What is the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam?
The AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam is an introduction to AWS services and the intention is to examine the candidates ability to define what the AWS cloud is and its global infrastructure. It provides an overview of AWS core services security aspects, pricing and support services. The main objective is to provide an overall understanding about the Amazon Web Services Cloud platform. The course helps you get the conceptual understanding of the AWS and can help you know about the basics of AWS and cloud computing, including the services, cases and benefits.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Prep Questions and Answers
Which of the following service is most useful when a Disaster Recovery method is triggered in AWS.
A. Amazon Route 53
B. Amazon SNS
C. Amazon SQS
D. Amazon Inspector
Answer:
Show Answer
A. Route 53 is a domain name system service by AWS. When a Disaster does occur , it can be easy to switch to secondary sites using the Route53 service.
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that
computers use to connect to each other. Amazon Route 53 is fully compliant with IPv6 as well.
Which of the following disaster recovery deployment mechanisms that has the highest downtime
A. Pilot light
B. Warm standby
C. Multi Site
D. Backup and Restore
Answer:
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D. The below snapshot from the AWS Documentation shows the spectrum of the Disaster recovery methods. If you go to the further end of the spectrum you have the least time for downtime for the users. AWS Disaster Recovery Techniques
Reference: AWS Route 53/
Your company is planning to host resources in the AWS Cloud. They want to use services which can be used to decouple resources hosted on the cloud. Which of the following services can help fulfil this requirement?
A. AWS EBS Volumes
B. AWS EBS Snapshots
C. AWS Glacier
D. AWS SQS
Answer:
Show Answer
D. AWS SQS: Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly-scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between applications or microservices. It moves data between distributed application components and helps you decouple these components.
What is the availability and durability rating of S3 Standard Storage Class?
Choose the correct answer:
A. 99.999999999% Durability and 99.99% Availability
B. 99.999999999% Availability and 99.90% Durability
C. 99.999999999% Durability and 99.00% Availability
D. 99.999999999% Availability and 99.99% Durability
Answer:
Show Answer
A. 99.999999999% Durability and 99.99% Availability
S3 Standard Storage class has a rating of 99.999999999% durability (referred to as 11 nines) and 99.99% availability.
What AWS database is primarily used to analyze data using standard SQL formatting with compatibility for your existing business intelligence tools
A. Redshift
B. RDS
C. DynamoDB
D. ElastiCache
Answer:
Show Answer
A. Redshift is a database offering that is fully-managed and used for data warehousing and analytics, including compatibility with existing business intelligence tools.
Which of the following are the benefits of AWS Organizations?
Choose the 2 correct answers:
A. Analyze cost before migrating to AWS.
B. Centrally manage access polices across multiple AWS accounts.
C. Automate AWS account creation and management.
D. Provide technical help (by AWS) for issues in your AWS account.
Answer:
Show Answer
B. and C.:
CENTRALLY MANAGE POLICIES ACROSS MULTIPLE AWS ACCOUNTS
AUTOMATE AWS ACCOUNT CREATION AND MANAGEMENT
CONTROL ACCESS TO AWS SERVICES
CONSOLIDATE BILLING ACROSS MULTIPLE AWS ACCOUNTS
There is a requirement hosting a set of servers in the Cloud for a short period of 3 months. Which of the following types of instances should be chosen to be cost effective.
A. Spot Instances
B. On-Demand
C. No Upfront costs Reserved
D. Partial Upfront costs Reserved
Answer:
Show Answer
B. Since the requirement is just for 3 months, then the best cost effective option is to use On-Demand Instances.
What service helps you to aggregate logs from your EC2 instance? Choose one answer from the options below:
A. SQS
B. S3
C. Cloudtrail
D. Cloudwatch Logs
Answer:
Show Answer
D. You can use Amazon CloudWatch Logs to monitor, store, and access your log files from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, AWS CloudTrail, and other sources. You can then retrieve the associated log data from CloudWatch Log.
A company is deploying a new two-tier web application in AWS. The company wants to store their most frequently used data so that the response time for the application is improved. Which AWS service provides the solution for the company’s requirements?
A. MySQL Installed on two Amazon EC2 Instances in a single Availability Zone
B. Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ
C. Amazon ElastiCache
D. Amazon DynamoDB
Answer:
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C. Amazon ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory data store or cache in the cloud. The service improves the performance of web applications by allowing you to retrieve information from fast, managed, in-memory data stores, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases.
You have a distributed application that periodically processes large volumes of data across multiple Amazon EC2 Instances. The application is designed to recover gracefully from Amazon EC2 instance failures. You are required to accomplish this task in the most cost-effective way. Which of the following will meet
your requirements?
A. Spot Instances
B. Reserved Instances
C. Dedicated Instances
On-Demand Instances
Answer:
Show Answer
A. When you think of cost effectiveness, you can either have to choose Spot or Reserved instances. Now when you have a regular processing job, the best is to use spot instances and since your application is designed recover gracefully from Amazon EC2 instance failures, then even if you lose the Spot instance , there is no issue because your application can recover.
Which of the following features is associated with a Subnet in a VPC to protect against Incoming traffic requests?
A. AWS Inspector
B. Subnet Groups
C. Security Groups
D. NACL
Answer:
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D. A network access control list (ACL) is an optional layer of security for your VPC that acts as a firewall for controlling traffic in and out of one or more subnets. You might set up network ACLs with rules similar to your security groups in order to add an additional layer of security to your VPC.
A company is deploying a two-tier, highly available web application to AWS. Which service provides durable storage for static content while utilizing Overall CPU resources for the web tier?
A. Amazon EBC volume.
B. Amazon S3
C. Amazon EC2 instance store
D. Amazon RDS instance
Answer:
Show Answer
B. Amazon S3 is the default storage service that should be considered for companies. It provides durable storage for all static content.
What are characteristics of Amazon S3?
Choose 2 answers from the options given below.
A. S3 allows you to store objects of virtually unlimited size.
B. S3 allows you to store unlimited amounts of data.
C. S3 should be used to host relational database.
D. Objects are directly accessible via a URL.
Answer:
Show Answer
B. and D.: Each object does have a limitation in S3, but you can store virtually unlimited amounts of data. Also each object gets a directly accessible URL
When working on the costing for on-demand EC2 instances , which are the following are attributes which determine the costing of the EC2 Instance. Choose 3 answers from the options given below
A. Instance Type
B. AMI Type
C. Region
D. Edge location
Answer:
Show Answer
A. B. C. : See components making up the pricing below.
AWS AMI Pricing
Reference: AWS ec2 pricing on-demand/
You have a mission-critical application which must be globally available at all times. If this is the case, which of the below deployment mechanisms would you employ
A. Deployment to multiple edge locations
B. Deployment to multiple Availability Zones
D. Deployment to multiple Data Centers
D. Deployment to multiple Regions
Answer:
Show Answer
D. Regions represent different geographic locations and it is best to host your application across multiple regions for disaster recovery.
Which of the following are right principles when designing cloud based systems. Choose 2 answers from the options below
A. Build Tightly-coupled components
B. Build loosely-coupled components
C. Assume everything will fail
D. Use as many services as possible
Answer:
Show Answer
B. and C. Always build components which are loosely coupled. This is so that even if one component does fail, the entire system does not fail. Also if you build with the assumption that everything will fail, then you will ensure that the right measures are taken to build a highly available and fault tolerant system.
You have 2 accounts in your AWS account. One for the Dev and the other for QA. All are part of
consolidated billing. The master account has purchase 3 reserved instances. The Dev department is currently using 2 reserved instances. The QA team is planning on using 3 instances which of the same instance type. What is the pricing tier of the instances that can be used by the QA Team?
A. No Reserved and 3 on-demand
B. One Reserved and 2 on-demand
C. Two Reserved and 1 on-demand
D. Three Reserved and no on-demand
Answer:
Show Answer
B. Since all are a part of consolidating billing, the pricing of reserved instances can be shared by All. And since 2 are already used by the Dev team , another one can be used by the QA team. The rest of the instances can be on-demand instances.
Which of the following storage mechanisms can be used to store messages effectively which can be used across distributed systems?
A. Amazon Glacier
B. Amazon EBS Volumes
C. Amazon EBS Snapshots
D. Amazon SQS
Answer:
Show Answer
D. Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly-scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between applications or microservices. It moves data between distributed application components and helps you decouple these components.
You are exploring what services AWS has off-hand. You have a large number of data sets that need to be processed. Which of the following services can help fulfil this requirement.
A. EMR
B. S3
C. Glacier
D. Storage Gateway
Answer:
Show Answer
A. Amazon EMR helps you analyze and process vast amounts of data by distributing the computational work across a cluster of virtual servers running in the AWS Cloud. The cluster is managed using an open-source framework called Hadoop. Amazon EMR lets you focus on crunching or analyzing your data without having to worry about time-consuming setup, management, and tuning of Hadoop clusters or the compute capacity they rely on.
Which of the following services allows you to analyze EC2 Instances against pre-defined security templates to check for vulnerabilities
A. AWS Trusted Advisor
B. AWS Inspector
C. AWS WAF
D. AWS Shield
Answer:
Show Answer
B. Amazon Inspector enables you to analyze the behaviour of your AWS resources and helps you to identify potential security issues. Using Amazon Inspector, you can define a collection of AWS resources that you want to include in an assessment target. You can then create an assessment template and launch a security
assessment run of this target.
Your company is planning to offload some of the batch processing workloads on to AWS. These jobs can be interrupted and resumed at any time. Which of the following instance types would be the most cost effective to use for this purpose.
A. On-Demand
B. Spot
C. Full Upfront Reserved
D. Partial Upfront Reserved
Answer:
Show Answer
B. Spot Instances are a cost-effective choice if you can be flexible about when your applications run and if your applications can be interrupted. For example, Spot Instances are well-suited for data analysis, batch jobs, background processing, and optional tasks
Which of the below cannot be used to get data onto Amazon Glacier.
A. AWS Glacier API
B. AWS Console
C. AWS Glacier SDK
D. AWS S3 Lifecycle policies
Answer:
Show Answer
B. Note that the AWS Console cannot be used to upload data onto Glacier. The console can only be used to create a Glacier vault which can be used to upload the data.
Which of the following from AWS can be used to transfer petabytes of data from on-premise locations to the AWS Cloud.
A. AWS Import/Export
B. AWS EC2
C. AWS Snowball
D. AWS Transfer
Answer:
Show Answer
C. Snowball is a petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses secure appliances to transfer large amounts of data& into and out of the AWS cloud. Using Snowball addresses common challenges with large-scale data transfers including high network costs, long transfer times, and security concerns. Transferring data with Snowball is simple, fast, secure, and can be as little as one-fifth the cost of high-speed Internet.
Which of the following services allows you to analyze EC2 Instances against pre-defined security templates to check for vulnerabilities
A. AWS Trusted Advisor
B. AWS Inspector
C. AWS WAF
D. AWS Shield
Answer:
Show Answer
B. Amazon Inspector enables you to analyze the behavior of your AWS resources and helps you to identify potential security issues. Using Amazon Inspector, you can define a collection of AWS resources that you want to include in an assessment target. You can then create an assessment template and launch a security
assessment run of this target.
Your company wants to move an existing Oracle database to the AWS Cloud. Which of the following services can help facilitate this move.
A. AWS Database Migration Service
B. AWS VM Migration Service
C. AWS Inspector
D. AWS Trusted Advisor
Answer:
Show Answer
A. AWS Database Migration Service helps you migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. The source database remains fully operational during the migration, minimizing downtime to applications that rely on the database. The AWS Database Migration Service can migrate your data to and from most widely used commercial and open source databases.
Which of the following features of AWS RDS allows for offloading reads of the database.
A. Cross region replication
B. Creating Read Replica’s
C. Using snapshots
D. Using Multi-AZ feature
Answer:
Show Answer
B. You can reduce the load on your source DB Instance by routing read queries from your applications to the read replica. Read replicas allow you to elastically scale out beyond the capacity constraints of a single DB instance for read-heavy database workloads.
Which of the following does AWS perform on its behalf for EBS volumes to make it less prone to failure?
A. Replication of the volume across Availability Zones
B. Replication of the volume in the same Availability Zone
C. Replication of the volume across Regions
D. Replication of the volume across Edge locations
Answer:
Show Answer
B. When you create an EBS volume in an Availability Zone, it is automatically replicated within that zone to prevent data loss due to failure of any single hardware component
Your company is planning to host a large ecommerce application on the AWS Cloud. One of their major concerns is Internet attacks such as DDos attacks. Which of the following services can help mitigate this concern. Choose 2 answers from the options given below
A. A. Cloudfront
B. AWS Shield
C. C. AWS EC2
D. AWS Config
Answer:
Show Answer
A. and B. : One of the first techniques to mitigate DDoS attacks is to minimize the surface area that can be attacked thereby limiting the options for attackers and allowing you to build protections in a single place. We want to ensure that we do not expose our application or resources to ports, protocols or applications from where they do not expect any communication. Thus, minimizing the possible points of attack and letting us concentrate our mitigation efforts. In some cases, you can do this by placing your computation resources behind Content Distribution
Networks (CDNs), Load Balancers and restricting direct Internet traffic to certain parts of your infrastructure
like your database servers. In other cases, you can use firewalls or Access Control Lists (ACLs) to control what traffic reaches your applications.
Which of the following are 2 ways that AWS allows to link accounts
A. Consolidating billing
B. AWS Organizations
C. Cost Explorer
D. IAM
Answer:
Show Answer
A. and B. : You can use the consolidated billing feature in AWS Organizations to consolidate payment for multiple AWS accounts or multiple AISPL accounts. With consolidated billing, you can see a combined view of AWS charges incurred by all of your accounts. You also can get a cost report for each member account that is associated with your master account. Consolidated billing is offered at no additional charge.
Which of the following helps in DDos protection. Choose 2 answers from the options given below
A. Cloudfront
B. AWS Shield
C. AWS EC2
D. AWS Config
Answer:
Show Answer
A. and B. : One of the first techniques to mitigate DDoS attacks is to minimize the surface area that can be attacked thereby limiting the options for attackers and allowing you to build protections in a single place. We want to ensure that we do not expose our application or resources to ports, protocols or applications from where they do not expect any communication. Thus, minimizing the possible points of attack and letting us concentrate our mitigation efforts. In some cases, you can do this by placing your computation resources behind; Content Distribution Networks (CDNs), Load Balancers and restricting direct Internet traffic to certain parts of your infrastructure like your database servers. In other cases, you can use firewalls or Access Control Lists (ACLs) to control what traffic reaches your applications.
A company wants to host a self-managed database in AWS. How would you ideally implement this solution?
A. Using the AWS DynamoDB service
B. Using the AWS RDS service
C. Hosting a database on an EC2 Instance
D. Using the Amazon Aurora service
Answer:
Show Answer
C. If you want a self-managed database, that means you want complete control over the database engine and the underlying infrastructure. In such a case you need to host the database on an EC2 Instance
There is a requirement to host a database server for a minimum period of one year. Which of the following would result in the least cost?
A. Spot Instances
B. On-Demand
C. No Upfront costs Reserved
D. Partial Upfront costs Reserved
Answer:
Show Answer
D. : If the database is going to be used for a minimum of one year at least , then it is better to get Reserved Instances. You can save on costs , and if you use a partial upfront options , you can get a better discount
which of the below can be used to import data into Amazon Glacier?
Choose 3 answers from the options given below:
A. AWS Glacier API
B. AWS Console
C. AWS Glacier SDK
D. AWS S3 Lifecycle policies
Answer:
Show Answer
A. C. and D. : The AWS Console cannot be used to upload data onto Glacier. The console can only be used to create a Glacier vault which can be used to upload the data.
Which of the following can be used to secure EC2 Instances hosted in AWS. Choose 2 answers
A. Usage of Security Groups
B. Usage of AMI’s
C. Usage of Network Access Control Lists
D. Usage of the Internet gateway
Answer:
Show Answer
A and C: Security groups acts as a virtual firewall for your instance to control inbound and outbound traffic. Network access control list (ACL) is an optional layer of security for your VPC that acts as a firewall for
controlling traffic in and out of one or more subnets.
You plan to deploy an application on AWS. This application needs to be PCI Compliant. Which of the below steps are needed to ensure the compliance? Choose 2 answers from the below list:
A. Chhose AWS services which are PCI Compliant
B. Ensure the right steps are taken during application development for PCI Compliance
C. Encure the AWS Services are made PCI Compliant
D. Do an audit after the deployment of the application for PCI Compliance.
Question: Which of the following is a factor when calculating Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the AWS Cloud?
A. The number of servers migrated to AWS
B. The number of users migrated to AWS
C. The number of passwords migrated to AWS
D. The number of keys migrated to AWS
Answer: Show Answer
A. Running servers will incur costs. The number of running servers is one factor of Server Costs; a key component of AWS's Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Reference: AWS cost calculator
Which AWS Services can be used to store files? Choose 2 answers from the options given below:
A. Amazon CloudWatch
B. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
C. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
D. AWS COnfig
D. AWS Amazon Athena
Answer:
Show Answer
B. and C. Amazon S3 is a Object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. Amazon Elastic Block Store is a Persistent block storage for Amazon EC2.
Question: What best describes Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
Choose the correct answer:
A. AWS is the cloud.
B. AWS only provides compute and storage services.
C. AWS is a cloud services provider.
D. None of the above.
Answer:
Show Answer
C: AWS is defined as a cloud services provider. They provide hundreds of services of which compute and storage are included (not not limited to).
Reference: AWS
Question: Which AWS service can be used as a global content delivery network (CDN) service?
A. Amazon SES
B. Amazon CouldTrail
C. Amazon CloudFront
D. Amazon S3
Answer: Show Answer
C: Amazon CloudFront is a web service that gives businesses and web application developers an easy
and cost effective way to distribute content with low latency and high data transfer speeds. Like other AWS services, Amazon CloudFront is a self-service, pay-per-use offering, requiring no long term commitments or minimum fees. With CloudFront, your files are delivered to end-users using a global network of edge locations.Reference: AWS cloudfront
What best describes the concept of fault tolerance?
Choose the correct answer:
A. The ability for a system to withstand a certain amount of failure and still remain functional.
B. The ability for a system to grow in size, capacity, and/or scope.
C. The ability for a system to be accessible when you attempt to access it.
D. The ability for a system to grow and shrink based on demand.
Answer:
Show Answer
A: Fault tolerance describes the concept of a system (in our case a web application) to have failure in some of its components and still remain accessible (highly available). Fault tolerant web applications will have at least two web servers (in case one fails).
Question: The firm you work for is considering migrating to AWS. They are concerned about cost and the initial investment needed. Which of the following features of AWS pricing helps lower the initial investment amount needed? Choose 2 answers from the options given below:
A. The ability to choose the lowest cost vendor.
B. The ability to pay as you go
C. No upfront costs
D. Discounts for upfront payments
Answer: Show Answer
B and C: The best features of moving to the AWS Cloud is: No upfront cost and The ability to pay as you go where the customer only pays for the resources needed. Reference: AWS pricing
Question: Your company has
started using AWS. Your IT Security team is concerned with the
security of hosting resources in the Cloud. Which AWS service provides security optimization recommendations that could help the IT Security team secure resources using AWS?
A. AWS API Gateway
B. Reserved Instances
C. AWS Trusted Advisor
D. AWS Spot Instances
Answer: Show Answer
C: An online resource to help you reduce cost, increase performance, and improve security by optimizing your AWS environment, Trusted Advisor provides real time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices. Reference: AWS trusted advisor
What is the relationship between AWS global infrastructure and the concept of high availability?
Choose the correct answer:
A. AWS is centrally located in one location and is subject to widespread outages if something happens at that one location.
B. AWS regions and Availability Zones allow for redundant architecture to be placed in isolated parts of the world.
C. Each AWS region handles a different AWS services, and you must use all regions to fully use AWS.
D. None of the above
Answer
Show Answer
B: As an AWS user, you can create your applications infrastructure and duplicate it. By placing duplicate infrastructure in multiple regions, high availability is created because if one region fails you have a backup (in a another region) to use.
Question: You are hosting a number of EC2 Instances on AWS. You are looking to monitor CPU Utilization on the Instance. Which service would you use to collect and track performance metrics for AWS services?
C: Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS. You can use Amazon CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, set alarms, and automatically react to changes in your AWS resources. Reference: AWS cloudwatch/
Question: Which of the following support plans give access to all the checks in the Trusted Advisor service. Choose 2 answers from the options given below:
Question: Which of the following in AWS maps to a separate geographic location?
A. AWS Region
B. AWS Data Centers
C. AWS Availability Zone
Answer:Show Answer
A: Amazon cloud computing resources are hosted in multiple locations world-wide. These locations are composed of AWS Regions and Availability Zones. Each AWS Region is a separate geographic area. Reference: AWS Regions And Availability Zone
A. The ability for a system to grow and shrink based on demand.
B. The ability for a system to grow in size, capacity, and/or scope.
C. The ability for a system be be accessible when you attempt to access it.
D. The ability for a system to withstand a certain amount of failure and still remain functional.
Answer
Show Answer
B: Scalability refers to the concept of a system being able to easily (and cost-effectively) scale UP. For web applications, this means the ability to easily add server capacity when demand requires.
Question: If you wanted to monitor all events in your AWS account, which of the below services would you use?
A. AWS CloudWatch
B. AWS CloudWatch logs
C. AWS Config
D. AWS CloudTrail
Answer: Show Answer
D: AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk
auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. This event history simplifies security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting. Reference: Cloudtrail
What are the four primary benefits of using the cloud/AWS?
Choose the correct answer:
A. Fault tolerance, scalability, elasticity, and high availability.
B. Elasticity, scalability, easy access, limited storage.
C. Fault tolerance, scalability, sometimes available, unlimited storage
D. Unlimited storage, limited compute capacity, fault tolerance, and high availability.
Answer:
Show Answer
A: Fault tolerance, scalability, elasticity, and high availability are the four primary benefits of AWS/the cloud.
What best describes a simplified definition of the "cloud"?
Choose the correct answer:
A. All the computers in your local home network.
B. Your internet service provider
C. A computer located somewhere else that you are utilizing in some capacity.
D. An on-premisis data center that your company owns.
Answer
Show Answer
D: The simplest definition of the cloud is a computer that is located somewhere else that you are utilizing in some capacity. AWS is a cloud services provider, as the provide access to computers they own (located at AWS data centers), that you use for various purposes.
Question: Your development team is planning to host a development environment on the cloud. This consists of EC2 and RDS instances. This environment will probably only be required for 2 months. Which types of instances would you use for this purpose?
A. On-Demand
B. Spot
C. Reserved
D. Dedicated
Answer:Show Answer
A: The best and cost effective option would be to use On-Demand Instances. The AWS documentation gives the following additional information on On-Demand EC2 Instances. With On-Demand instances you only pay for
EC2 instances you use. The use of On-Demand instances frees you from the costs and complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware and transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs. Reference: AWS ec2 pricing on-demand
Question: Which of the following can be used to secure EC2 Instances?
A. Security Groups
B. EC2 Lists
C. AWS Configs
D. AWS CloudWatch
Answer:Show Answer
A: security group< acts as a virtual firewall for your instance to control inbound and outbound traffic. When you launch an instance in a VPC, you can assign up to five security groups to the instance. Security groups act at the instance level, not the subnet level. Therefore, each instance in a subnet in your VPC could be assigned to a different set of security groups. If you don't specify a particular group at launch time, the instance is automatically assigned to the default security group for the VPC. Reference: VPC Security Groups
Exam Topics:
The AWS Cloud Practitioner exam is broken down into 4 domains
Cloud Concepts
Security
Technology
Billing and Pricing.
What is the purpose of a DNS server?
Choose the correct answer:
A. To act as an internet search engine.
B. To protect you from hacking attacks.
C. To convert common language domain names to IP addresses.
D. To serve web application content.
Answer:
Show Answer
C: Domain name system servers act as a "third party" that provides the service of converting common language domain names to IP addresses (which are required for a web browser to properly make a request for web content).
What best describes the concept of high availability?
Choose the correct answer:
A. The ability for a system to grow in size, capacity, and/or scope.
B. The ability for a system to withstand a certain amount of failure and still remain functional.
C. The ability for a system to grow and shrink based on demand.
D. The ability for a system to be accessible when you attempt to access it.
Answer:
Show Answer
D: High availability refers to the concept that something will be accessible when you try to access it. An object or web application is "highly available" when it is accessible a vast majority of the time.
What is the major difference between AWS's RDS and DynamoDB database services?
Choose the correct answer:
A. RDS offers NoSQL database options, and DynamoDB offers SQL database options.
B. RDS offers one SQL database option, and DynamoDB offers many NoSQL database options.
C. RDS offers SQL database options, and DynamoDB offers a NoSQL database option.
D. None of the above
Answer:
Show Answer
C. RDS is a SQL database service (that offers several database engine options), and DynamoDB is a NoSQL database option that only offers one NoSQL engine.
Reference:
What are two open source in-memory engines supported by ElastiCache?
If you want to have SMS or email notifications sent to various members of your department with status updates on resources in your AWS account, what service should you choose?
Choose the correct answer:
A. SNS
B. GetSMS
C. RDS
D. STS
Answer:
Show Answer
A. Simple Notification Service (SNS) is what publishes messages to SMS and/or email endpoints.
2026 AWS Certification Trends & Insights from r/AWSCertifications
As the cloud landscape continues to evolve, staying updated with real-world experiences from recent test-takers is invaluable. We scoured the r/AWSCertifications community over the past two months to bring you the latest trends, study advice, and testimonials from candidates who recently passed their exams in 2026.
Top Recommended Study Resources
Tutorials Dojo: Widely considered the "gold standard" for practice exams. Users emphasize that these are frequently updated and provide the most accurate representation of the real exam's difficulty. Purchasing directly from their website is recommended for the fastest updates.
Stephane Maarek (Udemy): His video courses remain a top recommendation for structured, foundational learning. Many candidates use his videos to grasp core concepts before moving on to practice exams.
Neal Davis & Official AWS Resources: Neal Davis is frequently cited for high-quality practice exams, while candidates are also advised to use the official AWS exam guide and sample tests to identify in-scope services.
Proven Strategies for Exam Success
Practice Exams are Key: Memorizing answers won't cut it. Aim to achieve consistent scores above 80% across multiple timed practice exams to build intuition.
Focus on Pattern Recognition: Modern AWS exams test your ability to understand how services fit together. Focus on understanding the "why" and "when" to use specific services rather than memorizing every minor detail.
Time Management: Especially for Professional-level exams, time management is critical. Don't get stuck on a single question; flag it, make your best guess, and move on.
Expect Difficulty: It is extremely common to feel like you are failing during the actual exam, even if you are well-prepared. The real exam phrasing can be ambiguous or seemingly more difficult than practice tests.
Latest 2026 Advice & Testimonials
Many recent test-takers are now successfully using AI to explain complex scenarios or clarify specific service details they find difficult. Additionally, candidates stress the importance of active learning—creating your own study aids like Anki decks for key services. Finally, a common tip is to not wait until you feel 100% ready; setting an exam date provides the necessary pressure to maintain a consistent study schedule.
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Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
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AWS AMI Pricing
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