AWS Solutions Architect - Cloud Guru Exam Questions

A company has an auto scaling group of EC2 instances hosting their retail sales application. Any significant downtime for this application can result in large losses of profit. Therefore the architecture also includes an Application Load Balancer and an RDS database in a Multi-AZ deployment. The company has a very aggressive Recovery Time Objective (RTO) in case of disaster. How long will a failover typically complete?

The failover will take a minute or two. Q: What happens during Multi-AZ failover and how long does it take? Failover is automatically handled by Amazon RDS so that you can resume database operations as quickly as possible without administrative intervention. When failing over, Amazon RDS simply flips the canonical name record (CNAME) for your DB instance to point at the standby, which is in turn promoted to become the new primary. We encourage you to follow best practices and implement database connection retry at the application layer. Failovers, as defined by the interval between the detection of the failure on the primary and the resumption of transactions on the standby, typically complete within one to two minutes. Failover time can also be affected by whether large uncommitted transactions must be recovered; the use of adequately large instance types is recommended with Multi-AZ for best results. AWS also recommends the use of Provisioned IOPS with Multi-AZ instances for fast, predictable, and consistent throughput performance.

You work for an advertising company that has a real-time bidding application. You are also using CloudFront on the front end to accommodate a worldwide user base. Your users begin complaining about response times and pauses in real-time bidding. Which service can be used to reduce DynamoDB response times by an order of magnitude (milliseconds to microseconds)?

- DAX Incorrect. One of the purposes of using CloudFront is to reduce the number of requests that your origin server must respond to directly. With CloudFront caching, more objects are served from CloudFront edge locations which are closer to your users. This reduces the load on your origin server and reduces latency. The more requests that CloudFront can serve from edge caches, the fewer viewer requests that CloudFront must forward to your origin to get the latest version or a unique version of an object. Edge caches can improve overall performance, but not specific to DynamoDB. Correct. Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a fully managed, highly available, in-memory cache that can reduce Amazon DynamoDB response times from milliseconds to microseconds, even at millions of requests per second. While DynamoDB offers consistent single-digit millisecond latency, DynamoDB with DAX takes performance to the next level with response times in microseconds for millions of requests per second for read-heavy workloads. With DAX, your applications remain fast and responsive, even when a popular event or news story drives unprecedented request volumes your way. No tuning required

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 Incorrect. one of the main clues in this scenario is "must encrypt the data before writing this data to storage". Correct. You can configure your application to use the KMS API to encrypt all data before saving it to disk. This link details how to choose an encryption service for various use cases: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/crypto/latest/userguide/awscryp-choose-toplevel.html

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.

-Alias with an A type record set. -Alias with an AAAA type record set. Incorrect. Alias with a type "CNAME" record set is incorrect because you can't create a CNAME record at the zone apex. Alias with a type "AAAA" record set and Alias with a type "A" record set are correct. To route domain traffic to an ELB load balancer, use Amazon Route 53 to create an alias record that points to your load balancer. An alias record is a Route 53 extension to DNS.

Your organization uses AWS CodeDeploy for deployments. Now you are starting a project on the AWS Lambda platform. For your deployments, you've been given a requirement of performing blue-green deployments. When you perform deployments, you want to split traffic, sending a small percentage of the traffic to the new version of your application. Which deployment configuration will allow this splitting of traffic?

-Canary Incorrect. Weighted routing does enable you to split traffic by percentage, but it is not a Lambda deployment configuration. Weighted routing is related to Route 53. Correct. With canary, traffic is shifted in two increments. You can choose from predefined canary options that specify the percentage of traffic shifted to your updated Lambda function version in the first increment and the interval, in minutes, before the remaining traffic is shifted in the second increment.

A small startup company has multiple departments with small teams representing each department. They have hire you to configure Identity and Access Management in their AWS account. The team expects to grow rapidly, and promote from within which could mean promoted team members switching over to a new team fairly often. How can you configure IAM to prepare for this type of growth?

-Create the user accounts, create a group for each department, create and attach an appropriate policy to each group, and place each user account into their department's group. When new team members are onboarded, create their account and put them in the appropriate group. If an existing team member changes departments, move their account to their new IAM group. Although you can attach policies to roles, roles are not appropriate for grouping users. The group is the correct tool for grouping users. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id_groups.html An IAM group is a collection of IAM users. Groups let you specify permissions for multiple users, which can make it easier to manage the permissions for those users. For example, you could have a group called Admins and give that group the types of permissions that administrators typically need. Any user in that group automatically has the permissions that are assigned to the group. If a new user joins your organization and needs administrator privileges, you can assign the appropriate permissions by adding the user to that group. Similarly, if a person changes jobs in your organization, instead of editing that user's permissions, you can remove him or her from the old groups and add him or her to the appropriate new groups.

A software company is developing an online "learn a new language" application. The application will be designed to teach up to 20 different languages for native English and Spanish speakers. It is ideal that the application have fast response times and can deliver both text and voice to the end user. The application will also need to store user progress data. This application has 24,000 read units per second and 3,300 write units per second. Which type of storage would meet these requirements?

-DynamoDB Duolingo uses Amazon DynamoDB to store 31 billion items in support of an online learning site that delivers lessons for 80 languages. The U.S. startup reaches more than 18 million monthly users around the world who perform more than six billion exercises using the free Duolingo lessons. The company relies heavily on Amazon DynamoDB not just for its highly scalable database, but also for high performance that reaches 24,000 read units per second and 3,300 write units per second. In addition, Duolingo uses a range of other AWS services such as Amazon EC2, based on the latest Intel Xeon Processor Family, for compute Amazon ElastiCache to increase performance; Amazon S3 for storing image-related data; and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for permanent data storage. Moving forward, Duolingo plans on leveraging AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS Lambda for its microservices architecture, as well as Amazon Redshift for its data analytics.

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 RedShift is for data warehousing, and while it does have a high-speed querying feature, DynamoDB is the best tool for this job. Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL database that supports key-value and document data models, and enables developers to build modern, serverless applications that can start small and scale globally to support petabytes of data and tens of millions of read and write requests per second. DynamoDB is designed to run high-performance, internet-scale applications that would overburden traditional relational databases.

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 in real-time and both transform and load the streaming data into Amazon S3 or ElasticSearch?

-Kinesis Data Firehose Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is the easiest way to reliably load streaming data into data lakes, data stores, and analytics tools. It can capture, transform, and load streaming data into Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and Splunk, enabling near-real-time analytics with existing business intelligence tools and dashboards you're already using today. It is a fully-managed service that automatically scales to match the throughput of your data and requires no ongoing administration. It can also batch, compress, transform, and encrypt the data before loading it, minimizing the amount of storage used at the destination and increasing security.

A software gaming company has produced an online racing game which uses CloudFront for fast delivery to worldwide users. The game also uses DynamoDB for storing in-game and historical user data. The DynamoDB table has a preconfigured read and write capacity. Users have been reporting slow down issues, and an analysis has revealed that the DynamoDB table has begun throttling during peak traffic times. Which step can you take to improve game performance?

-Make sure DynamoDB Auto Scaling is turned on. Amazon DynamoDB auto scaling uses the AWS Application Auto Scaling service to dynamically adjust provisioned throughput capacity on your behalf, in response to actual traffic patterns. This enables a table or a global secondary index to increase its provisioned read and write capacity to handle sudden increases in traffic, without throttling. When the workload decreases, Application Auto Scaling decreases the throughput so that you don't pay for unused provisioned capacity. Note that if you use the AWS Management Console to create a table or a global secondary index, DynamoDB auto scaling is enabled by default. You can modify your auto scaling settings at any time.

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. You have a 3-year contract and decide to purchase reserved EC2 instances for a 3-year duration. You are informed that the particular program has been cancelled abruptly and negotiations have brought the contract to an amicable conclusion one year early. What can you do to stop incurring charges and save money on the EC2 instances?

-Sell the reserved instances on the Reserved Instance Marketplace. The Reserved Instance Marketplace is a platform that supports the sale of third-party and AWS customers' unused Standard Reserved Instances, which vary in term lengths and pricing options. For example, you may want to sell Reserved Instances after moving instances to a new AWS Region, changing to a new instance type, ending projects before the term expiration, when your business needs change, or if you have unneeded capacity.

A company has an Auto Scaling Group of EC2 instances hosting their retail sales application. Any significant downtime for this application can result in large losses of profit. Therefore the architecture also includes an Application Load Balancer and an RDS database in a Multi-AZ deployment. What will happen to preserve high availability if the primary database fails?

-The CNAME is switched from the primary db instance to the secondary. Correct: Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments provide enhanced availability and durability for RDS database (DB) instances, making them a natural fit for production database workloads. When you provision a Multi-AZ DB Instance, Amazon RDS automatically creates a primary DB Instance and synchronously replicates the data to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone (AZ). Each AZ runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure, and is engineered to be highly reliable. In case of an infrastructure failure, Amazon RDS performs an automatic failover to the standby (or to a read replica in the case of Amazon Aurora), so that you can resume database operations as soon as the failover is complete. Since the endpoint for your DB Instance remains the same after a failover, your application can resume database operation without the need for manual administrative intervention. Failover is automatically handled by Amazon RDS so that you can resume database operations as quickly as possible without administrative intervention. When failing over, Amazon RDS simply flips the canonical name record (CNAME) for your DB instance to point at the standby, which is in turn promoted to become the new primary.

Your team has provisioned multiple Auto Scaling Groups in a single Availability Zone. The Auto Scaling Groups at max capacity would total 40 EC2 instances between them. However, you notice that the Auto Scaling Groups will only scale out to a total of 20 instances at any one time. What could be the problem?

-There is a vCPU-based on-demand instance limit per region The instance limit is per Region. Correct. Your AWS account has default quotas, formerly referred to as limits, for each AWS service. Unless otherwise noted, each quota is Region-specific. You can request increases for some quotas, and other quotas cannot be increased. Service Quotas is an AWS service that helps you manage your quotas for over 100 AWS services from one location. Along with looking up the quota values, you can also request a quota increase from the Service Quotas console.

You are working as a Solutions Architect in a large healthcare organization. You have many Auto Scaling Groups that utilize launch configurations. Many of these launch configurations are similar yet have subtle differences. You'd like to use multiple versions of these launch configurations. An ideal approach would be to have a default launch configuration and then have additional versions that add additional features. Which option best meets these requirements?

-Use launch templates instead. Incorrect. Although CloudFormation templates are intended to be versioned, this is reinventing the wheel. Launch templates can be used, and versioning is a feature of launch templates. A launch template is similar to a launch configuration, in that it specifies instance configuration information. Included are the ID of the Amazon Machine Image (AMI), the instance type, a key pair, security groups, and the other parameters that you use to launch EC2 instances. However, defining a launch template instead of a launch configuration allows you to have multiple versions of a template. With versioning, you can create a subset of the full set of parameters and then reuse it to create other templates or template versions. For example, you can create a default template that defines common configuration parameters and allow the other parameters to be specified as part of another version of the same template.

A testing team is using a group of EC2 instances to run batch, automated tests on an application. The tests run overnight, but don't take all night. The instances sit idle for long periods of time and accrue unnecessary charges. What can you do to stop these instances when they are idle for long periods?

-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 stops the instance. This is creating functionality already provided by CloudWatch. Adding Stop Actions to Amazon CloudWatch Alarms: You can create an alarm that stops an Amazon EC2 instance when a certain threshold has been met. For example, you may run development or test instances and occasionally forget to shut them off. You can create an alarm that is triggered when the average CPU utilization percentage has been lower than 10 percent for 24 hours, signaling that it is idle and no longer in use. You can adjust the threshold, duration, and period to suit your needs, plus you can add an SNS notification, so that you will receive an email when the alarm is triggered. Amazon EC2 instances that use an Amazon Elastic Block Store volume as the root device can be stopped or terminated, whereas instances that use the instance store as the root device can only be terminated.

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 is a cheaper option. Correct: This is the least expensive option and cost is the overriding factor. -Incorrect Pilot Light

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 his 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?

CodeDeploy is more complex than Elastic Beanstalk and does not meet the ease of use requirements. With Elastic Beanstalk, you can quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS Cloud without having to learn about the infrastructure that runs those applications. Elastic Beanstalk reduces management complexity without restricting choice or control. You simply upload your application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and application health monitoring. Elastic Beanstalk supports applications developed in Go, Java, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python, and Ruby. When you deploy your application, Elastic Beanstalk builds the selected supported platform version and provisions one or more AWS resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, to run your application.

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? Choose two.

Elasticache and DynamoDB can both be used to store session data.

A new startup is considering the advantages of using DynamoDB versus a traditional relational database in AWS RDS. The NoSQL nature of DynamoDB presents a small learning curve to the team members who all have experience with traditional databases. The company will have multiple databases, and the decision will be made on a case-by-case basis. Which of the following use cases would favor DynamoDB? Select two.

Incorrect. Oracle Database (a relational database), is widely known for storing BLOB data. DynamoDB is not designed to store such large chunks of data. DynamoDB is a NoSQL database that supports key-value and document data structures. A key-value store is a database service that provides support for storing, querying, and updating collections of objects that are identified using a key and values that contain the actual content being stored. Meanwhile, a document data store provides support for storing, querying, and updating items in a document format such as JSON, XML, and HTML. DynamoDB's fast and predictable performance characteristics make it a great match for handling session data. Plus, since it's a fully-managed NoSQL database service, you avoid all the work of maintaining and operating a separate session store. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/amazon-dynamodb-session-manager-for-apache-tomcat/ Storing metadata for Amazon S3 objects is correct because the Amazon DynamoDB stores structured data indexed by primary key and allows low-latency read and write access to items ranging from 1 byte up to 400KB. Amazon S3 stores unstructured blobs and is suited for storing large objects up to 5 TB. In order to optimize your costs across AWS services, large objects or infrequently accessed data sets should be stored in Amazon S3, while smaller data elements or file pointers (possibly to Amazon S3 objects) are best saved in Amazon DynamoDB.

You have configured an Auto Scaling Group of EC2 instances. You have begun testing the scaling of the Auto Scaling Group using a stress tool to force the CPU utilization metric being used to force scale out actions. The stress tool is also being manipulated by removing stress to force a scale in. But you notice that these actions are only taking place in five-minute intervals. What is happening?

The question states that events are taking place in five-minute intervals. This suggests multiple five-minute intervals. The cooldown period helps you prevent your Auto Scaling group from launching or terminating additional instances before the effects of previous activities are visible. You can configure the length of time based on your instance startup time or other application needs. When you use simple scaling, after the Auto Scaling group scales using a simple scaling policy, it waits for a cooldown period to complete before any further scaling activities due to simple scaling policies can start. An adequate cooldown period helps to prevent the initiation of an additional scaling activity based on stale metrics. By default, all simple scaling policies use the default cooldown period associated with your Auto Scaling Group, but you can configure a different cooldown period for certain policies, as described in the following sections. Note that Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling honors cooldown periods when using simple scaling policies, but not when using other scaling policies or scheduled scaling. A default cooldown period automatically applies to any scaling activities for simple scaling policies, and you can optionally request to have it apply to your manual scaling activities. When you use the AWS Management Console to update an Auto Scaling Group, or when you use the AWS CLI or an AWS SDK to create or update an Auto Scaling Group, you can set the optional default cooldown parameter. If a value for the default cooldown period is not provided, its default value is 300 seconds.