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The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate  average salary is  $149,446/year

In this blog, we will help you prepare for the AWS Solution Architect Associate Certification Exam, give you some  facts and summaries, provide AWS Solution Architect Associate Top  Questions and Answers Dump

How long to study for the AWS Solutions Architect exam?

AWS Certified Solutions Architects are IT professionals who design cloud solutions with AWS services to meet given technical requirements. An AWS Solutions Architect Associate is expected to design and implement distributed systems on AWS that are high-performing, scalable, secure and cost optimized.

How hard is the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam?

The AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam is an associate-level exam that requires a solid understanding of the AWS platform and a broad range of AWS services. The AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam questions are scenario-based questions and can be challenging. Despite this, the AWS Solutions Architect Associate is often earned by beginners to cloud computing.

The popular AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam  have its new version this  August 2022.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) Exam Guide

AWS solutions architect associate exam prep facts and summaries questions and answers dump – Solution Architecture Definition 1:

Solution architecture is a practice of defining and describing an architecture of a system delivered in context of a specific solution and as such it may encompass description of an entire system or only its specific parts. Definition of a solution architecture is typically led by a solution architect.

AWS solutions architect associate exam prep facts and summaries questions and answers dump – Solution Architecture  Definition 2:

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate examination is intended for individuals who perform a solutions architect role and have one or more years of hands-on experience designing available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, and scalable distributed systems on AWS.

AWS solutions architect associate exam prep facts and summaries questions and answers dump – AWS Solution Architect Associate Exam Facts and Summaries (SAA-C03)

1. Take an AWS Training Class
2. Study AWS Whitepapers and FAQs: AWS Well-Architected webpage (various whitepapers linked)
3. If you are running an application in a production environment and must add a new EBS volume with data from a snapshot, what could you do to avoid degraded performance during the volume’s first use?
   Initialize the data by reading each storage block on the volume.
   Volumes created from an EBS snapshot must be initialized. Initializing occurs the first time a storage block on the volume is read, and the performance impact can be impacted by up to 50%. You can avoid this impact in production environments by pre-warming the volume by reading all of the blocks.
4. If you are running a legacy application that has hard-coded static IP addresses and it is running on an EC2 instance; what is the best failover solution that allows you to keep the same IP address on a new instance?
   Elastic IP addresses (EIPs) are designed to be attached/detached and moved from one EC2 instance to another. They are a great solution for keeping a static IP address and moving it to a new instance if the current instance fails. This will reduce or eliminate any downtime uses may experience.
5. Which feature of Intel processors help to encrypt data without significant impact on performance?
   AES-NI
6. You can mount to EFS from which two of the following?
   • On-prem servers running Linux
   • EC2 instances running Linux

   EFS is not compatible with Windows operating systems.

7. When a file(s) is encrypted and the stored data is not in transit it’s known as encryption at rest. What is an example of encryption at rest? 

8. When would vertical scaling be necessary? When an application is built entirely into one source code, otherwise known as a monolithic application.

9. Fault-Tolerance allows for continuous operation throughout a failure, which can lead to a low Recovery Time Objective.  RPO vs RTO

10. High-Availability means automating tasks so that an instance will quickly recover, which can lead to a low Recovery Time Objective.  RPO vs. RTO
11. Frequent backups reduce the time between the last backup and recovery point, otherwise known as the Recovery Point Objective.  RPO vs. RTO
12. Which represents the difference between Fault-Tolerance and High-Availability? High-Availability means the system will quickly recover from a failure event, and Fault-Tolerance means the system will maintain operations during a failure.
13. From a security perspective, what is a principal? An anonymous user falls under the definition of a principal. A principal can be an anonymous user acting on a system.

    An authenticated user falls under the definition of a principal. A principal can be an authenticated user acting on a system.

14. What are two types of session data saving for an Application Session State? Stateless and Stateful

23. It is the customer’s responsibility to patch the operating system on an EC2 instance.

24. In designing an environment, what four main points should a Solutions Architect keep in mind? Cost-efficient, secure, application session state, undifferentiated heavy lifting: These four main points should be the framework when designing an environment.

26. What are the benefits of horizontal scaling?

Vertical scaling can be costly while horizontal scaling is cheaper.

Horizontal scaling suffers from none of the size limitations of vertical scaling.

Having horizontal scaling means you can easily route traffic to another instance of a server.

Top
Reference: AWS Solution Architect Associate Exam Prep

Top 100 AWS solutions architect associate exam prep facts and summaries questions and answers dump – SAA-C03

A company is developing a highly available web application using stateless web servers. Which services are suitable for storing session state data? (Select TWO.)

• A. CloudWatch
• B. DynamoDB
• C. Elastic Load Balancing
• D. ElastiCache
• E. Storage Gateway

Reference: AWS Session management

Reference: Amazon EBS Performance Tips

Answer: D ( Get the  SAA-C03 Exam Prep for More:  iOS – Android – Windows  )
VPC endpoints for Amazon S3 provide secure connections to S3 buckets that do not require a gateway or NAT instances. NAT Gateways and Internet Gateways still route traffic over the Internet to the public endpoint for Amazon S3. There is no way to connect to Amazon S3 via VPN.

Reference: S3 VPC Endpoints

Answer: ( Get the SAA-C03 Exam Prep for More:  iOS – Android – Windows  )
A security group can grant access to traffic from the allowed networks via the CIDR range for each network. VPC peering and VPN are connectivity services and cannot control traffic for security. Amazon Redshift user accounts address authentication and authorization at the user level and have no control over network traffic.

Reference: AWS Security best practice

Answer: C ( Get the SAA-C02 / SAA-C03 Exam Prep for More:  iOS – Android – Windows  )
A single EC2 instance will not scale and is a single point of failure in the architecture. A much better solution would be to have EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group across 2 availability zones read messages from the queue. The other responses are all managed services that can be configured to scale or will scale automatically.

Reference: Eliminating Single Points of Failures on AWS Cloud

• Single NAT Instance in Network
• Running all Workloads in single AZ Compute/Storage
• Single DNS and other DNS Issues in Network
• Not setting up for Auto-Scale Core Services
• AWS Load Balancer – Cross Network
• AWS RDS within single AZ Database
• Manual Scale
• How to Remove Single Points of Failure by Using a High-Availability Partition Group in Your AWS CloudHSM Environment

Answer: ( Get the SAA-C02 / SAA-C03 Exam Prep for More:  iOS – Android – Windows  )
Amazon Aurora is a relational database that will automatically scale to accommodate data growth. Amazon Redshift does not support read replicas and will not automatically scale. DynamoDB is a NoSQL service, not a relational database. Amazon S3 is object storage, not a relational database.

Reference: Replication with Amazon Aurora

Answer: B ( Get the  SAA-C03 Exam Prep for More:  iOS – Android – Windows  )
Amazon EFS now allows you to instantly provision the throughput required for your applications independent of the amount of data stored in your file system. This allows you to optimize throughput for your application’s performance needs.

Reference: Amazon EFS Performance

Answer:  ( Get the SAA-C02 / SAA-C03 Exam Prep for More:  iOS – Android – Windows  )
Placement groups are a clustering of EC2 instances in one Availability Zone with fast (up to 25Gbps) connections between them. This feature is used for applications that need extremely low-latency connections between instances.

Reference: Placement Groups

Answer: C.
The online application must be in public subnets to allow access from clients’ browsers. The database cluster must be in private subnets to meet the requirement that there be no access from the Internet.
A NAT Gateway is required to give the database cluster the ability to download patches from the Internet. NAT Gateways must be deployed in public subnets.

Reference: Public and Private Subnets

Answer: ( Get the SAA-C02 / SAA-C03 Exam Prep for More:  iOS – Android – Windows  )
Retrieve Instance User Data
To retrieve user data from within a running instance, use the following URI:
http://169.254.169.254/latest/user-data

Reference: Instance Metadata and User Data

Q10: A company is developing a highly available web application using stateless web servers. Which services are suitable for storing session state data? (Select TWO.)

• A. CloudWatch
• B. DynamoDB
• C. Elastic Load Balancing
• D. ElastiCache
• E. Storage Gateway

Answer: B. and D. ( Get the SAA-C02 / SAA-C03 Exam Prep for More:  iOS – Android – Windows  )
Both DynamoDB and ElastiCache provide high performance storage of key-value pairs.
CloudWatch and ELB are not storage services. Storage Gateway is a storage service, but it is a hybrid Storage service that enables on-premises applications to use cloud storage.

A stateful web service will keep track of the “state” of a client’s connection and data over several requests. So for example, the client might login, select a users account data, update their address, attach a photo, and change the status flag, then disconnect.

In a stateless web service, the server doesn’t keep any information from one request to the next. The client needs to do it’s work in a series of simple transactions, and the client has to keep track of what happens between requests. So in the above example, the client needs to do each operation separately: connect and update the address, disconnect. Connect and attach the photo, disconnect. Connect and change the status flag, disconnect.

A stateless web service is much simpler to implement, and can handle greater volume of clients.

Reference: Stateful & Stateless web service

Answer: ( Get the SAA-C02 / SAA-C03 Exam Prep for More:  iOS – Android – Windows  )

An anonymous user falls under the definition of a principal. A principal can be an anonymous user acting on a system.  An authenticated user falls under the definition of a principal. A principal can be an authenticated user acting on a system.

Reference: Access management

Answer: B. D. and E. ( Get the SAA-C02 / SAA-C03 Exam Prep for More:  iOS – Android – Windows  )

In a tiered application, the presentation layer is separate from the logic layer; the logic layer is separate from the data layer. Since parts of the application are isolated, they can scale horizontally.

Reference: Tiered Application

B. By purchasing more resources very far in advance

C. By purchasing more resources after demand has risen

D. It is not possible to predict demand

Answer: ( Get the SAA-C02 / SAA-C03 Exam Prep for More:  iOS – Android – Windows  )

Reference: AWS Horizontal Scaling

Q15: Select the true statements regarding AWS Regions.

A. Availability Zones are isolated locations within regions

B. Region codes identify specific regions (example: US-EAST-2)

C. All AWS Regions contain the full set of AWS services.

D. An AWS Region is assigned based on the user’s location when creating an AWS account.

Q17: You lead a team to develop a new online game application in AWS EC2. The application will have a large number of users globally. For a great user experience, this application requires very low network latency and jitter. If the network speed is not fast enough, you will lose customers. Which tool would you choose to improve the application performance? (Select TWO.)

A. AWS VPN

B. AWS Global Accelerator

C. Direct Connect

D. API Gateway

E. CloudFront

Q18: A company has a media processing application deployed in a local data center.  Its file storage is built on a Microsoft Windows file server. The application and file server need to be migrated to AWS. You want to quickly set up the file server in AWS and the application code should continue working to access the file systems. Which method should you choose to create the file server?

A. Create a Windows File Server from Amazon WorkSpaces.

B. Configure a high performance Windows File System in Amazon EFS.

C. Create a Windows File Server in Amazon FSx.

D. Configure a secure enterprise storage through Amazon WorkDocs.

Q19: You are developing an application using AWS SDK to get objects from AWS S3. The objects have big sizes and sometimes there are failures when getting objects especially when the network connectivity is poor. You want to get a specific range of bytes in a single GET request and retrieve the whole object in parts. Which method can achieve this?

A. Enable multipart upload in the AWS SDK.

B. Use the “Range” HTTP header in a GET request to download the specified range bytes of an object.

C. Reduce the retry requests and enlarge the retry timeouts through AWS SDK when fetching S3 objects.

D. Retrieve the whole S3 object through a single GET operation.

Q20: You have an application hosted in an Auto Scaling group and an application load balancer distributes traffic to the ASG. You want to add a scaling policy that keeps the average aggregate CPU utilization of the Auto Scaling group to be 60 percent. The capacity of the Auto Scaling group should increase or decrease based on this target value. Which scaling policy does it belong to?

A. Target tracking scaling policy.

B. Step scaling policy.

C. Simple scaling policy.

D. Scheduled scaling policy.

Q21: You need to launch a number of EC2 instances to run Cassandra. There are large distributed and replicated workloads in Cassandra and you plan to launch instances using EC2 placement groups. The traffic should be distributed evenly across several partitions and each partition should contain multiple instances. Which strategy would you use when launching the placement groups?

A. Cluster placement strategy

B. Spread placement strategy.

C. Partition placement strategy.

D. Network placement strategy.

Q22: To improve the network performance, you launch a C5 EC2 Amazon Linux instance and enable enhanced networking by modifying the instance attribute with “aws ec2 modify-instance-attribute –instance-id instance_id –ena-support”. Which mechanism does the EC2 instance use to enhance the networking capabilities?

A. Intel 82599 Virtual Function (VF) interface.

B. Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA).

C. Elastic Network Adapter (ENA).

D. Elastic Network Interface (ENI).

Q23: You work for an online retailer where any downtime at all can cause a significant loss of revenue. You have architected your application to be deployed on an Auto Scaling Group of EC2 instances behind a load balancer. You have configured and deployed these resources using a CloudFormation template. The Auto Scaling Group is configured with default settings, and a simple CPU utilization scaling policy. You have also set up multiple Availability Zones for high availability. The Load Balancer does health checks against an html file generated by script. When you begin performing load testing on your application and notice in CloudWatch that the load balancer is not sending traffic to one of your EC2 instances. What could be the problem?

A. The EC2 instance has failed the load balancer health check.

B. The instance has not been registered with CloudWatch.

C. The EC2 instance has failed EC2 status checks.

D. You are load testing at a moderate traffic level and not all instances are needed.

Q24: Your company is using a hybrid configuration because there are some legacy applications which are not easily converted and migrated to AWS. And with this configuration comes a typical scenario where the legacy apps must maintain the same private IP address and MAC address. You are attempting to convert the application to the cloud and have configured an EC2 instance to house the application. What you are currently testing is removing the ENI from the legacy instance and attaching it to the EC2 instance. You want to attempt a cold attach. What does this mean?

A. Attach ENI when it’s stopped.

B. Attach ENI before the public IP address is assigned.

C. Attach ENI to an instance when it’s running.

D. Attach ENI when the instance is being launched.

Q25: Your company has recently converted to a hybrid cloud environment and will slowly be migrating to a fully AWS cloud environment. The AWS side is in need of some steps to prepare for disaster recovery. A disaster recovery plan needs drawn up and disaster recovery drills need to be performed for compliance reasons. The company wants to establish Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives. The RTO and RPO can be pretty relaxed. The main point is to have a plan in place, with as much cost savings as possible. Which AWS disaster recovery pattern will best meet these requirements?

A. Warm Standby

B. Backup and restore

C. Multi Site

D. Pilot Light

Q26: An international travel company has an application which provides travel information and alerts to users all over the world. The application is hosted on groups of EC2 instances in Auto Scaling Groups in multiple AWS Regions. There are also load balancers routing traffic to these instances. In two countries, Ireland and Australia, there are compliance rules in place that dictate users connect to the application in eu-west-1 and ap-southeast-1. Which service can you use to meet this requirement?

A. Use Route 53 weighted routing.

B. Use Route 53 geolocation routing.

C. Configure CloudFront and the users will be routed to the nearest edge location.

D. Configure the load balancers to route users to the proper region.

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Q26: You have taken over management of several instances in the company AWS environment. You want to quickly review scripts used to bootstrap the instances at runtime. A URL command can be used to do this. What can you append to the URL http://169.254.169.254/latest/ to retrieve this data?

A. user-data/

B. instance-demographic-data/

C. meta-data/

D. instance-data/

Q27: A software company has created an application to capture service requests from users and also enhancement requests. The application is deployed on an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances fronted by an Application Load Balancer. The Auto Scaling group has scaled to maximum capacity, but there are still requests being lost. The cost of these instances is becoming an issue. What step can the company take to ensure requests aren’t lost?

A. Use larger instances in the Auto Scaling group.

B. Use spot instances to save money.

C. Use an SQS queue with the Auto Scaling group to capture all requests.

D. Use a Network Load Balancer instead for faster throughput.

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Q28: A company has an auto scaling group of EC2 instances hosting their retail sales application. Any significant downtime for this application can result in large losses of profit. Therefore the architecture also includes an Application Load Balancer and an RDS database in a Multi-AZ deployment. The company has a very aggressive Recovery Time Objective (RTO) in case of disaster. How long will a failover typically complete?

A. Under 10 minutes

B. Within an hour

C. Almost instantly

D. one to two minutes

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Q29: You have two EC2 instances running in the same VPC, but in different subnets. You are removing the secondary ENI from an EC2 instance and attaching it to another EC2 instance. You want this to be fast and with limited disruption. So you want to attach the ENI to the EC2 instance when it’s running. What is this called?

A. hot attach

B. warm attach

C. cold attach

D. synchronous attach

Q30: You suspect that one of the AWS services your company is using has gone down. How can you check on the status of this service?

A. AWS Trusted Advisor

B. Amazon Inspector

C. AWS Personal Health Dashboard

D. AWS Organizations

Q31: You have configured an Auto Scaling Group of EC2 instances fronted by an Application Load Balancer and backed by an RDS database. You want to begin monitoring the EC2 instances using CloudWatch metrics. Which metric is not readily available out of the box?

A. CPU utilization

B. DiskReadOps

C. NetworkIn

D. Memory utilization

Q32: Several instances you are creating have a specific data requirement. The requirement states that the data on the root device needs to persist independently from the lifetime of the instance. After considering AWS storage options, which is the simplest way to meet these requirements?

A. Store your root device data on Amazon EBS.

B. Store the data on the local instance store.

C. Create a cron job to migrate the data to S3.

D. Send the data to S3 using S3 lifecycle rules.

Q33: A company has an Auto Scaling Group of EC2 instances hosting their retail sales application. Any significant downtime for this application can result in large losses of profit. Therefore the architecture also includes an Application Load Balancer and an RDS database in a Multi-AZ deployment. What will happen to preserve high availability if the primary database fails?

A. A Lambda function kicks off a CloudFormation template to deploy a backup database.

B. The CNAME is switched from the primary db instance to the secondary.

C. Route 53 points the CNAME to the secondary database instance.

D. The Elastic IP address for the primary database is moved to the secondary database.

Get 2022-2023 AWS Solutions Architect Associates SAA-C03 Certification Exam Prep eBook or PDF  or  Print Book on Amazon

Get 2022-2023 AWS Solutions Architect Associates SAA-C03 Certification Exam Prep eBook or PDF  or  Print Book on Amazon

Get 2022-2023 AWS Solutions Architect Associates SAA-C03 Certification Exam Prep eBook or PDF  or  Print Book on Amazon

Get the 2022-2023 AWS Solutions Architect Associates SAA-C03 Certification Exam Prep eBook or PDF  or  Print Book on Amazon

Get the 2022-2023 AWS Solutions Architect Associates SAA-C03 Certification Exam Prep eBook or PDF  or  Print Book on Amazon

Get the 2022-2023 AWS Solutions Architect Associates SAA-C03 Certification Exam Prep eBook or PDF  or  Print Book on Amazon

Q44: A data company has implemented a subscription service for storing video files. There are two levels of subscription: personal and professional use. The personal users can upload a total of 5 GB of data, and professional users can upload as much as 5 TB of data. The application can upload files of size up to 1 TB to an S3 Bucket. What is the best way to upload files of this size?

A. Multipart upload

B. Single-part Upload

C. AWS Snowball

D. AWS SnowMobile

Get the 2022-2023 AWS Solutions Architect Associates SAA-C03 Certification Exam Prep eBook or PDF  or  Print Book on Amazon

Q45: You have multiple EC2 instances housing applications in a VPC in a single Availability Zone. The applications need to communicate at extremely high throughputs to avoid latency for end users. The average throughput needs to be 6 Gbps. What’s the best measure you can do to ensure this throughput?

A. Put the instances in a placement group

B. Use Elastic Network Interfaces

C. Use Auto Scaling Groups

D. Increase the size of the instances

Q46: A team member has been tasked to configure four EC2 instances for four separate applications. These are not high-traffic apps, so there is no need for an Auto Scaling Group. The instances are all in the same public subnet and each instance has an EIP address, and all of the instances have the same Security Group. But none of the instances can send or receive internet traffic. You verify that all the instances have a public IP address. You also verify that an internet gateway has been configured. What is the most likely issue?

A. There is no route in the route table to the internet gateway (or it has been deleted).

B. Each instance needs its own security group.

C. The route table is corrupt.

D. You are using the default nacl.

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Q47: You have been assigned to create an architecture which uses load balancers to direct traffic to an Auto Scaling Group of EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones. The application to be deployed on these instances is a life insurance application which requires path-based and host-based routing. Which type of load balancer will you need to use?

A. Any type of load balancer will meet these requirements.

B. Classic Load Balancer

C. Network Load Balancer

D. Application Load Balancer

Q48: You have been assigned to create an architecture which uses load balancers to direct traffic to an Auto Scaling Group of EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones. You were considering using an Application Load Balancer, but some of the requirements you have been given seem to point to a Classic Load Balancer. Which requirement would be better served by an Application Load Balancer?

A. Support for EC2-Classic

B. Path-based routing

C. Support for sticky sessions using application-generated cookies

D. Support for TCP and SSL listeners

Q49: You have been tasked to review your company disaster recovery plan due to some new requirements. The driving factor is that the Recovery Time Objective has become very aggressive. Because of this, it has been decided to configure Multi-AZ deployments for the RDS MySQL databases. Unrelated to DR, it has been determined that some read traffic needs to be offloaded from the master database. What step can be taken to meet this requirement?

A. Convert to Aurora to allow the standby to serve read traffic.

B. Redirect some of the read traffic to the standby database.

C. Add DAX to the solution to alleviate excess read traffic.

D. Add read replicas to offload some read traffic.

Q50: A gaming company is designing several new games which focus heavily on player-game interaction. The player makes a certain move and the game has to react very quickly to change the environment based on that move and to present the next decision for the player in real-time. A tool is needed to continuously collect data about player-game interactions and feed the data into the gaming platform in real-time. Which AWS service can best meet this need?

A. AWS Lambda

B. Kinesis Data Streams

C. Kinesis Data Analytics

D. AWS IoT

Q51: You are designing an architecture for a financial company which provides a day trading application to customers. After viewing the traffic patterns for the existing application you notice that traffic is fairly steady throughout the day, with the exception of large spikes at the opening of the market in the morning and at closing around 3 pm. Your architecture will include an Auto Scaling Group of EC2 instances. How can you configure the Auto Scaling Group to ensure that system performance meets the increased demands at opening and closing of the market?

A. Configure a Dynamic Scaling Policy to scale based on CPU Utilization.

B. Use a load balancer to ensure that the load is distributed evenly during high-traffic periods.

C. Configure your Auto Scaling Group to have a desired size which will be able to meet the demands of the high-traffic periods.

D. Use a predictive scaling policy on the Auto Scaling Group to meet opening and closing spikes.

Get the 2022-2023 AWS Solutions Architect Associates SAA-C03 Certification Exam Prep eBook or PDF  or  Print Book on Amazon

Get the 2022-2023 AWS Solutions Architect Associates SAA-C03 Certification Exam Prep eBook or PDF  or  Print Book on Amazon

Web Free SAA-C03 Practice

Q56: A travel company has deployed a website which serves travel updates to users all over the world. The traffic this database serves is very read heavy and can have some latency issues at certain times of the year. What can you do to alleviate these latency issues?

A. Place CloudFront in front of the Database.

B. Add read replicas

C. Configure RDS Multi-AZ

D. Configure multi-Region RDS

Q57: A large financial institution is gradually moving their infrastructure and applications to AWS. The company has data needs that will utilize all of RDS, DynamoDB, Redshift, and ElastiCache. Which description best describes Amazon Redshift?

A. Key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale.

B. Cloud-based relational database.

C. Can be used to significantly improve latency and throughput for many read-heavy application workloads.

D. Near real-time complex querying on massive data sets.

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Q58: You are designing an architecture which will house an Auto Scaling Group of EC2 instances. The application hosted on the instances is expected to be an extremely popular social networking site. Forecasts for traffic to this site expect very high traffic and you will need a load balancer to handle tens of millions of requests per second while maintaining high throughput at ultra low latency. You need to select the type of load balancer to front your Auto Scaling Group to meet this high traffic requirement. Which load balancer will you select?

A. You will need an Application Load Balancer to meet this requirement.

B. All the AWS load balancers meet the requirement and perform the same.

C. You will select a Network Load Balancer to meet this requirement.

D. You will need a Classic Load Balancer to meet this requirement.

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Q59: An organization of about 100 employees has performed the initial setup of users in IAM. All users except administrators have the same basic privileges. But now it has been determined that 50 employees will have extra restrictions on EC2. They will be unable to launch new instances or alter the state of existing instances. What will be the quickest way to implement these restrictions?

A. Create an IAM Role for the restrictions. Attach it to the EC2 instances.

B. Create the appropriate policy. Place the restricted users in the new policy.

C. Create the appropriate policy. With only 20 users, attach the policy to each user.

D. Create the appropriate policy. Create a new group for the restricted users. Place the restricted users in the new group and attach the policy to the group.

Q60: You are managing S3 buckets in your organization. This management of S3 extends to Amazon Glacier. For auditing purposes you would like to be informed if an object is restored to S3 from Glacier. What is the most efficient way you can do this?

A. Create a CloudWatch event for uploads to S3

B. Create an SNS notification for any upload to S3.

C. Configure S3 notifications for restore operations from Glacier.

D. Create a Lambda function which is triggered by restoration of object from Glacier to S3.

Q61: Your company has gotten back results from an audit. One of the mandates from the audit is that your application, which is hosted on EC2, must encrypt the data before writing this data to storage. Which service could you use to meet this requirement?

A. AWS Cloud HSM

B. Security Token Service

C. EBS encryption

D. AWS KMS

Q62: Recent worldwide events have dictated that you perform your duties as a Solutions Architect from home. You need to be able to manage several EC2 instances while working from home and have been testing the ability to ssh into these instances. One instance in particular has been a problem and you cannot ssh into this instance. What should you check first to troubleshoot this issue?

A. Make sure that the security group for the instance has ingress on port 80 from your home IP address.

B. Make sure that your VPC has a connected Virtual Private Gateway.

C. Make sure that the security group for the instance has ingress on port 22 from your home IP address.

D. Make sure that the Security Group for the instance has ingress on port 443 from your home IP address.

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Q62: A consultant is hired by a small company to configure an AWS environment. The consultant begins working with the VPC and launching EC2 instances within the VPC. The initial instances will be placed in a public subnet. The consultant begins to create security groups. What is true of the default security group?

A. You can delete this group, however, you can’t change the group’s rules.

B. You can delete this group or you can change the group’s rules.

C. You can’t delete this group, nor can you change the group’s rules.

D. You can’t delete this group, however, you can change the group’s rules.

Q63: You are evaluating the security setting within the main company VPC. There are several NACLs and security groups to evaluate and possibly edit. What is true regarding NACLs and security groups?

A. Network ACLs and security groups are both stateful.

B. Network ACLs and security groups are both stateless.

C. Network ACLs are stateless, and security groups are stateful.

D. Network ACLs and stateful, and security groups are stateless.

Q64: Your company needs to deploy an application in the company AWS account. The application will reside on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling Group fronted by an Application Load Balancer. The company has been using Elastic Beanstalk to deploy the application due to limited AWS experience within the organization. The application now needs upgrades and a small team of subcontractors have been hired to perform these upgrades. What can be used to provide the subcontractors with short-lived access tokens that act as temporary security credentials to the company AWS account?

A. IAM Roles

B. AWS STS

C. IAM user accounts

D. AWS SSO

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Q65: The company you work for has reshuffled teams a bit and you’ve been moved from the AWS IAM team to the AWS Network team. One of your first assignments is to review the subnets in the main VPCs. What are two key concepts regarding subnets?

A. A subnet spans all the Availability Zones in a Region.

B. Private subnets can only hold database.

C. Each subnet maps to a single Availability Zone.

D. Every subnet you create is associated with the main route table for the VPC.

E. Each subnet is associated with one security group.

Q66: Amazon Web Services offers 4 different levels of support. Which of the following are valid support levels? Choose 3

A. Enterprise

B. Developer

C. Corporate

D. Business

E. Free Tier

Q67: You are reviewing Change Control requests, and you note that there is a change designed to reduce wasted CPU cycles by increasing the value of your Amazon SQS “VisibilityTimeout” attribute. What does this mean?

A. While processing a message, a consumer instance can amend the message visibility counter by a fixed amount.

B. When a consumer instance retrieves a message, that message will be hidden from other consumer instances for a fixed period.

C. When the consumer instance polls for new work the SQS service will allow it to wait a certain time for a message to be available before closing the connection.

D. While processing a message, a consumer instance can reset the message visibility by restarting the preset timeout counter.

E. When the consumer instance polls for new work, the consumer instance will wait a certain time until it has a full workload before closing the connection.

F. When a new message is added to the SQS queue, it will be hidden from consumer instances for a fixed period.

Q68: You are a security architect working for a large antivirus company. The production environment has recently been moved to AWS and is in a public subnet. You are able to view the production environment over HTTP. However, when your customers try to update their virus definition files over a custom port, that port is blocked. You log in to the console and you allow traffic in over the custom port. How long will this take to take effect?

A. After a few minutes.

B. Immediately.

C. Straight away, but to the new instances only.

D. Straight away to the new instances, but old instances must be stopped and restarted before the new rules apply.

Q69: Amazon SQS keeps track of all tasks and events in an application.

A. True

B. False

Q70: Your Security Manager has hired a security contractor to audit your network and firewall configurations. The consultant doesn’t have access to an AWS account. You need to provide the required access for the auditing tasks, and answer a question about login details for the official AWS firewall appliance. Which of the following might you do?
Choose 2

A. Create an IAM User with a policy that can Read Security Group and NACL settings.

B. Explain that AWS implements network security differently and that there is no such thing as an official AWS firewall appliance. Security Groups and NACLs are used instead.

C. Create an IAM Role with a policy that can Read Security Group and NACL settings.

D. Explain that AWS is a cloud service and that AWS manages the Network appliances.

E. Create an IAM Role with a policy that can Read Security Group and Route settings.

Q71: How many internet gateways can I attach to my custom VPC?

A. 5
B. 3
C. 2
D. 1

Q72: How long can a message be retained in an SQS Queue?

A. 14 days

B. 1 day

C. 7 days

D. 30 days

Q73: Although your application customarily runs at 30% usage, you have identified a recurring usage spike (>90%) between 8pm and midnight daily. What is the most cost-effective way to scale your application to meet this increased need?

A. Manually deploy Reactive Event-based Scaling each night at 7:45.

B. Deploy additional EC2 instances to meet the demand.

C. Use scheduled scaling to boost your capacity at a fixed interval.

D. Increase the size of the Resource Group to meet demand.

Q74: To save money, you quickly stored some data in one of the attached volumes of an EC2 instance and stopped it for the weekend. When you returned on Monday and restarted your instance, you discovered that your data was gone. Why might that be?

A. The EBS volume was not large enough to store your data.

B. The instance failed to connect to the root volume on Monday.

C. The elastic block-level storage service failed over the weekend.

D. The volume was ephemeral, block-level storage. Data on an instance store volume is lost if an instance is stopped.

Q75: Select all the true statements on S3 URL styles: Choose 2

A. Virtual hosted-style URLs will be eventually depreciated in favor of Path-Style URLs for S3 bucket access.

B. Virtual-host-style URLs (such as: https://bucket-name.s3.Region.amazonaws.com/key name) are supported by AWS.

C. Path-Style URLs (such as https://s3.Region.amazonaws.com/bucket-name/key name) are supported by AWS.

D. DNS compliant names are NOT recommended for the URLs to access S3.

Q76: With EBS, I can ____. Choose 2

A. Create an encrypted snapshot from an unencrypted snapshot by creating an encrypted copy of the unencrypted snapshot.

B. Create an unencrypted volume from an encrypted snapshot.

C. Create an encrypted volume from a snapshot of another encrypted volume.

D. Encrypt an existing volume.

Q77: You have been engaged by a company to design and lead a migration to an AWS environment. The team is concerned about the capabilities of the new environment, especially when it comes to high availability and cost-effectiveness. The design calls for about 20 instances (c3.2xlarge) pulling jobs/messages from SQS. Network traffic per instance is estimated to be around 500 Mbps at the beginning and end of each job. Which configuration should you plan on deploying?

A. Use a 2nd Network Interface to separate the SQS traffic for the storage traffic.

B. Choose a different instance type that better matched the traffic demand.

C.Spread the Instances over multiple AZs to minimize the traffic concentration and maximize fault-tolerance.

D. Deploy as a Cluster Placement Group as the aggregated burst traffic could be around 10 Gbps.

Q78: You are a solutions architect working for a cosmetics company. Your company has a busy Magento online store that consists of a two-tier architecture. The web servers are on EC2 instances deployed across multiple AZs, and the database is on a Multi-AZ RDS MySQL database instance. Your store is having a Black Friday sale in five days, and having reviewed the performance for the last sale you expect the site to start running very slowly during the peak load. You investigate and you determine that the database was struggling to keep up with the number of reads that the store was generating. Which solution would you implement to improve the application read performance the most?

A. Deploy an Amazon ElastiCache cluster with nodes running in each AZ.

B. Upgrade your RDS MySQL instance to use provisioned IOPS.

C. Add an RDS Read Replica in each AZ.

D. Upgrade the RDS MySQL instance to a larger type.

Q79: Which native AWS service will act as a file system mounted on an S3 bucket?

A. Amazon Elastic Block Store

B. File Gateway

C. Amazon S3

D. Amazon Elastic File System

Q80:You have been evaluating the NACLS in your company. Most of the NACLs are configured the same: 100 All Traffic Allow 200 All Traffic Deny ‘*’ All Traffic Deny If a request comes in, how will it be evaluated?

A. The default will deny traffic.

B. The request will be allowed.

C. The highest numbered rule will be used, a deny.

D. All rules will be evaluated and the end result will be Deny.

Q81: You have been given an assignment to configure Network ACLs in your VPC. Before configuring the NACLs, you need to understand how the NACLs are evaluated. How are NACL rules evaluated?

A. NACL rules are evaluated by rule number from lowest to highest and executed immediately when a matching rule is found.

B. NACL rules are evaluated by rule number from highest to lowest, and executed immediately when a matching rule is found.

C. All NACL rules that you configure are evaluated before traffic is passed through.

D. NACL rules are evaluated by rule number from highest to lowest, and all are evaluated before traffic is passed through.

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Q82: Your company has gone through an audit with a focus on data storage. You are currently storing historical data in Amazon Glacier. One of the results of the audit is that a portion of the infrequently-accessed historical data must be able to be accessed immediately upon request. Where can you store this data to meet this requirement?

A. S3 Standard

B. Leave infrequently-accessed data in Glacier.

C. S3 Standard-IA

D. Store the data in EBS

Q84: After an IT Steering Committee meeting, you have been put in charge of configuring a hybrid environment for the company’s compute resources. You weigh the pros and cons of various technologies, such as VPN and Direct Connect, and based on the requirements you have decided to configure a VPN connection. What features and advantages can a VPN connection provide?

Q86: Your company has decided to go to a hybrid cloud environment. Part of this effort will be to move a large data warehouse to the cloud. The warehouse is 50TB, and will take over a month to migrate given the current bandwidth available. What is the best option available to perform this migration considering both cost and performance aspects?

Q87: You have been assigned the review of the security in your company AWS cloud environment. Your final deliverable will be a report detailing potential security issues. One of the first things that you need to describe is the responsibilities of the company under the shared responsibility module. Which measure is the customer’s responsibility?

Q88: You work for a busy real estate company, and you need to protect your data stored on S3 from accidental deletion. Which of the following actions might you take to achieve this? Choose 2

A. Create a bucket policy that prohibits anyone from deleting things from the bucket.
B. Enable S3 – Infrequent Access Storage (S3 – IA).
C. Enable versioning on the bucket. If a file is accidentally deleted, delete the delete marker.
D. Configure MFA-protected API access.
E. Use pre-signed URL’s so that users will not be able to accidentally delete data.

Q89: AWS intends to shut down your spot instance; which of these scenarios is possible? Choose 3

A. AWS sends a notification of termination and you receive it 120 seconds before the intended forced shutdown.

B. AWS sends a notification of termination and you receive it 120 seconds before the forced shutdown, and you delay it by sending a ‘Delay300’ instruction before the forced shutdown takes effect.

C. AWS sends a notification of termination and you receive it 120 seconds before the intended forced shutdown, but AWS does not action the shutdown.

D. AWS sends a notification of termination and you receive it 120 seconds before the forced shutdown, but you block the shutdown because you used ‘Termination Protection’ when you initialized the instance.

E. AWS sends a notification of termination and you receive it 120 seconds before the forced shutdown, but the defined duration period (also known as Spot blocks) hasn’t ended yet.

F. AWS sends a notification of termination, but you do not receive it within the 120 seconds and the instance is shutdown.

Q90: What does the “EAR” in a policy document stand for?

A. Effects, APIs, Roles
B. Effect, Action, Resource
C. Ewoks, Always, Romanticize
D. Every, Action, Reasonable

Q92: You can use _ to build a schema for your data, and _ to query the data that’s stored in S3.

A. Glue, Athena
B. EC2, SQS
C. EC2, Glue
D. Athena, Lambda

Q93: What type of work does EMR perform?

A. Data processing information (DPI) jobs.
B. Big data (BD) jobs.
C. Extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs.
D. Huge amounts of data (HAD) jobs

Q94: _____ allows you to transform data using SQL as it’s being passed through Kinesis.

A. RDS
B. Kinesis Data Analytics
C. Redshift
D. DynamoDB

Q95 [SAA-C03]: A company runs a public-facing three-tier web application in a VPC across multiple Availability Zones. Amazon EC2 instances for the application tier running in private subnets need to download software patches from the internet. However, the EC2 instances cannot be directly accessible from the internet. Which actions should be taken to allow the EC2 instances to download the needed patches? (Select TWO.)

A. Configure a NAT gateway in a public subnet.
B. Define a custom route table with a route to the NAT gateway for internet traffic and associate it with the private subnets for the application tier.
C. Assign Elastic IP addresses to the EC2 instances.
D. Define a custom route table with a route to the internet gateway for internet traffic and associate it with the private subnets for the application tier.
E. Configure a NAT instance in a private subnet.

Q96 [SAA-C03]: A solutions architect wants to design a solution to save costs for Amazon EC2 instances that do not need to run during a 2-week company shutdown. The applications running on the EC2 instances store data in instance memory that must be present when the instances resume operation. Which approach should the solutions architect recommend to shut down and resume the EC2 instances?

A. Modify the application to store the data on instance store volumes. Reattach the volumes while restarting them.
B. Snapshot the EC2 instances before stopping them. Restore the snapshot after restarting the instances.
C. Run the applications on EC2 instances enabled for hibernation. Hibernate the instances before the 2- week company shutdown.
D. Note the Availability Zone for each EC2 instance before stopping it. Restart the instances in the same Availability Zones after the 2-week company shutdown.

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Q97 [SAA-C03]: A company plans to run a monitoring application on an Amazon EC2 instance in a VPC. Connections are made to the EC2 instance using the instance’s private IPv4 address. A solutions architect needs to design a solution that will allow traffic to be quickly directed to a standby EC2 instance if the application fails and becomes unreachable. Which approach will meet these requirements?

A) Deploy an Application Load Balancer configured with a listener for the private IP address and register the primary EC2 instance with the load balancer. Upon failure, de-register the instance and register the standby EC2 instance.
B) Configure a custom DHCP option set. Configure DHCP to assign the same private IP address to the standby EC2 instance when the primary EC2 instance fails.
C) Attach a secondary elastic network interface to the EC2 instance configured with the private IP address. Move the network interface to the standby EC2 instance if the primary EC2 instance becomes unreachable.
D) Associate an Elastic IP address with the network interface of the primary EC2 instance. Disassociate the Elastic IP from the primary instance upon failure and associate it with a standby EC2 instance.

Q98 [SAA-C03]: An analytics company is planning to offer a web analytics service to its users. The service will require that the users’ webpages include a JavaScript script that makes authenticated GET requests to the company’s Amazon S3 bucket. What must a solutions architect do to ensure that the script will successfully execute?

A. Enable cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) on the S3 bucket.
B. Enable S3 Versioning on the S3 bucket.
C. Provide the users with a signed URL for the script.
D. Configure an S3 bucket policy to allow public execute privileges.

Q99 [SAA-C03]: A company’s security team requires that all data stored in the cloud be encrypted at rest at all times using encryption keys stored on premises. Which encryption options meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)

A. Use server-side encryption with Amazon S3 managed encryption keys (SSE-S3).
B. Use server-side encryption with AWS KMS managed encryption keys (SSE-KMS).
C. Use server-side encryption with customer-provided encryption keys (SSE-C).
D. Use client-side encryption to provide at-rest encryption.
E. Use an AWS Lambda function invoked by Amazon S3 events to encrypt the data using the customer’s keys.

Q100 [SAA-C03]: A company uses Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances to run its data processing workload. The nightly job typically takes 7 hours to run and must finish within a 10-hour time window. The company anticipates temporary increases in demand at the end of each month that will cause the job to run over the time limit with the capacity of the current resources. Once started, the processing job cannot be interrupted before completion. The company wants to implement a solution that would provide increased resource capacity as cost-effectively as possible. What should a solutions architect do to accomplish this?

A) Deploy On-Demand Instances during periods of high demand.
B) Create a second EC2 reservation for additional instances.
C) Deploy Spot Instances during periods of high demand.
D) Increase the EC2 instance size in the EC2 reservation to support the increased workload.

Q101 [SAA-C03]: A company runs an online voting system for a weekly live television program. During broadcasts, users submit hundreds of thousands of votes within minutes to a front-end fleet of Amazon EC2 instances that run in an Auto Scaling group. The EC2 instances write the votes to an Amazon RDS database. However, the database is unable to keep up with the requests that come from the EC2 instances. A solutions architect must design a solution that processes the votes in the most efficient manner and without downtime. Which solution meets these requirements?

A. Migrate the front-end application to AWS Lambda. Use Amazon API Gateway to route user requests to the Lambda functions.
B. Scale the database horizontally by converting it to a Multi-AZ deployment. Configure the front-end application to write to both the primary and secondary DB instances.
C. Configure the front-end application to send votes to an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue. Provision worker instances to read the SQS queue and write the vote information to the database.
D. Use Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) to create a scheduled event to re-provision the database with larger, memory optimized instances during voting periods. When voting ends, re-provision the database to use smaller instances.

Q102 [SAA-C03]: A company has a two-tier application architecture that runs in public and private subnets. Amazon EC2 instances running the web application are in the public subnet and an EC2 instance for the database runs on the private subnet. The web application instances and the database are running in a single Availability Zone (AZ). Which combination of steps should a solutions architect take to provide high availability for this architecture? (Select TWO.)

A. Create new public and private subnets in the same AZ.
B. Create an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group and Application Load Balancer spanning multiple AZs for the web application instances.
C. Add the existing web application instances to an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer.
D. Create new public and private subnets in a new AZ. Create a database using an EC2 instance in the public subnet in the new AZ. Migrate the old database contents to the new database.
E. Create new public and private subnets in the same VPC, each in a new AZ. Create an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB instance in the private subnets. Migrate the old database contents to the new DB instance.

Q103 [SAA-C03]: A website runs a custom web application that receives a burst of traffic each day at noon. The users upload new pictures and content daily, but have been complaining of timeouts. The architecture uses Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups, and the application consistently takes 1 minute to initiate upon boot up before responding to user requests. How should a solutions architect redesign the architecture to better respond to changing traffic?

A. Configure a Network Load Balancer with a slow start configuration.
B. Configure Amazon ElastiCache for Redis to offload direct requests from the EC2 instances.
C. Configure an Auto Scaling step scaling policy with an EC2 instance warmup condition.
D. Configure Amazon CloudFront to use an Application Load Balancer as the origin.

Q104 [SAA-C03]: An application running on AWS uses an Amazon Aurora Multi-AZ DB cluster deployment for its database. When evaluating performance metrics, a solutions architect discovered that the database reads are causing high I/O and adding latency to the write requests against the database. What should the solutions architect do to separate the read requests from the write requests?

A. Enable read-through caching on the Aurora database.
B. Update the application to read from the Multi-AZ standby instance.
C. Create an Aurora replica and modify the application to use the appropriate endpoints.
D. Create a second Aurora database and link it to the primary database as a read replica.

Question 106: A company plans to migrate its on-premises workload to AWS. The current architecture is composed of a Microsoft SharePoint server that uses a Windows shared file storage. The Solutions Architect needs to use a cloud storage solution that is highly available and can be integrated with Active Directory for access control and authentication. Which of the following options can satisfy the given requirement?

A. Create a file system using Amazon EFS and join it to an Active Directory domain.
B. Create a file system using Amazon FSx for Windows File Server and join it to an Active Directory domain in AWS.
C. Create a Network File System (NFS) file share using AWS Storage Gateway.
D. Launch an Amazon EC2 Windows Server to mount a new S3 bucket as a file volume.

Question 107: A company plans to migrate its on-premises workload to AWS. The current architecture is composed of a Microsoft SharePoint server that uses a Windows shared file storage. The Solutions Architect needs to use a cloud storage solution that is highly available and can be integrated with Active Directory for access control and authentication. Which of the following options can satisfy the given requirement?

A. Create a file system using Amazon EFS and join it to an Active Directory domain.
B. Create a file system using Amazon FSx for Windows File Server and join it to an Active Directory domain in AWS.
C. Create a Network File System (NFS) file share using AWS Storage Gateway.
D. Launch an Amazon EC2 Windows Server to mount a new S3 bucket as a file volume.

Question 108: A Forex trading platform, which frequently processes and stores global financial data every minute, is hosted in your on-premises data center and uses an Oracle database. Due to a recent cooling problem in their data center, the company urgently needs to migrate their infrastructure to AWS to improve the performance of their applications. As the Solutions Architect, you are responsible in ensuring that the database is properly migrated and should remain available in case of database server failure in the future. Which of the following is the most suitable solution to meet the requirement?

A. Create an Oracle database in RDS with Multi-AZ deployments.
B. Launch an Oracle database instance in RDS with Recovery Manager (RMAN) enabled.
C. Launch an Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) in RDS.
D. Convert the database schema using the AWS Schema Conversion Tool and AWS Database Migration Service. Migrate the Oracle database to a non-cluster Amazon Aurora with a single instance.

Question 109: A data analytics company, which uses machine learning to collect and analyze consumer data, is using Redshift cluster as their data warehouse. You are instructed to implement a disaster recovery plan for their systems to ensure business continuity even in the event of an AWS region outage. Which of the following is the best approach to meet this requirement?

A. Do nothing because Amazon Redshift is a highly available, fully-managed data warehouse which can withstand an outage of an entire AWS region.
B. Enable Cross-Region Snapshots Copy in your Amazon Redshift Cluster.
C. Create a scheduled job that will automatically take the snapshot of your Redshift Cluster and store it to an S3 bucket. Restore the snapshot in case of an AWS region outage.
D. Use Automated snapshots of your Redshift Cluster.

Question 109: A start-up company has an EC2 instance that is hosting a web application. The volume of users is expected to grow in the coming months and hence, you need to add more elasticity and scalability in your AWS architecture to cope with the demand. Which of the following options can satisfy the above requirement for the given scenario? (Select TWO.)

A. Set up two EC2 instances and then put them behind an Elastic Load balancer (ELB).
B. Set up two EC2 instances deployed using Launch Templates and integrated with AWS Glue.
C. Set up an S3 Cache in front of the EC2 instance.
D. Set up two EC2 instances and use Route 53 to route traffic based on a Weighted Routing Policy.
E. Set up an AWS WAF behind your EC2 Instance.

Question 110: A company plans to deploy a Docker-based batch application in AWS. The application will be used to process both mission-critical data as well as non-essential batch jobs. Which of the following is the most cost-effective option to use in implementing this architecture?

A. Use ECS as the container management service then set up Reserved EC2 Instances for processing both mission-critical and non-essential batch jobs.
B. Use ECS as the container management service then set up a combination of Reserved and Spot EC2 Instances for processing mission-critical and non-essential batch jobs respectively.
C. Use ECS as the container management service then set up On-Demand EC2 Instances for processing both mission-critical and non-essential batch jobs.
D. Use ECS as the container management service then set up Spot EC2 Instances for processing both mission-critical and non-essential batch jobs.

Question 112: An online stocks trading application that stores financial data in an S3 bucket has a lifecycle policy that moves older data to Glacier every month. There is a strict compliance requirement where a surprise audit can happen at anytime and you should be able to retrieve the required data in under 15 minutes under all circumstances. Your manager instructed you to ensure that retrieval capacity is available when you need it and should handle up to 150 MB/s of retrieval throughput. Which of the following should you do to meet the above requirement? (Select TWO.)

A. Retrieve the data using Amazon Glacier Select.
B. Use Bulk Retrieval to access the financial data.
C. Purchase provisioned retrieval capacity.
D. Use Expedited Retrieval to access the financial data.
E. Specify a range, or portion, of the financial data archive to retrieve.

Question 113: An organization stores and manages financial records of various companies in its on-premises data center, which is almost out of space. The management decided to move all of their existing records to a cloud storage service. All future financial records will also be stored in the cloud. For additional security, all records must be prevented from being deleted or overwritten. Which of the following should you do to meet the above requirement?
A. Use AWS Storage Gateway to establish hybrid cloud storage. Store all of your data in Amazon S3 and enable object lock.
B. Use AWS DataSync to move the data. Store all of your data in Amazon EFS and enable object lock.
C. Use AWS Storage Gateway to establish hybrid cloud storage. Store all of your data in Amazon EBS and enable object lock.
D. Use AWS DataSync to move the data. Store all of your data in Amazon S3 and enable object lock.

Question 114: A solutions architect is designing a solution to run a containerized web application by using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). The solutions architect wants to minimize cost by running multiple copies of a task on each container instance. The number of task copies must scale as the load increases and decreases. Which routing solution distributes the load to the multiple tasks?

A. Configure an Application Load Balancer to distribute the requests by using path-based routing.
B. Configure an Application Load Balancer to distribute the requests by using dynamic host port mapping.
C. Configure an Amazon Route 53 alias record set to distribute the requests with a failover routing policy.
D. Configure an Amazon Route 53 alias record set to distribute the requests with a weighted routing policy.

Question 115: Question: A Solutions Architect needs to deploy a mobile application that can collect votes for a popular singing competition. Millions of users from around the world will submit votes using their mobile phones. These votes must be collected and stored in a highly scalable and highly available data store which will be queried for real-time ranking. Which of the following combination of services should the architect use to meet this requirement?
A. Amazon Redshift and AWS Mobile Hub
B. Amazon DynamoDB and AWS AppSync
C. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon MQ
D. Amazon Aurora and Amazon Cognito

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Question 116: The usage of a company’s image-processing application is increasing suddenly with no set pattern. The application’s processing time grows linearly with the size of the image. The processing can take up to 20 minutes for large image files. The architecture consists of a web tier, an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) standard queue, and message consumers that process the images on Amazon EC2 instances. When a high volume of requests occurs, the message backlog in Amazon SQS increases. Users are reporting the delays in processing. A solutions architect must improve the performance of the application in compliance with cloud best practices. Which solution will meet these requirements?

A. Purchase enough Dedicated Instances to meet the peak demand. Deploy the instances for the consumers.
B. Convert the existing SQS standard queue to an SQS FIFO queue. Increase the visibility timeout.
C. Configure a scalable AWS Lambda function as the consumer of the SQS messages.
D. Create a message consumer that is an Auto Scaling group of instances. Configure the Auto Scaling group to scale based upon the ApproximateNumberOfMessages Amazon CloudWatch metric.

Question 117: An application is hosted on an EC2 instance with multiple EBS Volumes attached and uses Amazon Neptune as its database. To improve data security, you encrypted all of the EBS volumes attached to the instance to protect the confidential data stored in the volumes. Which of the following statements are true about encrypted Amazon Elastic Block Store volumes? (Select TWO.)

Question 118: A reporting application runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The instances run in an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. For complex reports, the application can take up to 15 minutes to respond to a request. A solutions architect is concerned that users will receive HTTP 5xx errors if a report request is in process during a scale-in event. What should the solutions architect do to ensure that user requests will be completed before instances are terminated?

A. Enable sticky sessions (session affinity) for the target group of the instances.
B. Increase the instance size in the Application Load Balancer target group.
C. Increase the cooldown period for the Auto Scaling group to a greater amount of time than the time required for the longest running responses.
D. Increase the deregistration delay timeout for the target group of the instances to greater than 900 seconds.

Question 119: A company used Amazon EC2 Spot Instances for a demonstration that is now complete. A solutions architect must remove the Spot Instances to stop them from incurring cost. What should the solutions architect do to meet this requirement?

A. Cancel the Spot request only.
B. Terminate the Spot Instances only.
C. Cancel the Spot request. Terminate the Spot Instances.
D. Terminate the Spot Instances. Cancel the Spot request.

Question 120: Which components are required to build a site-to-site VPN connection on AWS? (Select TWO.)
A. An Internet Gateway
B. A NAT gateway
C. A customer Gateway
D. A Virtual Private Gateway
E. Amazon API Gateway

Question 121: A company runs its website on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer that is configured as the origin for an Amazon CloudFront distribution. The company wants to protect against cross-site scripting and SQL injection attacks. Which approach should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements?

A. Enable AWS Shield Advanced. List the CloudFront distribution as a protected resource.
B. Define an AWS Shield Advanced policy in AWS Firewall Manager to block cross-site scripting and SQL injection attacks.
C. Set up AWS WAF on the CloudFront distribution. Use conditions and rules that block cross-site scripting and SQL injection attacks.
D. Deploy AWS Firewall Manager on the EC2 instances. Create conditions and rules that block cross-site scripting and SQL injection attacks.

Question 122: A media company is designing a new solution for graphic rendering. The application requires up to 400 GB of storage for temporary data that is discarded after the frames are rendered. The application requires approximately 40,000 random IOPS to perform the rendering. What is the MOST cost-effective storage option for this rendering application?
A. A storage optimized Amazon EC2 instance with instance store storage
B. A storage optimized Amazon EC2 instance with a Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1 or io2) Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume
C. A burstable Amazon EC2 instance with a Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume
D. A burstable Amazon EC2 instance with Amazon S3 storage over a VPC endpoint

Question 123: A company is deploying a new application that will consist of an application layer and an online transaction processing (OLTP) relational database. The application must be available at all times. However, the application will have periods of inactivity. The company wants to pay the minimum for compute costs during these idle periods. Which solution meets these requirements MOST cost-effectively?
A. Run the application in containers with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) on AWS Fargate. Use Amazon Aurora Serverless for the database.
B. Run the application on Amazon EC2 instances by using a burstable instance type. Use Amazon Redshift for the database.
C. Deploy the application and a MySQL database to Amazon EC2 instances by using AWS CloudFormation. Delete the stack at the beginning of the idle periods.
D. Deploy the application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. Use Amazon RDS for MySQL for the database.

Question 124:  Which options best describe characteristics of events in event-driven design?  (Select THREE.)

A. Events are usually processed asynchronously

B. Events usually expect an immediate reply

C. Events are used to share information about a change in state

D. Events are observable

E. Events direct the actions of targets 

Questions 125: Which of these scenarios would lead you to choose AWS AppSync and GraphQL APIs over API Gateway and REST APIs? Choose THREE.

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Answer: B. E. F. G

Notes: You aren’t responsible for the operating system or network configuration where your functions run, and AWS is ensuring the security of the data within those managed services. You are responsible for protecting data entering your application and limiting access to your AWS resources. You still need to protect data that originates client-side or that travels to or from endpoints outside AWS.

When integrating CloudFront with regional API endpoints, CloudFront also supports geoblocking, which you can use to prevent requests from being served from particular geographic locations.

Use origin access identity with Amazon S3 to allow bucket access only through CloudFront.

CORS is a browser security feature that restricts cross-origin HTTP requests that are initiated from scripts running in the browser. It is enforced by the browser. If your APIs will receive cross-origin requests, you should enable CORS support in API Gateway.

IAM resource policies can be used to limit access to your APIs. For example, you can restrict access to users from a specified AWS account or deny traffic from a specified source IP address or CIDR block.

AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications or APIs against common web exploits. AWS WAF lets you create security rules that block common attack patterns, such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting, and rules that filter out specific traffic patterns you define.

Lambda functions are triggered by events. These events submit an event parameter to the Lambda function and could be exploited for SQL injection. You can prevent this type of attack by parameterizing queries so that your Lambda function expects a single input.

Answer: B. and C.

Notes: You may use multiple deployment frameworks for an application so that you can use the framework that best suits the type of deployment. For example, you might use the AWS SAM framework to define your application stack and deployment preferences and then use AWS CDK to provision any infrastructure-related resources, such as the CI/CD pipeline.

It is a best practice to use different AWS accounts for each environment. This approach limits the blast radius of issues that occur and makes it less complex to differentiate which resources are associated with each environment. Because of the way costs are calculated with serverless, spinning up additional environments doesn’t add much to your cost.

AWS SAM lets you configure safe deployment preferences so that you can run code before the deployment, and after the deployment and rollback if there is a problem. You can also specify a method for shifting traffic to the new version a little bit at a time.

It is a best practice to use one AWS SAM template across environments and use options to parameterize values that are different per environment. This helps ensure that the environment is built with exactly the same stack.

Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/serverless-application-model/latest/developerguide/automating-updates-to-serverless-apps.html

Question 130:  A company runs a cron job on an Amazon EC2 instance on a predefined schedule. The cron job calls a bash script that encrypts a 2 KB file. A security engineer creates an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) CMK with a key policy.

The key policy and the EC2 instance role have the necessary configuration for this job.

Which process should the bash script use to encrypt the file?

A) Use the aws kms encrypt command to encrypt the file by using the existing CMK.

B) Use the aws kms create-grant command to generate a grant for the existing CMK.

C) Use the aws kms encrypt command to generate a data key. Use the plaintext data key to encrypt the file.

D) Use the aws kms generate-data-key command to generate a data key. Use the encrypted data key to encrypt the file.

Answer: D

Notes: KMS allow encryption for raw data up to 4K but it is not recommended so A is possible but not good practice. Create grant is a ‘policy’ things, not an encryption things. Kms encrypt doesn’t generate data key. Only D generate a data key clear text and encrypted. You then encrypt the file with the data key, add the encrypted data key to the encrypted file metadata for later decryption.

Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/developerguide/overview.html

Answer:  A B and C

Notes:

If you look at the choices, there are three related to SCP, which controls services, and three related to IAM and permissions boundaries.

Limiting services doesn’t help with data classification – using boundaries, policies and roles give you the scalability and can solve the problem.

Answer: A

Notes: You can’t directly install Amazon-issued certificates on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. Instead, use the certificate with a load balancer, and then register the EC2 instance behind the load balancer.

Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/associate-acm-certificate-alb-nlb/

3. Reliability
The reliability pillar includes the ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues. You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Reliability Pillar whitepaper.

4. Performance Efficiency
The performance efficiency pillar includes the ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve. You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Performance Efficiency Pillar whitepaper.

5. Cost Optimization
The cost optimization pillar includes the ability to avoid or eliminate unneeded cost or suboptimal resources. You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Cost Optimization Pillar whitepaper.

6. Sustainability

• The ability to increase efficiency across all components of a workload by maximizing the benefits from the provisioned resources.
• There are six best practice areas for sustainability in the cloud:
  • Region Selection – AWS Global Infrastructure
  • User Behavior Patterns – Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing
  • Software and Architecture Patterns – AWS Design Principles
  • Data Patterns – Amazon EBS,  Amazon EFS, Amazon FSx, Amazon S3
  • Hardware Patterns – Amazon EC2, AWS Elastic Beanstalk
  • Development and Deployment Process – AWS CloudFormation
• Key AWS service:
  • Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Source: 6 pillards of AWs Well architected Framework

The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides architectural best practices across the five pillars for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud. The framework provides a set of questions that allows you to review an existing or proposed architecture. It also provides a set of AWS best practices for each pillar.
Using the Framework in your architecture helps you produce stable and efficient systems, which allows you to focus on functional requirements.

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