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AWS Solution Architect Associate Certification Exam Prep: Facts and Summaries, Questions and Answers Dump

AWS Solution Architect Associate Exam Questions and Answers Dump

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 65 Questions and Answers Dump

 

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.

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 Solution Architect Associate Exam Facts and Summaries

  1. This exam validates an examinee’s ability to effectively demonstrate knowledge of how to architect and deploy secure and robust applications on AWS technologies. It validates an examinee’s ability to:
    • Define a solution using architectural design principles based on customer requirements.
    • Provide implementation guidance based on best practices to the organization throughout the lifecycle of the project.
  2. There are two types of questions on the examination:
    • Multiple-choice: Has one correct response and three incorrect responses (distractors).
    • Multiple-response: Has two correct responses out of five options.

    Select one or more responses that best complete the statement or answer the question. Distractors, or incorrect answers, are response options that an examinee with incomplete knowledge or skill would likely choose. However, they are generally plausible responses that fit in the content area defined by the test objective. Unanswered questions are scored as incorrect; there is no penalty for guessing.  

  3. The table below lists the main content domains and their weightings:
  4. Domain 1: Design Resilient Architectures
    • Choose reliable/resilient storage.
    • Determine how to design decoupling mechanisms using AWS services.
    • Determine how to design a multi-tier architecture solution.
    • Determine how to design high availability and/or fault tolerant architectures
  5. Domain 2: Define Performant Architectures
    • Choose performant storage and databases.
    • Apply caching to improve performance.
    • Design solutions for elasticity and scalability.
  6. Domain 3: Specify Secure Applications and Architectures.
    • Determine how to secure application tiers.
    • Determine how to secure data.
    • Define the networking infrastructure for a single VPC application.
  7.  Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
    • Determine how to design cost-optimized storage.
    • Determine how to design cost-optimized compute.
  8. Domain 5: Define Operationally-Excellent Architectures
    • Choose design features in solutions that enable operational excellence.
  9. Take an AWS Training Class
  10. Study AWS Whitepapers and FAQs: AWS Well-Architected webpage (various whitepapers linked)
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. Which feature of Intel processors help to encrypt data without significant impact on performance?
    AES-NI
  14. 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.

  15. 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? 

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

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

  18. High-Availability means automating tasks so that an instance will quickly recover, which can lead to a low Recovery Time Objective.  RPO vs. RTO
  19. Frequent backups reduce the time between the last backup and recovery point, otherwise known as the Recovery Point Objective.  RPO vs. RTO
  20. 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.
  21. 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.

  22. 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.

25. In the context of disaster recovery, what does RPO stand for? RPO is the abbreviation for Recovery Point Objective.

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.

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Reference: AWS Solution Architect Associate Exam Prep

AWS Solution Architect Associate Exam Prep Questions and Answers Dump

Q0: 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

B. and D.

Reference: AWS Session management

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Q1: A Solutions Architect is designing a critical business application with a relational database that runs on an EC2 instance. It requires a single EBS volume that can support up to 16,000 IOPS.
Which Amazon EBS volume type can meet the performance requirements of this application?

  • A. EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD
  • B. EBS Throughput Optimized HDD
  • C. EBS General Purpose SSD
  • D. EBS Cold HDD

A.
EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD provides sustained performance for mission-critical low-latency workloads. EBS General Purpose SSD can provide bursts of performance up to 3,000 IOPS and have a maximum baseline performance of 10,000 IOPS for volume sizes greater than 3.3 TB. The 2 HDD options are lower cost, high throughput volumes.

Reference: Amazon EBS Performance Tips

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Q2: An application running on EC2 instances processes sensitive information stored on Amazon S3. The information is accessed over the Internet. The security team is concerned that the Internet connectivity to Amazon S3 is a security risk.
Which solution will resolve the security concern?

  • A. Access the data through an Internet Gateway.
  • B. Access the data through a VPN connection.
  • C. Access the data through a NAT Gateway.
  • D.Access the data through a VPC endpoint for Amazon S3

D.
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

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Q3: An organization is building an Amazon Redshift cluster in their shared services VPC. The cluster will host sensitive data.
How can the organization control which networks can access the cluster?

  • A. Run the cluster in a different VPC and connect through VPC peering.
  • B.Create a database user inside the Amazon Redshift cluster only for users on the network.
  • C. Define a cluster security group for the cluster that allows access from the allowed networks.
  • D. Only allow access to networks that connect with the shared services network via VPN.

C
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

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Q4: A web application allows customers to upload orders to an S3 bucket. The resulting Amazon S3 events trigger a Lambda function that inserts a message to an SQS queue. A single EC2 instance reads messages from the queue, processes them, and stores them in an DynamoDB table partitioned by unique order ID. Next month traffic is expected to increase by a factor of 10 and a Solutions Architect is reviewing the architecture for possible scaling problems.
Which component is MOST likely to need re-architecting to be able to scale to accommodate the new traffic?

  • A. Lambda function
  • B. SQS queue
  • C. EC2 instance
  • D. DynamoDB table

C.
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

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Q5: An application requires a highly available relational database with an initial storage capacity of 8 TB. The database will grow by 8 GB every day. To support expected traffic, at least eight read replicas will be required to handle database reads.
Which option will meet these requirements?

  • A. DynamoDB
  • B. Amazon S3
  • C. Amazon Aurora
  • D. Amazon Redshift

C.
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

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Q6: How can you improve the performance of EFS?

  • A. Use an instance-store backed EC2 instance.
  • B. Provision more throughput than is required.
  • C. Divide your files system into multiple smaller file systems.
  • D. Provision higher IOPs for your EFS.

B.
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

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Q7:
If you are designing an application that requires fast (10 – 25Gbps), low-latency connections between EC2 instances, what EC2 feature should you use?

  • A. Snapshots
  • B. Instance store volumes
  • C. Placement groups
  • D. IOPS provisioned instances.

C.
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

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Q8: A Solutions Architect is designing an online shopping application running in a VPC on EC2 instances behind an ELB Application Load Balancer. The instances run in an Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. The application tier must read and write data to a customer managed database cluster. There should be no access to the database from the Internet, but the cluster must be able to obtain software patches from the Internet.

 

Which VPC design meets these requirements?

  • A. Public subnets for both the application tier and the database cluster
  • B. Public subnets for the application tier, and private subnets for the database cluster
  • C. Public subnets for the application tier and NAT Gateway, and private subnets for the database cluster
  • D. Public subnets for the application tier, and private subnets for the database cluster and NAT Gateway

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

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Q9: What command should you run on a running instance if you want to view its user data (that is used at launch)?

  • A. curl http://254.169.254.169/latest/user-data
  • B. curl http://localhost/latest/meta-data/bootstrap
  • C. curl http://localhost/latest/user-data
  • D. curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/user-data

Answer: D.
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

Get user data from AWS Ec2 running instance
Get user data from AWS Ec2 running instance

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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.
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

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Q11: From a security perspective, what is a principal?

  • A. An identity
  • B. An anonymous user 
  • C. An authenticated user
  • D. A resource
  • E. 

Answer: B. and C.

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

Q12: What are the characteristics of a tiered application?

  • A. All three application layers are on the same instance
  • B. The presentation tier is on an isolated instance than the logic layer
  • C. None of the tiers can be cloned
  • D. The logic layer is on an isolated instance than the data layer
  • E. Additional machines can be added to help the application by implementing horizontal scaling
  • F.  Incapable of horizontal scaling

Answer: B. D. and E.

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

Q13: When using horizontal scaling, how can a server’s capacity closely match it’s rising demand?

A. By frequently purchasing additional instances and smaller resources

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: A

Reference: AWS Horizontal Scaling

 

Q14: What is the concept behind AWS’ Well-Architected Framework?

A. It’s a set of best practice areas, principles, and concepts that can help you implement effective AWS solutions.

B. It’s a set of best practice areas, principles, and concepts that can help you implement effective solutions tailored to your specific business.

C. It’s a set of best practice areas, principles, and concepts that can help you implement effective solutions from another web host.

D. It’s a set of best practice areas, principles, and concepts that can help you implement effective E-Commerce solutions.

Answer: A.

 
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.

Answer: (A, B, D)
Reference: AWS Regions
Q16: Which is not one of the five pillars of a well-architected framework?

A. Reliability

B. Performance Efficiency

C. Structural Simplicity

D. Security

E. Operational Excellence

Answer: C

 

What are the 5 pillars of a well architected framework:
1. Operational Excellence
The operational excellence pillar includes the ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures. You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Operational Excellence Pillar whitepaper.

2. Security
The security pillar includes the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies. You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Security Pillar whitepaper.

 

 

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.

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.

 

 

Other AWS Facts and Summaries and Questions/Answers Dump

What means undifferentiated heavy lifting?

The reality, of course, today is that if you come up with a great idea you don’t get to go quickly to a successful product. There’s a lot of undifferentiated heavy lifting that stands between your idea and that success. The kinds of things that I’m talking about when I say undifferentiated heavy lifting are things like these: figuring out which servers to buy, how many of them to buy, what time line to buy them.

 

Eventually you end up with heterogeneous hardware and you have to match that. You have to think about backup scenarios if you lose your data center or lose connectivity to a data center. Eventually you have to move facilities. There’s negotiations to be done. It’s a very complex set of activities that really is a big driver of ultimate success.

 

But they are undifferentiated from, it’s not the heart of, your idea. We call this muck. And it gets worse because what really happens is you don’t have to do this one time. You have to drive this loop. After you get your first version of your idea out into the marketplace, you’ve done all that undifferentiated heavy lifting, you find out that you have to cycle back. Change your idea. The winners are the ones that can cycle this loop the fastest.

 

On every cycle of this loop you have this undifferentiated heavy lifting, or muck, that you have to contend with. I believe that for most companies, and it’s certainly true at Amazon, that 70% of your time, energy, and dollars go into the undifferentiated heavy lifting and only 30% of your energy, time, and dollars gets to go into the core kernel of your idea.

 

I think what people are excited about is that they’re going to get a chance they see a future where they may be able to invert those two. Where they may be able to spend 70% of their time, energy and dollars on the differentiated part of what they’re doing.

— Jeff Bezos, 2006