Solution Architect Associate Final

You have an application running in us-west-2 that requires 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? (SELECT TWO)

For which of the following scenarios should a Solutions Architect consider using Elastic Beanstalk? (SELECT THREE)

While reviewing the Auto Scaling events for your application, you notice that your application is scaling up and down multiple times in the same hour. What changes would you suggest in order to optimize costs while preserving elasticity? (SELECT TWO)

A company hosts a popular web application that connects to an Amazon RDS MySQL DB instance running in a default VPC private subnet created with default ACL settings. The web servers must be accessible only to customers on an SSL connection and the database must only be accessible to web servers in a public subnet. Which solution would meet these requirements without impacting other applications?  (SELECT TWO)

An application reads and writes objects to an S3 bucket. When the application is fully deployed, the read/write traffic is expected to be 5,000 requests per second for the addition of data and 7,000 requests per second for the retrieval of data.
What would the architect do to maximize the Amazon S3 performance?

A retailer exports data daily from its transactional databases into an S3 bucket in the Sydney region. The retailer’s Data Warehousing team wants to import this data into an existing Amazon Redshift cluster in their VPC at Sydney. Corporate security policy mandates that data can only be transported within a VPC.
Which steps would satisfy the security policy? (SELECT TWO)

A Redshift cluster currently contains 60TB of data. There is a requirement that a disaster recovery site is put in place in a region located 600 km away. Which solution would help ensure that this requirement is fulfilled?

A company is using a Redshift cluster to store their data warehouse. There is a requirement from the Internal IT Security team to encrypt data for the Redshift database.
How could this be achieved? (SELECT TWO)

An application hosted on EC2 Instances has its promotional campaign due, to start in 2 weeks. There is a mandate from the management to ensure that no performance problems are encountered due to traffic growth during this time. What should be done to the Auto Scaling Group to fulfil this requirement?

A company has an application hosted in AWS. This application consists of EC2 Instances which sit behind an ELB. The following are the requirements from an administrative perspective:

a) Ensure notifications are sent when the read requests go beyond 1000 requests per minute

b) Ensure notifications are sent when the latency goes beyond 10 seconds

c) Monitor all API activities on the AWS resources

Which of the followings can be used to satisfy these requirements? (SELECT TWO)

A database is being hosted using the AWS RDS service. This database is to be made into a production database and is required to have high availability.
Which of the following could be used to achieve this requirement?

You require the ability to analyse a customer’s clickstream data on a website so they can do behavioural analysis. Your customer needs to know what sequence of pages and ads their customer clicked on. This data will be used in real-time to modify the page layouts as customers click through the site to increase stickiness and advertising click-through.
Which option would meet the requirements for capturing and analysing this data?

A company has an infrastructure that consists of machines which send log information every 5 minutes. The number of these machines can run into thousands and it is required to ensure that the data can be analysed at a later stage.
What could be helpful in fulfilling this requirement?

A company is planning to use Docker containers and necessary container orchestration tools for its batch processing requirements. There is a requirement of batch processing for both critical and non-critical data.
Which of the following is the best implementation step for this requirement to ensure that cost is effectively managed?

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 step could be helpful to fulfil this requirement? (SELECT TWO)

You have planned to host 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 steps would ensure a secure setup? (SELECT TWO)

An EC2 Instance hosts a Java-based application that accesses a DynamoDB table. This EC2 Instance is currently serving production users.
What would be a secure way for the EC2 Instance to access the DynamoDB table?

A company has set up an application in AWS that interacts with DynamoDB. It is required that when an item is modified in a DynamoDB table, immediate entry is made to the associated application.
How can this be accomplished? (SELECT TWO)

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?

You have a set of 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 option could 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 analysed in real-time for any sort of threat detection.
What would be helpful in this regard?

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 the EC2 Instance has complete access to the Internet since it will be used by users on the Internet.
What would be helpful to accomplish this?

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?

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.

A company is building a Two-Tier web application to serve dynamic transaction-based content.
What services should you leverage to enable an elastic and scalable Web Tier?

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?

Your company has a set of applications that make use of Docker containers used by the Development team. There is a need to move these containers to AWS.
Which of the following methods could be used to set up these Docker containers in a separate environment in AWS?

A company has a workflow that sends video files from their on-premises system to AWS for transcoding. They use EC2 worker instances to pull transcoding jobs from SQS.
Why is SQS an appropriate service for this scenario?

You have a business-critical two-tier web application currently deployed in 2 Availability Zones in a single region, using Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling. The app depends on synchronous replication at the database layer. The application needs to remain fully available even if one application AZ goes offline and if Auto Scaling cannot launch new instances in the remaining AZ.
How can the current architecture be enhanced to ensure this?

A company is planning to use the AWS ECS service to work with containers in “us-east-1” region. There is a need for the least amount of administrative overhead while launching containers.
How can this be achieved?

A company is hosting a MySQL database in AWS using the AWS RDS service. To offload the reads, a Read Replica has been created and reports are run off the Read Replica database. But at certain times, the reports show stale data.
Why may this be the case?

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?

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?

A company has a Redshift cluster for petabyte-scale data warehousing. The data within the cluster is easily reproducible from additional data stored on Amazon S3. The company wants to reduce the overall total cost of running this Redshift cluster.
Which scenario would best meet the needs of the running cluster, while still reducing total overall ownership of the cluster? Choose the correct answer from the options below.

You are designing a system which needs at minimum, 8 m4.large instances operating to service traffic. While designing a system for high availability in the us-east-1 region having 6 Availability Zones, your company needs to be able to handle the death of a full availability zone.
How should you distribute the servers to save as much cost as possible, assuming all of the EC2 nodes are properly linked to an ELB?
Your VPC account can utilize us-east-1’s AZs a through f, inclusive.

A company is worried about the EBS volume hosted in AWS and wants to ensure that redundancy is achieved for the same.
What must be done to achieve this in a cost-effective manner?

An organization has a requirement to store 10TB worth of scanned files across multiple availability zones. They are required to have a search application in place to search through the scanned files.
Which of the below mentioned options is ideal for implementing the search facility?

A concern raised in your company is that developers could potentially delete production-based EC2 resources.
As a Cloud Admin, which of the below options would you choose to help alleviate this concern?
Choose 2 options.

An application currently writes a large number of records to a DynamoDB table in one region. There is a requirement for a secondary application to retrieve new records written to the DynamoDB table every 2 hours and process the updates accordingly.
Which of the following is an ideal way to ensure that the secondary application gets the relevant changes from the DynamoDB table?

You plan on hosting a web application consisting of a web server and a database server. These servers are going to be hosted on different EC2 Instances in different subnets in a VPC.
Which of the following can be used to ensure that the database server only allows traffic from the web server?

You need to ensure that data stored in S3 is encrypted but do not want to manage the encryption keys.
Which of the following encryption mechanisms can be used in this case?

You are building a large-scale confidential documentation web server on AWS and all of its documentation will be stored on S3. One of the requirements is that it should not be publicly accessible from S3 directly, and CloudFront would be needed to accomplish this.
Which of the methods listed below would satisfy the outlined requirements?
Choose an answer from the options below.

You work as an architect for a company. An application is going to be deployed on a set of EC2 instances in a private subnet of VPC. You need to ensure that IT administrators can securely administer the instances in the private subnet.
How can you accomplish this?

You’re an architect for your company. Your IT admin staff needs access to newly created EC2 Instances for administrative purposes.
Which of the following needs to be done to ensure that the IT admin staff can successfully connect via port 22 on to the EC2 Instances

Your company is planning on the following architecture for their application

A set of EC2 Instances hosting the web part of the application.
A relational database for the backend
A Load balancer for distribution of traffic
A NAT gateway for routing traffic from the database server to the
Internet

Which of the following architecture ensure high availability across all
components?

An application consists of a fleet of EC2 Instances. These Instances are launched in the Oregon region which consists of 3 availability zones (us-west-2a, us-west-2b, us-west-2c). This application needs 6 Instances running at all times. As an architect you need to distribute the instances in such a way that the application could still maintain its capacity if any one availability zone were to go down. Also, you need to ensure that the cost is kept to a minimum?
Which of the following configurations would you consider?

A company has an application defined with the following architecture A fleet of EC2 Instances which are used to accept video uploads from users. A fleet of EC2 Instances which are used to process the video uploads.
Which of the following would help architect an operationally excellent architecture?

A company has an Amazon Aurora cluster setup. They have setup a Lambda function which needs to insert records into a DynamoDB table. The Amazon Aurora cluster needs to invoke the Lambda as a stored procedure.
Which of the following need to be in place for this setup to work.
Choose 2 answers from the options given below

Your team has been instructed to develop an application that will make use of a DynamoDB table. During the design stage, you have to provide inputs to ensure that an optimal strategy is employed for a high read and write expectancy on the underlying DynamoDB table.
Which of the following would you consider?

A company is planning to store sensitive documents in an S3 bucket. They want to ensure that documents are encrypted at rest. They want to ensure they manage the underlying keys which are used for encryption but not the encryption/decryption process.
Which of the following can be used for this purpose? Choose 2 answers from the options given below

You are working as an architect in your organization. You have peered VPC A as requester and VPC B as accepter and both VPCs can communicate with each other. Now you want resources in both the VPCs to reach out to the internet but anyone on the internet should not be able to reach resources within both the VPCs.
Which of the below will achieve the desired outcome?

Your organization already had a VPC(10.10.0.0/16) setup with one public(10.10.1.0/24) and two private subnets – private subnet 1 (10.10.2.0/24) and private subnet 2 (10.10.3.0/24). The public subnet has the main route table and two private subnets have two different route tables respectively. AWS sysops team reports a problem stating the EC2 instance in private subnet 1 cannot communicate to RDS MySQL database which is on private subnet 2.
What are the possible reasons? (choose 2 options)

You are building a fleet of EC2 Linux Instances in the AWS environment for managing heavy workloads and writing data into AWS Redshift. The developers and administrators need to login to these EC2 machines to develop, fix, deploy, and manage workloads within your organizational network.
Which of the following would allow only the personnel within the organization to access the resources in the most secure way?

Your company is planning on setting up an application that will consist of a presentation layer and a datastore in DynamoDB. The data in DynamoDB will only used frequently within the week in which the data is inserted. After a week, the data would tend to become stale. But the stale data would need to be available on durable storage for future analysis on historical data.
Which of the following would be the ideal implementation steps for this sort of architecture?
Choose 2 answers from the options given below

You have created an S3 bucket in us-east-1 region with default configuration. You are located in Asia and deleted an object in the bucket using AWS CLI. However, when you tried to list the objects in the bucket, you still see the object you deleted. You are even able to download the object.
What could have caused this behaviour?

You are designing a web application that stores static assets in an Amazon S3 bucket. You expect this bucket to immediately receive over 400 requests with a mix of GET/PUT/DELETE per second.
What should you do to ensure optimal performance?

You have an application on EC2 which stores the files in an S3 bucket. EC2 is being launched using a role which has GetObject permissions on the S3 bucket defined in its policy. The users who authenticate to this application will get a pre-signed URL for the files in S3 bucket using EC2 role temporary credentials. However, users reporting they get an error when accessing pre-signed URLs.
What could be the reason? (Choose 2 options)

You created a bucket named “myfirstiotbucket” in US West region.
What are valid URLs for accessing the bucket? (Choose 2 options)

You have an AWS setup with an existing VPC in us-east-1. You have a fleet of 20 EC2 instances which are attached to EFS with mount targets on all existing VPC’s availability zones. Your organization had requested you to replicate the same setup in another VPC within us-east-1 keeping same EFS volume.
How will you achieve this?

Your organization is using Amazon SQS as an enterprise message queuing platform. 100s of applications reading the queues every few seconds to process the messages and delete them as soon as they are being written into the queues. Looking at the number of requests being sent to Amazon SQS APIs, your management is concerned on the pricing that will be incurred.
As an architect, how would you reduce pricing without compromising on time in this scenario?
Please select 2 correct answers.

You are performing a Load Testing exercise on your application hosted on AWS. While testing your Amazon RDS MySQL DB Instance, you notice that your application becomes non-responsive when you reach 100% CPU utilization. Your application is read-heavy.
What methods will help scale your data-tier to meet the application’s needs?
Choose 3 answers from the options given below.

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?

Your organization had built a video sharing website on EC2 within US for which S3 bucket in us- east-1 is used to store the video files. The website has been receiving very good feedback and your organization decided to expand the website all over the world. However, customers in Europe and Asia started to complain that website access, upload and download of videos files are slow.
How can you resolve the issue? (choose 2 options)

You are building a content serving web application with 20 EC2 instances load balanced. For all the instances, content storage remains the same. You have chosen AWS EFS to act as common storage repository. Your application need to have as low latency as possible when serving content to the web users.
Which of the following option would you choose and why?

You are building a content serving web application on 5 EC2 instances load balanced. Total content size stored may not exceed 25 GB. You have chosen EFS for content storage. The content is accessed frequently by large number of users.
Which throughput mode would you choose in order to make sure that application on EC2 instances to EFS data transfer will not have performance bottleneck?