AWS Solutions Architecture Associate Practice Questions Part 2

Your supervisor calls you wanting to know why an SWF workflow you created has not made any progress in the last three weeks. What is the most likely explanation for the workflow’s behavior?

Your application’s usage peaks at 90% during the hours of 9am and 10am everyday. All other hours require only 10% of the peak resources. What is the best way to scale your application so that you’re only paying for max resources during peak hours ?

Your supervisor asks you to create a highly available, decoupled web application. Which of the following does not help you accomplish this goal?

Which of the following is not a benefit of a decoupled architecture using EC2, Auto Scaling, and SQS?

After setting up you first VPC peering connection between you and one of your client’s, the client requests that he now wants to be able to send traffic between instances in the peered VPCs using private IP addresses. What must you do to make this possible?

Your company wants to backup the onsite file server to AWS but does not want to serve the files from S3 to your office network when files need accessed. Which service and setup would you use to accomplish this task?

Your AWS environment contains several on-demand EC2 instances dedicated to a project that has just been cancelled. Your supervisor does not want to incur charges for these on-demand instances, but also does not want to lose the data just yet because there is a chance the project may be revived in the next few days. What should you do to minimize charges for these instances in the meantime?

You are building a system to distribute confidential training videos to employees. Using CloudFront, what method would be used to serve content that is stored in S3, but not publicly accessible from S3 directly?

In order to establish a successful site-to-site VPN connection from your on-premise network to the VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), which of the following needs to be configured inside of the VPC?

While implementing a disaster recovery strategy in another region, you are attempting to move the data from one EBS volume to another in a separate region. What is the best way to do this? Keep in mind this is not a live production replication copy.

You create an SQS queue with the default settings for a new application your company is deploying. While new messages are added to the queue throughout the week, management has indicated that the application which retrieves the messages should only be run during your company’s weekly Sunday evening maintenance window. It is quickly noticed on Monday morning that several messages were not processed the previous evening and the messages are no longer in the queue. What is a likely cause for this issue?

“You create an SQS queue and decide to test it out by creating a simple application which looks for messages in the queue. When a message is retrieved, the application is supposed to delete the message. You create three test messages in your SQS queue and discover that messages 1 and 3 are quickly deleted but message 2 remains in the queue. What is a possible cause for this behavior?

Choose the 2 correct answers:”

What is the minimum size of an S3 object?

What is the difference between an availability zone and an edge location?

You recently purchased and deployed four reserved EC2 instances in the US-East-1 region’s Availability Zone 1 for a new project. Your supervisor just informed you that this project only requires two EC2 instances. Rather than selling the reserved instances, she asked you to terminate the extra instances and convert two of the on-demand instances already running in Availability Zone 1 to reserved instances. Can this be done?

Your company is concerned with EBS volume backup on Amazon EC2 and wants to ensure they have proper backups and that the data is durable. What solution would you implement and why?

Ten students have just been employed by your company for one week and it is your task to provide them with access to AWS, obviously through IAM. Your supervisor has come to you and said that he wants to be able to track these students as a group, for some bizzare reason, rather than individually. Because of this, he has requested for them to all have the same login ID but completely different passwords. Which of the following is the best way to achieve this?

While running an EC2 instance, you’ve been storing data on the root volume of the instance. However, in order to save money on the instance, you shut down the instance for the weekend. The following week, after starting the instance, you notice that all your work has been lost and is no longer available on the EC2 instance. What might be the cause of this?

One of your instances is reporting an unhealthy system status check. However, this is not something you should have to monitor and repair on your own. How might you automate the repair of the system status check failure in an AWS environment?

You manage a web application on EC2 instances. Your website occasionally experiences brief but large spikes in traffic that cause your EC2 instances’ resources to become overwhelmed and the application to freeze up and lose recently submitted requests from end users. You use Auto Scaling to deploy additional resources to handle the load during spikes, but the new instances do not deploy fast enough to prevent the existing application servers from freezing. Assuming you cannot find a pattern to when these spikes occur, which of the following is likely to provide the most cost-effective solution to avoid losing recently submitted requests?

To protect S3 data from both accidental deletion and accidental overwriting, you should:

“Which of the following AWS services allow you access to the underlying operating system?
Choose the 2 correct answers:”

Given the following region design, what is the bare minimum design for configuring high availability and why?
Two availability zones within a region, az-a and az-b

“After building an application that makes use of an Elastic Load balancer over port 80 you notice that your instances, even though they are healthy as part of the health check, are not serving traffic when you go to the ELB DNS cname. What might be the cause of this issue?

Choose the 2 correct answers:”

An EC2 instance retrieves a message from an SQS queue, begins processing the message, then crashes. What happens to the message?

You are testing an application that uses EC2 instances to poll an SQS queue. At this stage of testing, you have verified that the EC2 instances can retrieve messages from the queue, but your coworkers are complaining of not being able to manually retrieve any messages from the queue from their on-premises workstations. What is the most likely source of this problem?”

“You are a consultant tasked with migrating an on-premise application architecture to AWS. During your design process you have to give consideration to current on-premise security and determine which security attributes you are responsible for on AWS. Which of the follow does AWS provide for you as part of the shared responsibility model?

Choose the 2 correct answers:”

To prevent in-flight tampering, all requests sent with API keys over REST or Query API should be sent over HTTPS connection.

“Your company has moved a legacy application from on-premise data center to the cloud. The legacy application requires a static IP address being coded into the application which prevents you from deploying the application with high availability and fault tolerance using the ELB. Which steps would you take to apply high availability and fault tolerance to this application?

Choose the 2 correct answers:”

Data stored on EBS volumes are automatically and redundantly stored in multiple physical volumes in the same availability zone as part of the normal operations of the EBS service and at no additional charge.

Which of the following is true of an SQS message?

“Which statement is true about Amazon SQS?
Choose the 2 correct answers:”

Your supervisor asks you to create a highly available website which serves static content from EC2 instances. Which of the following is not a requirement to accomplish this goal?

After deciding that due to to strict contractual requirements that the latest AWS VPC that you deploy will need to incorporate AWS CloudHSM as an encryption solution. Where within your AWS infrastructure would be the best place to physically locate the HSM appliances and why?

Which of the following is not a legitimate concern?

“Your web application front end consists of multiple EC2 instances behind an Elastic Load Balancer. You configured ELB to perform health checks on these EC2 instances. If an instance fails to pass health
checks, which statement will be true?”

When a snapshot is being taken against an EBS volume, the volume becomes unavailable and the instance no longer has the ability to communicate with the EBS volume until the snapshot is complete.

“Which of the following will occur when an EC2 instance in a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) with an associated Elastic IP is stopped and started?
Choose the 2 correct answers:”

Your company is moving their entire 20TB data warehouse to the cloud. With your current bandwidth it would take 2 months to transfer the data. Which service would allow you to quickly get your data into AWS?

Which is an operational process performed by AWS for data security?

What is the maximum size of a general SSD EBS volume?

“Which of the following relational database servers are available on Amazon RDS?
Choose the 3 correct answers:”

You’re building out an application on AWS that is running within a single region. However, you’re designing with disaster recovery in mind. Your intention is to build the application so that if the current region it is running in becomes unavailable, you can failover to another region. Part of your application relies heavily on pre-built AMI’s. In order to share those AMI’s with the region you’re using as a backup, what process would you take?

“In AWS when a request is made, the AWS service decides whether a given request should be allowed or denied.
The distinction between a request being denied or allowed by default and an explicit deny in a policy is important. Which of the following statements best describes this distinction?”

You are asked to review a plan that your company has made to create a new application that makes use of SQS, EC2, AutoScaling and CloudWatch. Which of the following action items will you advise your company not to implement?

Your supervisor asks you to create a decoupled application whose process includes dependencies on EC2 instances and servers located in your company’s on-premises datacenter. Which of these are you least likely to recommend as part of that process?

As part of your application architecture requirements, the company you are working for has requested the ability to run analytics against all combined log files from the Elastic Load Balancer. Which services are used together in order to collect logs and process log file analysis in an AWS environment?

“Your AWS environment contains several reserved EC2 instances dedicated to a project that has just been cancelled. Your supervisor would like to recuperate cost for these reserved instances, but also does not want to lose the data just yet in case the project is revived next fiscal year. What can you do to minimize charges for these instances?
Choose the 2 correct answers:”

You are designing a global application that takes advantage of multiple regions. As part of your application, the need to synchronize from one region to another is required to ensure your application is serving the same data when employing latency based Route 53 DNS records. In order to ensure this happens, you have determined that using the AWS CLI to sync files from the primary storage servers to S3 is the best method. How might you implement AWS CLI authentication against the S3 service?

You are consulting for a finance company that has specific backup and archiving policies. This company’s RTO for all financial documents that have been created in the past 6 months is 1 hour. The second requirement is to configure a setup that allows for all documents that are 6 months or older to be sent automatically for archiving in a lower cost but highly durable archive environment. Given that the company is using the storage gateway, gateway-stored configuration, which of the following would be the best setup in order to reach the RTO and archiving objectives?

If an instance, that belongs to an Elastic Load balancer, health check fails; what occurs to the instance that fails?

Amazon Auto Scaling is not meant to handle instant load spikes but is built to grow with a gradual increase in usage over a short time period.

The AMI ID used in an Auto Scaling policy is configured in the _______.

What URL might you query on an EC2 instance in order to find the public AND private IP address of an instance?

“Your AWS environment contains several reserved EC2 instances dedicated to a project that has just been cancelled. Your supervisor wants to stop incurring charges for these reserved instances immediately and recuperate as much of the reserved instance cost as possible. What can you do to avoid being charged for them?

Choose the 2 correct answers:”

Which of the following is an invalid VPC Peering Configuration?

Company B provides an online image recognition service and utilizes SQS to decouple system components for scaleability. The SQS consumer’s readers poll the image queue as often as possible to keep end-to-end throughput as high as possible. However, Company B is realizing that polling in tight loops is burning CPU cycles and increasing costs with empty responses. How can company B reduce the number of empty responses?

You design an application that checks for new items in an S3 bucket once per hour. If new items exist, a message is added to an SQS queue. You have several EC2 instances which retrieve messages from the SQS queue, parse the file, and send you an email containing the relevant information from the file. You upload one test file to the bucket, wait a couple hours and find that you have hundreds of emails from the application. What is the most likely cause for this volume of email?

You are the System Administrator for your company’s AWS account of approximately 200 IAM users. A new company policy has just been introduced that will change the access of 50 of the IAM users to have unlimited access to S3 buckets. How can you implement this effectively so that there is no need to apply the policy at the individual user level?