. But this application is not currently accessible from the Internet. What could be potential problems?

The second subnet does not have a route in the route table to the internet gateway.

You have been tasked with designing a strategy for backing up EBS volumes attached to an instance-store-backed EC2 instance. You have been asked for an executive summary on your design, and the executive summary should include an answer to the question, "What can an EBS volume do when snapshotting the volume is in progress"?

The volume can be used normally while the snapshot is in progress.

Your team has provisioned an Auto Scaling Groups in a single Region. The Auto Scaling Group at max capacity would total 40 EC2 instances between them. However, you notice that the Auto Scaling Groups will only scale out to a portion of that number of instances at any one time. What could be the problem?

There is a vCPU-based on-demand instance limit per region

The CFO of your company approaches you and inquires about cutting costs in your AWS account. One area you are able to identify for cost cutting is in S3. There is data in S3 that is very rarely used and has only been retained for audit purposes. You decide to archive this data to a cheaper storage solution. Which AWS solution would meet this requirement?

Use a lifecycle policy to archive the data to Glacier

A software company has created an application to capture service requests from users and also enhancement requests. The application is deployed on an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances fronted by an Application Load Balancer. The Auto Scaling group has scaled to maximum capacity, but there are still requests being lost. The cost of these instances should remain the same. What step can the company take to ensure requests aren't lost?

Use an SQS queue with the Auto Scaling group to capture all requests

You are consulting for a state agency focused on the state lottery. You have been given a task to have 2,000,000 bar codes created as quickly as possible. This will require EC2 instances and an average CPU utilization of 70% for each of them. So you plan to spin up 10 EC2 instances to create the bar codes. You estimate that the instances will complete the job from around 11pm to 1am. You don't want the instances sitting idle for up to 9 hours until the next morning. What can you do to terminate these instances when they are done?

You can create a CloudWatch alarm that is triggered when the average CPU utilization percentage has been lower than 10 percent for 4 hours, and terminates the instance.

You have taken over management of several instances in the company AWS environment. You want to quickly review scripts used to bootstrap the instances at runtime. A URL command can be used to do this. What can you append to the URL http://169.254.169.254/latest/ to retrieve this data?

user-data/

You have several EC2 instances in an auto scaling group fronted by a network load balancer. The instances will need access to S3 and DynamoDB. The auto scaling group was created from a launch template. What needs to be configured in the launch template to enable newly launched instances access to S3 and DynamoDB?

An IAM Role attached to newly launched instances with permissions to S3 and DynamoDB.

Your company is storing highly sensitive data in S3 Buckets. The data includes personal and financial information. An audit has determined that this data must be stored in a secured manner and any data stored in the buckets already or data coming into the buckets must be analyzed and alerts sent out flagging improperly stored data. Which AWS service can be used to meet this requirement?

Amazon Macie

A database outage has been very costly to your organization. You have been tasked with configuring a more highly-available architecture. The main requirement is that the chosen architecture needs to meet an aggressive RTO in case of disaster. You have decided to use an RDS Multi-AZ deployment. How is the replication handled for RDS Multi-AZ?

Amazon RDS automatically provisions and maintains a synchronous standby replica in a different Availability Zone.

A company is running a teaching application which is consumed by users all over the world. The application is translated into 5 different languages. All of these language files need to be stored somewhere that is highly-durable and can be accessed frequently. As content is added to the site, the storage demands will grow by a factor of five, so the storage must be highly-scalable as well. Which storage option will be highly-durable, cost-effective, and highly-scalable?

Amazon S3

Your company is storing stack traces for application errors in an S3 Bucket. The engineers using these stack traces review them when addressing application issues. It has been decided that the files only need to be kept for four weeks then they can be purged. How can you meet this requirement in S3?

Configure the S3 Lifecycle rules to purge the files after a month

Your company has decided to migrate a SQL Server database to a newly-created AWS account. Which service can be used to migrate the database?

Database Migration Service

You have been assigned the review of the security in your company AWS cloud environment. Your final deliverable will be a report detailing potential security issues. One of the first things that you need to describe is the responsibilities of the company under the shared responsibility module. Which measure is the customer's responsibility?

EC2 instance OS Patching

An accounting company has big data applications for analyzing actuary data. The company is migrating some of its services to the cloud, and for the foreseeable future, will be operating in a hybrid environment. They need a storage service that provides a simple, scalable, fully managed elastic NFS file system for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. Which AWS service can meet these requirements?

EFS

You have been evaluating the NACLs in your company. Currently, you are looking at the default network ACL. Which statement is true regarding subnets and NACLs?

Each subnet in your VPC must be associated with a network ACL. If you don't explicitly associate a subnet with a network ACL, the subnet is automatically associated with the default network ACL.

A gaming company is designing several new games which focus heavily on player-game interaction. The player makes a certain move and the game has to react very quickly to change the environment based on that move and to present the next decision for the player in real-time. A tool is needed to continuously collect data about player-game interactions and feed the data into the gaming platform in real-time. Which AWS service can best meet this need?

Kinesis Data Streams

Your application is housed on an Auto Scaling Group of EC2 instances. The application is backed by the Multi-AZ MySQL RDS database and an additional read replica. You need to simulate some failures for disaster recovery

Read replica failure

A team of architects is designing a new AWS environment for a company which wants to migrate to the Cloud. The architects are considering the use of EC2 instances with instance store volumes. The architects realize that the data on the instance store volumes are ephemeral. Which action will not cause the data to be deleted on an instance store volume?

Reboot

An insurance company is creating an application which will perform analytics in near real-time on huge datasets in the terabyte range and potentially even petabyte. The company is evaluating an AWS data storage option. Which AWS service will allow storage of petabyte scale data and also allow fast querying of this data?

Redshift

Your company has gone through an audit with a focus on data storage. You are currently storing historical data in Amazon Glacier. One of the results of the audit is that a portion of the infrequently-accessed historical data must be able to be accessed immediately upon request. Where can you store this data to meet this requirement?

S3 Standard-IA

You are designing an architecture for a financial company which provides a day trading application to customers. After viewing the traffic patterns for the existing application you notice that traffic is fairly steady throughout the day, with the exception of large spikes at the opening of the market in the morning and at closing around 3 pm. Your architecture will include an Auto Scaling Group of EC2 instances. How can you configure the Auto Scaling Group to ensure that system performance meets the increased demands at opening and closing of the market?

Use a predictive scaling policy on the Auto Scaling Group to meet opening and closing spikes

You are working for a startup company with a small number of employees. The company expects rapid growth and you have been assigned to configure existing users and onboard new users with IAM privileges and logins. You intend to create IAM groups for the company departments and add new users to the appropriate group when you onboard them. You begin creating policies to assign permissions and attach them to the appropriate group. What is the best practice when giving users permissions in IAM policies?

Use the principle of least privilege.

Your company plans to slowly migrate from a hybrid cloud environment to a fully AWS cloud environment, and the AWS side needs to establish a disaster recovery plan. The company wants to set up Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives, with a major focus being cost. You have determined and will recommend that the best DR configuration to meet the cost and RT/RP Objectives will be to have a minimal version of the application always running in another Region. Which AWS disaster recovery plan will best meet these requirements?

Warm standby

A software company has created an application to capture service requests from users and also enhancement requests. The application is deployed on an Auto Scaling Group of EC2 instances fronted by an Application Load Balancer. The Auto Scaling Group has scaled to maximum capacity, but there are still requests being lost. The company has decided to use SQS with the Auto Scaling Group to ensure all messages are saved and processed. What is an appropriate metric for auto scaling with SQS?

backlog per instance

A consultant hired by a small company to configure an AWS environment. The consultant begins working with the VPC and launching EC2 instances within the VPC. The initial instances will be placed in a public subnet. The consultant begins to create security groups. What is true of security groups?

You can specify allow rules but not deny rules

You have been evaluating the NACLs in your company. Most of the NACLs are configured the same: 100 All Traffic Allow 200 All Traffic Deny * All Traffic Deny How can the last rule * All Traffic Deny be edited?

You can't modify or remove this rule