AWS Solutions Architect Associate Sample Questions

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AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Sample Questions

AWS Solutions Architect Associate Sample Questions

Advanced Sample Questions

What is AWS Lambda?

  • a. A cloud-based database service.
  • b. A virtual server that allows users to run applications on the cloud.
  • c. A fully managed service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources.

Answer: c. AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources. It’s a fully managed service, meaning you don’t have to worry about provisioning, scaling, or managing servers.

What is Amazon RDS?

  • a. A service that provides managed messaging for microservices.
  • b. A database service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.
  • c. A storage service that provides scalable and highly available block storage for EC2 instances.

Answer: b.

Explanation: Amazon RDS is a database service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It supports several popular database engines, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server.

What is AWS CloudFormation?

  • a. A service that provides virtual servers in the cloud.
  • b. A service that allows you to provision and manage infrastructure as code.
  • c. A service that provides global content delivery.

Answer: b.

Explanation: AWS CloudFormation is a service that allows you to provision and manage infrastructure as code. You can use CloudFormation to define a template that describes the resources you want to create, and then use that template to create and manage those resources.

What is Amazon S3?

  • a. A service that provides virtual servers in the cloud.
  • b. A database service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.
  • c. A storage service that provides scalable and highly available object storage for files and data.

Answer: c.

Explanation: Amazon S3 is a storage service that provides scalable and highly available object storage for files and data. It’s often used to store and serve static assets for web applications, as well as to store and share data between different applications.

What is Amazon EC2?

  • a. A database service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.
  • b. A service that provides virtual servers in the cloud.
  • c. A storage service that provides scalable and highly available block storage for EC2 instances.

Answer: b.

Explanation: Amazon EC2 is a service that provides virtual servers in the cloud. With EC2, you can launch instances of virtual machines that run various operating systems and software applications. You can also choose the size and configuration of the instances to meet your specific needs.

What is the purpose of Amazon Route 53?

  • a. A managed DNS service that makes it easy to route users to Internet applications.
  • b. A service that provides global content delivery.
  • c. A service that provides virtual servers in the cloud.

Answer: a.

Explanation: Amazon Route 53 is a managed DNS service that makes it easy to route users to Internet applications. It can route traffic to various AWS resources, including EC2 instances, S3 buckets, and load balancers, as well as to resources outside of AWS.

What is an Elastic IP address in AWS?

  • a. A static IP address that can be assigned to your AWS resources, such as EC2 instances and NAT gateways.
  • b. An IP address that changes automatically based on traffic demand.
  • c. A dynamic IP address that is assigned to your AWS resources when they are launched.

Answer: a.

Explanation: An Elastic IP address is a static IP address that can be assigned to your AWS resources, such as EC2 instances and NAT gateways. It allows you to maintain a consistent IP address even if the underlying resource is stopped and started or replaced.

What is an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)?

  • a. A virtual machine that runs various operating systems and software applications.
  • b. A pre-configured virtual machine that you can use to create an EC2 instance.
  • c. A block storage service that provides scalable and highly available storage for EC2 instances.

Answer: b.

Explanation: An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a pre-configured virtual machine that you can use to create an EC2 instance. It includes a specific operating system, software applications, and configuration settings, and can be used as a starting point for creating multiple instances.

What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

  • a. A service that makes it easy to deploy and scale applications in the cloud.
  • b. A service that provides virtual servers in the cloud.
  • c. A service that provides scalable and highly available block storage for EC2 instances.

Answer: a. AWS

Explanation: Elastic Beanstalk is a service that makes it easy to deploy and scale applications in the cloud. It automates the deployment process and handles capacity provisioning, load balancing, and automatic scaling, allowing you to focus on writing code.

What is AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)?

  • a. A service that provides managed messaging for microservices.
  • b. A service that allows you to control access to AWS resources by creating and managing users, groups, and permissions.
  • c. A service that provides global content delivery.

Answer: b.

Explanation: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a service that allows you to control access to AWS resources by creating and managing users, groups, and permissions. It enables you to securely manage access to resources within your AWS account and provides a central place to manage authentication and authorization.

Basic Sample Questions

Question 1. With the aim of selling weather data online, a meteorological start-up company has built a custom web application. Amazon DynamoDB is currently used to house the company’s data, and it wants to set up a new service that notifies managers of four internal teams when new weather events are recorded. It is important to the business that this new service does not interfere with the operation of its current application.
What steps must be taken by the solutions architect to guarantee the satisfaction of these objectives with the MINIMUM feasible operational overhead?
  • A. Creating a DynamoDB table in on-demand capacity mode. 
  • B. Creating a DynamoDB table with a global secondary index.
  • C. Creating a DynamoDB table with provisioned capacity and auto-scaling.
  • D. Creating a DynamoDB table in provisioned capacity mode, and configuring it as a global table.

Correct Answer: A

Question 2. A business runs its web application on Amazon Web Services by using seven Amazon EC2 instances. DNS queries are required to provide the IP addresses of each healthy EC2 instance.
What policy would you suggest to employ for complying with this stipulation?
  • A. Simple routing policy
  • B. Latency routing policy
  • C. Multi-value routing policy
  • D. Geolocation routing policy

Correct Answer: C

Question 3. As a result of using Amazon EC2 instances, a company is developing an application that produces transitory transactional data. An application requires data storage that provides adjustable and consistent IOPS.
What would you recommend the solutions architects proceed with?
  • A. Provisioning an EC2 instance with a Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) root volume and a Cold HDD (sc1) data volume.
  • B. Provisioning an EC2 instance with a Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) volume that will serve as the root and data volume.
  • C. Provisioning an EC2 instance with a General Purpose SSD (gp2) root volume and Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) data volume.
  • D. Provisioning an EC2 instance with a General Purpose SSD (gp2) root volume. Configuring the application for storing its data in an Amazon S3 bucket.

Correct Answer: C

Question 4. A company offers a picture hosting service in the us-east-1 region. Using the program, users from multiple countries can upload and browse images. In some cases, photographs receive a lot of views for many months, while others receive a low number of views for only a few days. Users can upload up to 20 MB in size. Based on the photo information, the service determines what picture to be shown to each user.
What would be the most cost-effective option for delivering access to suitable users?
  • A. Storing the photos in Amazon DynamoDB. Turning on DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) for caching frequently viewed items.
  • B. Storing the photos in the Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class. Storing the photo metadata and its S3 location in DynamoDB.
  • C. Storing the photos in the Amazon S3 Standard storage class. Setting up an S3 Lifecycle policy for moving photos older than 30 days to the S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) storage class. Using the object tags for keeping track of metadata.
  • D. Storing the photos in the Amazon S3 Glacier storage class. Setting up an S3 Lifecycle policy for moving photos older than 30 days to the S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage class. Storing the photo metadata and its S3 location in Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES).

Correct Answer: B

Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/storage-class-intro.html

Question 5.  During the development of a new website, a business is interested in storing static photos in an Amazon S3 bucket in an effort to reduce both latency and cost.
As a solutions architect how would you propose a service configuration?

A. Deploying a NAT server in front of Amazon S3.

B. Deploying Amazon CloudFront in front of Amazon S3.

C. Deploying a Network Load Balancer in front of Amazon S3.

D. Configuring Auto Scaling for automatically adjusting the capacity of the website.

Correct Answer: B

Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/deliver-content-faster/

Question 6. To provide consumers worldwide with dependable access to secret media files, a media company uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host a web application that caches secret media files. Storage is handled by Amazon S3 buckets. What solution should the organization employ to supply material rapidly, regardless of the origin of the requests?

A. Using AWS DataSync for connecting the S3 buckets to the web application.

B. Deploying AWS Global Accelerator for connecting the S3 buckets to the web application.

C. Deploying Amazon CloudFront for connecting the S3 buckets to CloudFront edge servers.

D. Using Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) for connecting the S3 buckets to the web application.

Correct Answer: B

Question 7. In addition, solutions architects must develop a way to archive client case files, which are critical assets for a company, which are only going to grow. With built-in redundancy, the solution must allow multiple application servers running on Amazon EC2 instances to access files concurrently.
Which solution would satisfy these criteria?
  • A. Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) 
  • B. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
  • C. Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive
  • D. AWS Backup

Correct Answer: A

Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/efs/faq/

Question 8. An organization has two virtual private clouds (VPCs) labeled Management and Production. VPCs in the Management and Production clouds are connected via VPNs via a customer gateway, while the latter two are connected via AWS Direct Connect via a virtual private gateway. Both the Management and Production VPCs communicate with one another through a single VPC peering connection.
How would minimize the architecture’s single point of failure?
  • A. Adding a set of VPNs between the Management and Production VPCs.
  • B. Adding a second virtual private gateway and attaching it to the Management VPC.
  • C. Adding a second set of VPNs to the Management VPC from a second customer gateway device.
  • D. Adding a second VPC peering connection between the Management VPC and the Production VPC.

Correct Answer: C

Question 9. To store video material a media organization uses Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. A particular video file has achieved much popularity and is getting a certain number of views from all over the globe. The costs have increased as a consequence. 
Without jeopardizing user accessibility, which step will result in a cost reduction?
  • A. Changing the EBS volume to Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS).
  • B. Storing the video in an Amazon S3 bucket and creating an Amazon CloudFront distribution.
  • C. Splitting the video into multiple, smaller segments so users are routed to the requested video segments only.
  • D. Clearing an Amazon S3 bucket in each Region and uploading the videos so users are routed to the nearest S3 bucket.

Correct Answer: B

Question 10. An Amazon RDS MySQL Multi-AZ database instance hosts transactional data for a company’s website. Various internal systems access the instance for batch processing data. Whenever internal systems request data from the RDS DB instance, the RDS DB instance drastically slows down, resulting in a poor user experience because the read and write performance of the website is affected.
Which is the most suitable approach to increase the website performance?
  • A. Using an RDS PostgreSQL DB instance instead of a MySQL database.
  • B. Using Amazon ElastiCache for caching the query responses for the website.
  • C. Adding an additional Availability Zone to the current RDS MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance.
  • D. Adding a read replica to the RDS DB instance and configuring the internal systems to query the read replica.

Correct Answer: D

Explanation: You can reduce the load on your source DB instance by routing read queries from your applications to the read replica. Read replicas allow the elastic scale-out beyond the capacity constraints of a single DB instance for read-heavy database workloads. Because read replicas can be promoted to master status, they are useful as part of a sharding implementation.

To further maximize read performance, Amazon RDS for MySQL permits adding table indexes directly to Read Replicas, without those indexes being present on the master.
Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/features/read-replicas

Question 11. An application is run by a business on a cluster of Amazon Linux EC2 instances. For compliance purposes, the organization must keep all application log files for seven years. We will use a reporting program to analyze the log files. This program will require concurrent access to all files.
In terms of cost-effectiveness, which storage system best meets these criteria?

A. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)

B. Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)

C. Amazon EC2 instance store

D. Amazon S3 Most Voted

Correct Answer: D

Explanation:  Amazon S3 provides easy-to-use management features and customizable access controls to help you store, organize, and protect your data. Amazon S3 is designed to meet industry durability standards, and stores data for millions of applications used by companies around the globe.

Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/

Question 12. An organization requires Amazon S3 storage for its data. As part of a compliance requirement, objects must be reverted to their original state when modified, and data older than five years should be stored for audit purposes.
As a solutions architect, what would you recommend to be the most affordable?

A. Enabling object-level versioning and S3 Object Lock in governance mode

B. Enabling object-level versioning and S3 Object Lock in compliance mode

C. Enabling object-level versioning. Enabling a lifecycle policy for moving data older than 5 years to S3 Glacier Deep Archive

D. Enabling object-level versioning. Enabling a lifecycle policy for moving data older than 5 years to S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA)

Correct Answer: C

Question 13. For hosting an application, multiple Amazon EC2 instances are used. An Amazon SQS queue is read, messages are written to an Amazon RDS database, and then the messages are removed. In some cases, duplicate records appear in the Amazon RDS database. No duplicate messages are there in the SQS queue.
How would you guarantee that these messages are handled just once?

A. Using the CreateQueue API call for creating a new queue.

B. Using the AddPermission API call for adding appropriate permissions.

C. Using the ReceiveMessage API call for setting an appropriate wait time.

D. Using the ChangeMessageVisibility API call for increasing the visibility timeout.

Correct Answer: D

Question 14. An organization allows developers to experiment in order to facilitate agility and innovation by linking current IAM policies to the existing IAM roles. On the other hand, the security operations team is concerned that the developers may attach the current administrator policy, thus circumventing all other security policies.
As a solutions architect what approach would you use to deal with this issue?

A. Creating an Amazon SNS topic for sending an alert every time a developer creates a new policy.

B. Using service control policies for disabling IAM activity across all accounts in the organizational unit.

C. Preventing the developers from attaching any policies and assigning all IAM duties to the security operations team.

D. Setting an IAM permissions boundary on the developer IAM role. It should explicitly deny the attachment of administrator policy.

Correct Answer: D

Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access_policies_boundaries.html

Question 15. Solutions architects are developing a daily data processing task that requires up to two hours to complete, but if it’s stopped, it’ll have to be rerun from scratch.
What would be the MOST cost-effective way for solving this issue?

A. Creating a script that runs locally on an Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance that is triggered by a cron job.

B. Creating an AWS Lambda function triggered by an Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) scheduled event.

C. Using an Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Fargate task triggered by an Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) scheduled event.

D. Using an Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) task running on Amazon EC2 triggered by an Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) scheduled event.

Correct Answer: C

Question 16. A PostgreSQL database instance with Amazon RDS stores the data of the business web application. During the financial closure period, accountants conduct massive queries, which negatively affect database performance due to excessive demands. In order to reduce the impact of reporting on the online application, management wants to reduce the number of queries.
To minimize a database’s influence, what should a solutions architect do with the LEAST amount of effort?

A. Creating a read replica and directing reporting traffic to the replica.

B. Creating a Multi-AZ database and directing reporting traffic to standby.

C. Creating a cross-Region read replica and directing reporting traffic to the replica.

D. Creating an Amazon Redshift database and directing reporting traffic to the Amazon Redshift database.

Correct Answer: A

Explanation: Amazon RDS uses a DB engine’s built-in replication capabilities to create a special type of DB instance called a read replica from a source database instance that supports MariaDB, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL Server. Reading replicas operate as DB instances that allow only read-only connections. The connections to read replicas are the same as they are to any other database instance. In Amazon RDS, all databases in a database instance are replicated.

Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_ReadRepl.html

Question 17. An organization’s website may allow users to view past performance reports, requiring a solution that can grow to fit the company’s global website requirements over time. In addition to being cost-efficient, the solution should minimize infrastructure resource provisioning and deliver the fastest reaction time possible.
Being a solutions architect which mix of technologies would you propose for satisfying these requirements?

A. Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3

B. AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB

C. Application Load Balancer & Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

D. Amazon Route 53 & internal Application Load Balancers

Correct Answer: A

Question 18. Solution architects are building hybrid applications on Cloud AWS (Amazon Web Services). On-premises data centers will be connected to Amazon Web Services using AWS Direct Link (DX). AWS and the on-premises data center must have a very durable application connection.
Which DX setup should be used to satisfy these criteria?

A. Configuring a DX connection with a VPN on top of it.

B. Configuring DX connections at multiple DX locations.

C. Configuring a DX connection using the most reliable DX partner.

D. Configuring multiple virtual interfaces on top of a DX connection.

Correct Answer: B

Question 19. A business is interested in automating the assessment of the security of its Amazon EC2 instances. Security and compliance requirements must be verified and demonstrated during the development process.
What actions will ensure that these criteria are met?

A. Using Amazon Macie for automatically discovering, classifying, and protecting the EC2 instances.

B. Using Amazon GuardDuty for publishing Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notifications.

C. Using Amazon Inspector with Amazon CloudWatch for publishing Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notifications

D. Using Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) for detecting and reacting to changes in the status of AWS Trusted Advisor checks.

Correct Answer: C

Question 20. A company operates a database on Amazon Aurora. The database is rendered inactive every night. An application that makes large reads on a database will face performance concerns after hours when user traffic surges. During peak hours, the program experiences timeout problems when reading from the database. Since the organization does not have a dedicated operations team, an automated solution must be implemented in order to address performance issues.
How can a solution architect ensure that the database will automatically adjust to the increased read loads? (Select two.)

A. Migrating the database to Aurora Serverless

B. Increasing the instance size of the Aurora database.

C. Configuring Aurora Auto Scaling with Aurora Replicas

D. Migrating the database to an Aurora multi-master cluster.

E. Migrating the database to an Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ deployment.

Correct Answer: CD

Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/Aurora.Managing.Performance.html

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