AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate

A customer planning on hosting an AWS RDS instance, needs to ensure that the underlying data is encrypted.
How can this be achieved?
Choose 2 answers from the options given below.

You are developing a new mobile application which is expected to be used by thousands of customers. You are considering storing user preferences in AWS, and need a data store to save the same. Each data item is expected to be 20KB in size. The solution needs to be cost-effective, highly available, scalable and secure.
How would you design the data layer?

Your Operations department is using an incident based application hosted on a set of EC2 Instances. These instances are placed behind an Auto Scaling Group to ensure the right number of instances are in place to support the application. The Operations department has expressed dissatisfaction with regard to poor application performance at 9:00 AM each day. However, it is also noted that the system performance returns to optimal at 9:45 AM.
What can be done to ensure that this issue gets fixed?

A database hosted in AWS is currently encountering an extended number of write operations and is not able to handle the load.
What can be done to the architecture to ensure that the write operations are not lost under any circumstance?

You have created an AWS Lambda function that will write data to a DynamoDB table.
Which of the following must be in place to ensure that the Lambda function can interact with the DynamoDB table?

Your company currently has data hosted in an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB. Since this data is critical, there is a need to ensure that it can be made available in another region in case of a disaster.
How can this be achieved?

Your company has a requirement to host a static web site in AWS.
Which of the following steps would help implement a quick and cost-effective solution for this requirement?
Choose 2 answers from the options given below.
Each answer forms a part of the solution.

A company currently storing a set of documents in the AWS Simple Storage Service, is worried about the potential loss if these documents are ever deleted.
Which of the following can be used to ensure protection from loss of the underlying documents in S3?

An application with a 150 GB relational database runs on an EC2 Instance. This is a critical business application requiring more than 16,000 IOPS of throughput per volume.
Which storage type would be preferred?

You manage the IT users for a large organization that is moving many services to AWS and you want a seamless way for your employees to log in and use the cloud services. You also want to use AWS Managed Microsoft AD and have been asked if users can access services in the on-premises environment.
What do you respond with?

Your company is planning on using Route 53 as the DNS provider. There is a need to ensure that the company’s domain name points to an existing CloudFront distribution.
How can this be achieved?

You are working as an AWS Architect for a start-up company. They have a production website which is two-tier with web servers in front end & database servers in back end. All these database servers are spread
across multiple Availability Zones & are stateful instance. You have configured Auto Scaling Group for these servers with minimum of 2 instance & maximum of 6 instance. During scale in of these instances post peak hours, you are observing data loss from these database servers.
What feature needs to be configured additionally to avoid data loss & copy data before instance termination?

You have an application running in us-west-2 requiring 6 EC2 Instances running at all times. With 3 Availability Zones in the region viz. us-west-2a, us-west-2b, and us-west-2c.
which of the following deployments provides fault tolerance if an Availability Zone in us-west-2 becomes unavailable?

An application allows a manufacturing site to upload files. Each uploaded 3 GB file is processed to extract metadata, and this process takes a few seconds per file. The frequency at which the uploads happen is unpredictable. For instance, there may be no updates for hours, followed by several files being uploaded concurrently.

What architecture addresses this workload in the most cost efficient manner?

A company is migrating an on-premises 10TB MySQL database to AWS. With a business requirement that the replica lag be under 100 milliseconds, the company expects this database to quadruple in size.

Which Amazon RDS engine meets the above requirements?

For which of the following workloads should a Solutions Architect consider using Elastic Beanstalk?

An application with a 150 GB relational database runs on an EC2 Instance.

While the application is used infrequently with small peaks in the morning and evening, what is the MOST cost effective storage type among the options below?

You are working as a consultant for a start-up firm. They have developed a web application for employee to enable them file sharing with external vendors securely. They created an Auto Scaling group for Web servers which require two m4. large EC2 instances running at all time & scaling up to maximum twelve instances. Post deploying this application, huge rise in billing is observed. Due to limited budget, CTO has requested your advice to optimise usage of instance in Auto Scaling groups.

What will be best solution to reduce cost without any performance impact?

You are working as an AWS Architect for a start-up company. It has production website on AWS which is a two-tier with web servers in front end & database servers in back end. Third party firm has been looking after operations of these database servers. They need to access these database servers in private subnets on SSH port. As per standard operating procedure provided by Security team, all access to these servers should be over secure layer & should be logged, what will be best solution to meet this requirement?

A company has a set of Hyper-V machines and VMware virtual machines. They are now planning on migrating these instances to the AWS Cloud.
Which of the following can be used to move these resources to the AWS Cloud?

A company has a lot of data hosted on their On-premises infrastructure.
Running out of storage space, the company wants a quick win solution
using AWS. Which of the following would allow easy extension of their
data infrastructure to AWS?

An application consists of the following architecture:

a. EC2 Instances in a single AZ behind an ELB

b. A NAT Instance which is used to ensure that instances can download
updates from the Internet

Which of the following can be used to ensure better fault tolerance in this setup? Choose 2 answers from the options given below.

A company has a set of resources hosted in an AWS VPC. Having acquired another company with its own set of resources hosted in AWS, it is
required to ensure that resources in the VPC of the parent company can access the resources in the VPC of the child company.

How can this be accomplished?

A company currently uses Redshift in AWS. The Redshift cluster is required to be used in a cost-effective manner. As an architect.

which of the following would you consider to ensure cost-effectiveness?

Below are the requirements for a data store in AWS:

a) Fully Managed

b) Integration with existing business intelligence tools

c) High concurrency workload that generally involves reading and writing
all columns for a small number of records at a time

Which of the following would be an ideal data store for the above
requirements? Choose 2 answers from the options below.

Your company has a set of resources hosted on the AWS Cloud. As a part of the new governing model, there is a requirement that all activity on AWS resources should be monitored.

What is the most efficient way to have this implemented?

A company with a set of Admin jobs(.NET core) currently setup in the C# programming language, is moving their infrastructure to AWS.

Which of the following would be an efficient means of hosting the Admin related jobs in AWS?

You?ve implemented AWS Key Management Service to protect your data in
your applications and other AWS services. Your global headquarters is in
Northern Virginia (US East (N. Virginia)) where you created your keys
and have provided the appropriate permissions to designated users and
specific roles within your organization. While the N. American users are
not having issues, German and Japanese users are unable to get KMS to
function. What is the most likely cause?

A company hosts a popular web application that connects to an Amazon RDS MySQL DB instance running in a private VPC subnet created with default ACL settings. The web servers must be accessible only to customers on an SSL connection and the database should only be accessible to web servers in a public subnet. As an architect, which of the following would you not recommend for such an architecture?

A company currently hosts a Redshift cluster in AWS. For security reasons, it should be ensured that all traffic from and to the Redshift cluster does not go through the Internet.

Which of the following features can be used to fulfil this requirement in an efficient manner?

Your company has a set of EC2 Instances hosted in AWS. There is a mandate to prepare for disasters and come up with the necessary disaster recovery procedures.

Which of the following would help in mitigating the effects of a disaster for the EC2 Instances?

Your recent security review revealed a large spike in attempted logins to your AWS account. With respect to sensitive data stored in S3, the
data has not been encrypted and is susceptible to fraud if it were to be stolen. You’ve recommended AWS Key Management Service as a solution.
Which of the following is true regarding how KMS operates?

A company has a set of EBS Volumes that need to be catered in case of a
disaster. How will you achieve this using existing AWS services effectively?

A company has an entire infrastructure hosted on AWS. It wants to create code templates used to provision the same set of resources in another region in case of a disaster in the primary region.

Which of the following services can help in this regard?

Your company has designed an app that requires it to store data in DynamoDB and have registered the app with identity providers so users can sign-in using third-parties like Google and Facebook.

What must be in place such that the app can obtain temporary credentials to access DynamoDB?

An instance is launched into a VPC subnet with the network ACL configured to allow all outbound traffic and deny all inbound traffic.
The instance’s security group is configured to allow SSH from any IP address.

What changes need to be made to allow SSH access to the instance?

A company has a sales team and each member of this team uploads their sales figures daily. A Solutions Architect needs a durable storage
solution for these documents and also a way to preserve documents from accidental deletions.

What among the following choices would deliver protection against unintended user actions?

An application requires a highly available relational database with an initial storage capacity of 8TB. This database will grow by 8GB
everyday. To support the expected traffic, at least eight read replicas will be required to handle the database reads.

Which of the below options meets these requirements?

A company has an application that delivers objects from S3 to users. Of late, some users spread across the globe have been complaining of slow response times.

Which of the following additional steps would help in building a cost-effective solution and also help ensure that the users get an optimal response to objects from S3?

An application needs to have a messaging system in AWS. It is of the utmost importance that the order of messages is preserved and duplicate
messages are not sent.

Which of the following services can help fulfil this requirement?

A company is planning on building an application using the services available on AWS. This application will be stateless in nature, and the
service must have the ability to scale according to the demand.

Which of the following would be an ideal compute service to use in this scenario?

A company has a set of EC2 Instances hosted on the AWS Cloud. These instances form a web server farm which services a web application
accessed by users on the Internet.

Which of the following would help make this architecture more fault tolerant? Choose 2 answers from the options given below.

You plan on hosting an application on EC2 Instances which will be used to process logs. The application is not very critical and can resume
operation even after an interruption.

Which of the following steps can help provide a cost-effective solution?

A company stores its log data in an S3 bucket. There is a current need to have search capabilities available for the data in S3.

How can this be achieved in an efficient and ongoing manner? Choose 2 answers from the options below.

A company plans on deploying a batch processing application in AWS.

Which of the following is an ideal way to host this application? Choose 2 answers from the options below. Each answer forms a part of the solution.

An architecture consists of the following:

a) An active/passive infrastructure hosted in AWS

b) Both infrastructures comprise ELB, Auto Scaling, and EC2 resources

How should Route 53 be configured to ensure proper failover in case the primary infrastructure were to go down?

Your company uses KMS to fully manage the master keys and perform encryption and decryption operations on your data and in your
applications. As an additional level of security, you now recommend AWS rotate your keys.

What is your company’s responsibility after enabling this additional feature?

You are in a startup company that is releasing its first iteration of its app. Your company doesn’t have a directory service for its intended
users but wants the users to be able to sign in and use the app.

What is your advice to your leadership to implement a solution quickly?

A company is migrating an on-premises 5TB MySQL database to AWS and expects its database size to increase steadily.

Which Amazon RDS engine meets these requirements?

You have implemented AWS Cognito services to require users to sign in
and sign up to your app through social identity providers like Facebook,
Google, etc. Your marketing department want users to try out the app
anonymously and thinks the current log-in requirement is excessive and
will reduce demand for products and services offered through the app.
What can you offer the marketing department in this regard?

Your app uses AWS Cognito Identity for authentication and stores user profiles in a User Pool. To expand the availability and ease of signing
in to the app, your team is requesting advice on allowing the use of OpenID Connect (OIDC) identity providers as additional means of authenticating users and saving the user profile information.

What is your recommendation on OIDC identity providers?

A company is building a Two-Tier web application to serve dynamic transaction-based content. The Data Tier uses an Online Transactional
Processing (OLTP) database.

What services should you leverage to enable an elastic and scalable Web Tier?

You have instances hosted in a private subnet in a VPC. There is a need
for the instances to download updates from the Internet. As an
architect, what change would you suggest to the IT Operations team which
would also be the most efficient and secure?

An application currently uses AWS RDS MySQL as its data layer. Due to recent performance issues on the database, it has been decided to separate the querying part of the application by setting up a separate reporting layer.

Which of the following additional steps could also potentially assist in improving the performance of the underlying database?

One of the leading entertainment channels is hosting an audition for a popular reality show in India. They have published an advertisement to upload images of the participants with certain criteria on their website which is hosted in AWS infrastructure.

The business requirement of the channel states that the participants with green card entry should be given a priority and results for them will be released first. However, results for the rest of the users will be released at their (channel?s) convenience.

Being a popular reality show, the number of requests coming to website will increase before the deadline, therefore the solution needs to be scalable and cost effective. Also, the failure of any layer should not affect the other layer in a multitier environment, in the AWS infrastructure. The technical management has given you few guidelines about the architecture, and they want Web components should allow participants to upload the images on S3 bucket. However, the second component will process these images and store it back to the S3 bucket, by making entries to the database storage.

As a solutions architect for the entertainment channel, how would you design the solution, considering the priority for the participants is maintained and data is processed and stored as per the requirement.

A company has setup an application in AWS that interacts with DynamoDB. It is required that when an item is modified in a DynamoDB table, an immediate entry is made to the associating application.

How can this be accomplished? Choose 2 answers from the choices below.

A company planning on building and deploying a web application on AWS, needs to have a data store to store session data. Which of the below
services can be used to meet this requirement?

Please select 2 correct options.

An EC2 Instance hosts a Java based application that accesses a DynamoDB table. This EC2 Instance is currently serving production users.

Which of the following is a secure way for the EC2 Instance to access the DynamoDB table?

You plan on hosting a web application on AWS. You create an EC2 Instance in a public subnet which needs to connect to an EC2 Instance that will host an Oracle database. Which of the following steps should be taken to ensure that a secure setup is in place?

Choose 2 answers from the choices below.

A company plans to have their application hosted in AWS. This
application has users uploading files and then using a public URL for
downloading them at a later stage. Which of the following designs would
help fulfill this requirement?

You have created a VPC in Paris region, and one public subnet in each
Availability Zone eu-west-3a, eu-west-3b, and eu-west-3c of the same
region, and each subnet having one EC2 instance inside it.

Now you want to launch ELB nodes in two AZ?s out of three available. How
many private IP addresses will be consumed by ELB nodes at initial
launch of ELB.

An application running on EC2 Instances processes sensitive information stored on Amazon S3. This information is accessed over the Internet. The security team is concerned that the Internet connectivity to Amazon S3 could be a security risk.

Which solution will resolve the security concern?

Your company currently has a set of EC2 Instances hosted in AWS. The
states of these instances need to be monitored and each state change
needs to be recorded. Which of the following can help fulfill this
requirement? Choose 2 collated steps from the options given below.

A company is planning on testing a large set of IoT enabled devices.
These devices will be streaming data every second. A proper service
needs to be chosen in AWS which could be used to collect and analyze
these streams in real time. Which of the following could be used for
this purpose?

A company has a requirement to store 100TB of data to AWS. This data will be exported using AWS Snowball and needs to then reside in a database layer. The database should have the facility to be queried from a business intelligence application. Each item is roughly 500KB in size. Which of the following is an ideal storage mechanism for the underlying data layer?

A customer wants to create EBS Volumes in AWS. The data on the volume is required to be encrypted at rest. How can this be achieved?

An application currently uses AWS RDS MySQL as its data layer. Due to recent performance issues on the database, it has been decided to separate the querying part of the application by setting up a separate reporting layer. Which of the following additional steps could also potentially assist in improving the performance of the underlying database?

A Solutions Architect designing a solution to store and archive corporate documents, has determined Amazon Glacier as the right choice of solution.
An important requirement is that the data must be delivered within 10 minutes of a retrieval request.

Which feature in Amazon Glacier can help meet this requirement?

A Solutions Architect designing a solution to store and archive corporate documents, has determined Amazon Glacier as the right choice of solution.
An important requirement is that the data must be delivered within 10 minutes of a retrieval request.

Which feature in Amazon Glacier can help meet this requirement?

You have an application hosted on AWS consisting of EC2 Instances launched via an Auto Scaling Group. You notice that the EC2 Instances
are not scaling out on demand.

What checks can be done to ensure that the scaling occurs as expected?

You have designed an application that uses AWS resources, such as S3, to operate and store users? documents. You currently use Cognito identity pools and User pools. To increase usage and ease of signing up you
decide adding social identity federation is the best path forward. When asked what the difference is between the Cognito identity pool and the federated identity providers (e.g. Google), how do you respond?

You have a web application hosted on an EC2 Instance in AWS which is being accessed by users across the globe. The Operations team has been receiving support requests about extreme slowness from users in some
regions.

What can be done to the architecture to improve the response time for these users?

Currently, you have a NAT Gateway defined for your private instances. You need to make the NAT Gateway highly available.

How can this be accomplished?

A company wants to have a fully managed data store in AWS. It should be a compatible MySQL database, which is an application requirement.

Which of the following databases engines can be used for this purpose?

A Solutions Architect is designing an online shopping application running in a VPC on EC2 Instances behind an ELB Application Load Balancer. The instances run in an Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. The application tier must read and write data to a customer managed database cluster. There should be no access to the database from the Internet, but the cluster must be able to obtain software patches from the Internet.

Which VPC design meets these requirements?

It is expected that only certain specified customers can upload images
to the S3 bucket for a certain period of time. As an architect what is
your suggestion?

A company is required to use the AWS RDS service to host a MySQL database. This database is going to be used for production purposes and
is expected to experience a high number of read/write activities.

Which of the below underlying EBS Volume types would be ideal for this database?

You have a set of on-premises virtual machines used to serve a web-based application. You need to ensure that a virtual machine if unhealthy is taken out of the rotation.

which of the following option can be used for health checking and DNS failover features for a web application running behind ELB, to increase redundancy and availability.

A company has a set of web servers. It is required to ensure that all the logs from these web servers can be analyzed in real time for any sort of threat detection.

Which of the following would assist in this regard?

You currently have the following architecture in AWS:

a. A couple of EC2 Instances located in us-west-2a

b. The EC2 Instances are launched via an Auto Scaling group.

c. The EC2 Instances sit behind a Classic ELB.

Which of the following additional steps should be taken to ensure the
above architecture conforms to a well-architected framework?

Your company manages an application that currently allows users to upload images to an S3 bucket. These images are picked up by EC2 Instances for processing and then placed in another S3 bucket. You need an area where the metadata for these images can be stored.

Which of the following would be an ideal data store for this?

An application team needs to quickly provision a development environment consisting of a web and database layer.

Which of the following would be the quickest and most ideal way to get this setup in place?

Third-party sign-in (Federation) has been implemented in your web application to allow users who need access to AWS resources. Users have been successfully logging in using Google, Facebook, and other third-party credentials. Suddenly, their access to some AWS resources has been restricted.

What is the likely cause of restricted use of AWS resources?

A company has an application that stores images and thumbnails on S3. The thumbnail needs to be available for download immediately.
Additionally, both the images and thumbnail images are not accessed frequently.

Which is the most cost-efficient storage option that meets above-mentioned requirements?

You have an EC2 Instance placed inside a subnet. You have created the VPC from scratch, and added the EC2 Instance to the subnet. It is
required to ensure that this EC2 Instance has complete access to the Internet, since it will be used by users on the Internet.

Which of the following options would help accomplish this?