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Top 20 AWS Certified Associate SysOps Administrator Practice Quiz – Questions and Answers Dumps
What is the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate?
The AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C01) examination is intended for individuals who have technical expertise in deployment, management, and operations on AWS.
The AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam covers the following domains:
Question 1: Under which security model does AWS provide secure infrastructure and services, while the customer is responsible for secure operating systems, platforms, and data?
NOTES/HINT1: The Shared Responsibility Model is the security model under which AWS provides secure infrastructure and services, while the customer is responsible for secure operating systems, platforms, and data.
Question 2: Which type of testing method is used to compare a control system to a test system, with the goal of assessing whether changes applied to the test system improve a particular metric compared to the control system?
NOTES/HINT2: The side-by-side testing method is used to compare a control system to a test system, with the goal of assessing whether changes applied to the test system improve a particular metric compared to the control system.
Question 3: When BGP is used with a hardware VPN, the IPSec and the BGP connections must both be which of the following on the same user gateway device?
Question 4: Which pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework includes the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies?
NOTES/HINT4: Security is the pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework that includes the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies.
Question 6: Amazon VPC provides the option of creating a hardware VPN connection between remote customer networks and their Amazon VPC over the Internet using which encryption technology?
NOTES/HINT6: Amazon VPC provides the option of creating a hardware VPN connection between remote customer networks and their Amazon VPC over the Internet using IPsec encryption technology.
Question 8: Which pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework includes the ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve?
NOTES/HINT8: Performance efficiency is the pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework that includes the ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
Question 11: A company is migrating a legacy web application from a single server to multiple Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). After the migration, users report that they are frequently losing their sessions and are being prompted to log in again. Which action should be taken to resolve the issue reported by users?
A) Purchase Reserved Instances. B) Submit a request for a Spot block. C) Submit a request for all Spot Instances. D) Use a mixture of On-Demand and Spot Instances
NOTES/HINT11: Legacy applications designed to run on a single server frequently store session data locally. When these applications are deployed on multiple instances behind a load balancer, user requests are routed to instances using the round robin routing algorithm. Session data stored on one instance would not be present on the others. By enabling sticky sessions, cookies are used to track user requests and keep subsequent requests going to the same instance.
Question 12: An ecommerce company wants to lower costs on its nightly jobs that aggregate the current day’s sales and store the results in Amazon S3. The jobs run on multiple On-Demand Instances, and the jobs take just under 2 hours to complete. The jobs can run at any time during the night. If the job fails for any reason, it needs to be started from the beginning. Which solution is the MOST cost-effective based on these requirements?
NOTES/HINT12: The solution will take advantage of Spot pricing, but by using a Spot block instead of Spot Instances, the company can be assured the job will not be interrupted.
Question 13: A sysops team checks their AWS Personal Health Dashboard every week for upcoming AWS hardware maintenance events. Recently, a team member was on vacation and the team missed an event, which resulted in an outage. The team wants a simple method to ensure that everyone is aware of upcoming events without depending on an individual team member checking the dashboard. What should be done to address this?
A) Build a web scraper to monitor the Personal Health Dashboard. When new health events are detected, send a notification to an Amazon SNS topic monitored by the entire team.
B) Create an Amazon CloudWatch Events event based off the AWS Health service and send a notification to an Amazon SNS topic monitored by the entire team.
C) Create an Amazon CloudWatch Events event that sends a notification to an Amazon SNS topic monitored by the entire team to remind the team to view the maintenance events on the Personal Health Dashboard.
D) Create an AWS Lambda function that continuously pings all EC2 instances to confirm their health. Alert the team if this check fails.
NOTES/HINT13: The AWS Health service publishes Amazon CloudWatch Events. CloudWatch Events can trigger Amazon SNS notifications. This method requires neither additional coding nor infrastructure. It automatically notifies the team of upcoming events, and does not depend upon brittle solutions like web scraping.
Question14: An application running in a VPC needs to access instances owned by a different account and running in a VPC in a different AWS Region. For compliance purposes, the traffic must not traverse the public internet. How should a sysops administrator configure network routing to meet these requirements?
A) Within each account, create a custom routing table containing routes that point to the other account’s virtual private gateway.
B) Within each account, set up a NAT gateway in a public subnet in its respective VPC. Then, using the public IP address from the NAT gateway, enable routing between the two VPCs.
C) From one account, configure a Site-to-Site VPN connection between the VPCs. Within each account, add routes in the VPC route tables that point to the CIDR block of the remote VPC.
D) From one account, create a VPC peering request. After an administrator from the other account accepts the request, add routes in the route tables for each VPC that point to the CIDR block of the peered VPC.
NOTES/HINT14: A VPC peering connection enables routing using each VPC’s private IP addresses as if they were in the same network. Traffic using inter-Region VPC peering always stays on the global AWS backbone and never traverses the public internet.
Question15: An application running on Amazon EC2 instances needs to access data stored in an Amazon DynamoDB table.
Which solution will grant the application access to the table in the MOST secure manner?
A) Create an IAM group for the application and attach a permissions policy with the necessary privileges. Add the EC2 instances to the IAM group.
B) Create an IAM resource policy for the DynamoDB table that grants the necessary permissions to Amazon EC2.
C) Create an IAM role with the necessary privileges to access the DynamoDB table. Associate the role with the EC2 instances.
D) Create an IAM user for the application and attach a permissions policy with the necessary privileges. Generate an access key and embed the key in the application code.
NOTES/HINT15: An IAM role can be used to provide permissions for applications that are running on Amazon EC2 instances to make AWS API requests using temporary credentials.
Question16: A third-party service uploads objects to Amazon S3 every night. Occasionally, the service uploads an incorrectly formatted version of an object. In these cases, the sysops administrator needs to recover an older version of the object. What is the MOST efficient way to recover the object without having to retrieve it from the remote service?
A) Configure an Amazon CloudWatch Events scheduled event that triggers an AWS Lambda function that backs up the S3 bucket prior to the nightly job. When bad objects are discovered, restore the backed up version.
B) Create an S3 event on object creation that copies the object to an Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) cluster. When bad objects are discovered, retrieve the previous version from Amazon ES.
C) Create an AWS Lambda function that copies the object to an S3 bucket owned by a different account. Trigger the function when new objects are created in Amazon S3. When bad objects are discovered, retrieve the previous version from the other account.
D) Enable versioning on the S3 bucket. When bad objects are discovered, access previous versions with the AWS CLI or AWS Management Console.
NOTES/HINT16: Enabling versioning is a simple solution; (A) involves writing custom code, (C) has no versioning, so the replication will overwrite the old version with the bad version if the error is not discovered quickly, and (B) will involve expensive storage that is not well suited for objects.
Question17: According to the AWS shared responsibility model, for which of the following Amazon EC2 activities is AWS responsible? (Select TWO.) A) Configuring network ACLs B) Maintaining network infrastructure C) Monitoring memory utilization D) Patching the guest operating system E) Patching the hypervisor
NOTES/HINT17: AWS provides security of the cloud, including maintenance of the hardware and hypervisor software supporting Amazon EC2. Customers are responsible for any maintenance or monitoring within an EC2 instance, and for configuring their VPC infrastructure.
Question18: A security and compliance team requires that all Amazon EC2 workloads use approved Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). A sysops administrator must implement a process to find EC2 instances launched from unapproved AMIs.
Which solution will meet these requirements? A) Create a custom report using AWS Systems Manager inventory to identify unapproved AMIs. B) Run Amazon Inspector on each EC2 instance and flag the instance if it is using unapproved AMIs. C) Use an AWS Config rule to identify unapproved AMIs. D) Use AWS Trusted Advisor to identify the EC2 workloads using unapproved AMIs.
Question19: A sysops administrator observes a large number of rogue HTTP requests on an Application Load Balancer. The requests originate from various IP addresses. These requests cause increased server load and costs.
What should the administrator do to block this traffic? A) Install Amazon Inspector on Amazon EC2 instances to block the traffic. B) Use Amazon GuardDuty to protect the web servers from bots and scrapers. C) Use AWS Lambda to analyze the web server logs, detect bot traffic, and block the IP addresses in the security groups. D) Use an AWS WAF rate-based rule to block the traffic when it exceeds a threshold.
Question20: A sysops administrator is implementing security group policies for a web application running on AWS.
An Elastic Load Balancer connects to a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances that connect to an Amazon RDS database over port 1521. The security groups are named elbSG, ec2SG, and rdsSG, respectively. How should these security groups be implemented? A) elbSG: allow port 80 and 443 from 0.0.0.0/0; ec2SG: allow port 443 from elbSG; rdsSG: allow port 1521 from ec2SG.
B) elbSG: allow port 80 and 443 from 0.0.0.0/0; ec2SG: allow port 80 and 443 from elbSG and rdsSG; rdsSG: allow port 1521 from ec2SG.
C) elbSG: allow port 80 and 443 from ec2SG; ec2SG: allow port 80 and 443 from elbSG and rdsSG; rdsSG: allow port 1521 from ec2SG.
D) elbSG: allow port 80 and 443 from ec2SG; ec2SG: allow port 443 from elbSG; rdsSG: allow port 1521 from elbSG.
NOTES/HINT20: elbSG must allow all web traffic (HTTP and HTTPS) from the internet. ec2SG must allow traffic from the load balancer only, in this case identified as traffic from elbSG. The database must allow traffic from the EC2 instances only, in this case identified as traffic from ec2SG.
Question21: You are currently hosting multiple applications in a VPC and have logged numerous port scans coming in from a specific IP address block. Your security team has requested that all access from the offending IP address block be denied tor the next 24 hours. Which of the following is the best method to quickly and temporarily deny access from the specified IP address block.
A) Create an AD policy to modify Windows Firewall settings on all hosts in the VPC to deny access from the IP address block B) Modify the Network ACLs associated with all public subnets in the VPC to deny access from the IP address block C) Add a rule to all of the VPC 5 Security Groups to deny access from the IP address block D) Modify the Windows Firewall settings on all Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that your organization uses in that VPC to deny access from the IP address block
ANSWER21:
C
NOTES22: Add a rule to all of the VPC 5 Security Groups to deny access from the IP address bloc
Question 22: When preparing for a compliance assessment of your system built inside of AWS. what are three best-practices for you to prepare for an audit? Choose 3 answers
A) Gather evidence of your IT operational controls B) Request and obtain applicable third-party audited AWS compliance reports and certifications C) Request and obtain a compliance and security tour of an AWS data center for a pre-assessment security review D) Request and obtain approval from AWS to perform relevant network scans and in-depth penetration tests of your system’s Instances and endpoint E) Schedule meetings with AWS’s third-party auditors to provide evidence of AWS compliance that maps to your control objectives
Question23: You have started a new job and are reviewing your company’s infrastructure on AWS You notice one web application where they have an Elastic Load Balancer (&B) in front of web instances in an Auto Scaling Group When you check the metrics for the ELB in CloudWatch you see four healthy instances In Availability Zone (AZ) A and zero in AZ B There are zero unhealthy instances. What do you need to fix to balance the instances across AZs?
A) Set the ELB to only be attached to another AZ B) Make sure Auto Scaling is configured to launch in both AZs C) Make sure your AMI is available in both AZs D) Make sure the maximum size of the Auto Scaling Group is greater than 4
Question24: You have been asked to leverage Amazon VPC BC2 and SOS to implement an application that submits and receives millions of messages per second to a message queue. You want to ensure your application has sufficient bandwidth between your EC2 instances and SQS. Which option will provide (he most scalable solution for communicating between the application and SOS?
A) Ensure the application instances are properly configured with an Elastic Load Balancer B) Ensure the application instances are launched in private subnets with the EBS-optimized option enabled C) Ensure the application instances are launched in public subnets with the associate-publicIP-address=true option enabled D) Launch application instances in private subnets with an Auto Scaling group and Auto Scaling triggers configured to watch the SOS queue size
Question25: You have identified network throughput as a bottleneck on your ml small EC2 instance when uploading data Into Amazon S3 In the same region. How do you remedy this situation?
A) Add an additional ENI B) Change to a larger Instance C) Use DirectConnect between EC2 and S3 D) Use EBS PIOPS on the local volume
Question 27: Your application currently leverages AWS Auto Scaling to grow and shrink as load Increases’ decreases and has been performing well Your marketing team expects a steady ramp up in traffic to follow an upcoming campaign that will result in a 20x growth in traffic over 4 weeks Your forecast for the approximate number of Amazon EC2 instances necessary to meet the peak demand is 175. What should you do to avoid potential service disruptions during the ramp up in traffic?
A) Ensure that you have pre-allocated 175 Elastic IP addresses so that each server will be able to obtain one as it launches B) Check the service limits in Trusted Advisor and adjust as necessary so the forecasted count remains within limits C) Change your Auto Scaling configuration to set a desired capacity of 175 prior to the launch of the marketing campaign D) Pre-warm your Elastic Load Balancer to match the requests per second anticipated during peak demand prior to the marketing campaign ANSWER:
D.
NOTES: Pre-warm your Elastic Load Balancer to match the requests per second anticipated during peak demand prior to the marketing campaign Reference: AWS Auto Scaling
Question 28: You have an Auto Scaling group associated with an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). You have noticed that instances launched via the Auto Scaling group are being marked unhealthy due to an ELB health check, but these unhealthy instances are not being terminated. What do you need to do to ensure trial instances marked unhealthy by the ELB will be terminated and replaced?
A) Change the thresholds set on the Auto Scaling group health check B) Add an Elastic Load Balancing health check to your Auto Scaling group C) Increase the value for the Health check interval set on the Elastic Load Balancer D) Change the health check set on the Elastic Load Balancer to use TCP rather than HTTP checks ANSWER:
B.
NOTES: Add an Elastic Load Balancing Health Check to your Auto Scaling GroupBy default, an Auto Scaling group periodically reviews the results of EC2 instance status to determine the health state of each instance. However, if you have associated your Auto Scaling group with an Elastic Load Balancing load balancer, you can choose to use the Elastic Load Balancing health check. In this case, Auto Scaling determines the health status of your instances by checking the results of both the EC2 instance status check and the Elastic Load Balancing instance health check. Reference: AWS ELB
Question 29: Which two AWS services provide out-of-the-box user configurable automatic backup-as-a-service and backup rotation options? Choose 2 answers
A) Amazon S3 B) Amazon RDS C) Amazon EBS D) Amazon Redshift ANSWER:
C. D.
NOTES: EBS and Redshift Reference: EBS and Redshift ReferenceUrl: EBS and Redshift
Question 30: An organization has configured a VPC with an Internet Gateway (IGW). pairs of public and private subnets (each with one subnet per Availability Zone), and an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) configured to use the public subnets The application s web tier leverages the ELB. Auto Scaling and a mum-AZ RDS database instance The organization would like to eliminate any potential single points of failure in this design. What step should you take to achieve this organization’s objective?
A) Nothing, there are no single points of failure in this architecture. B) Create and attach a second IGW to provide redundant internet connectivity. C) Create and configure a second Elastic Load Balancer to provide a redundant load balancer. D) Create a second multi-AZ RDS instance in another Availability Zone and configure replication to provide a redundant database.
ANSWER:
C.
NOTES: Create and configure a second Elastic Load Balancer to provide a redundant load balancer.
Question 31: Which of the following are characteristics of Amazon VPC subnets? Choose 2 answers
A) Each subnet maps to a single Availability Zone B) A CIDR block mask of /25 is the smallest range supported C) Instances in a private subnet can communicate with the internet only if they have an Elastic IP. D) By default, all subnets can route between each other, whether they are private or public E) V Each subnet spans at least 2 Availability zones to provide a high-availability environment ANSWER:
Question 32: You are creating an Auto Scaling group whose Instances need to insert a custom metric into CloudWatch. Which method would be the best way to authenticate your CloudWatch PUT request?
A) Create an IAM role with the Put MetricData permission and modify the Auto Scaling launch configuration to launch instances in that role B) Create an IAM user with the PutMetricData permission and modify the Auto Scaling launch configuration to inject the userscredentials into the instance User Data C) Modify the appropriate Cloud Watch metric policies to allow the Put MetricData permission to instances from the Auto Scaling group D) Create an IAM user with the PutMetricData permission and put the credentials in a private repository and have applications on the server pull the credentials as needed
ANSWER:
B.
NOTES: Create an IAM user with the PutMetricData permission and modify the Auto Scaling launch configuration to inject the userscredentials into the instance User Data
Question 33: When an EC2 instance that is backed by an S3-based AMI Is terminated, what happens to the data on me root volume?
A) Data is automatically saved as an E8S volume. B) Data is automatically saved as an ESS snapshot. C) Data is automatically deleted. D) Data is unavailable until the instance is restarted. ANSWER:
D.
NOTES: Data is unavailable until the instance is restarted. Reference: AWS EC2 ReferenceUrl: AWS EC2 S3-based AMI
Question 34: You have a web application leveraging an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) In front of the web servers deployed using an Auto Scaling Group Your database is running on Relational Database Service (RDS) The application serves out technical articles and responses to them in general there are more views of an article than there are responses to the article. On occasion, an article on the site becomes extremely popular resulting in significant traffic Increases that causes the site to go down. What could you do to help alleviate the pressure on the infrastructure while maintaining availability during these events? Choose 3 answers
A) Leverage CloudFront for the delivery of the articles. B) Add RDS read-replicas for the read traffic going to your relational database C) Leverage ElastiCache for caching the most frequently used data. D) Use SOS to queue up the requests for the technical posts and deliver them out of the queue. E) Use Route53 health checks to fail over to an S3 bucket for an error page.
Question 35: The majority of your Infrastructure is on premises and you have a small footprint on AWS Your company has decided to roll out a new application that is heavily dependent on low latency connectivity to LOAP for authentication Your security policy requires minimal changes to the company’s existing application user management processes. What option would you implement to successfully launch this application1?
A) Create a second, independent LOAP server in AWS for your application to use for authentication B) Establish a VPN connection so your applications can authenticate against your existing on-premises LDAP servers C) Establish a VPN connection between your data center and AWS create a LDAP replica on AWS and configure your application to use the LDAP replica for authentication D) Create a second LDAP domain on AWS establish a VPN connection to establish a trust relationship between your new and existing domains and use the new domain for authentication
I was initially nervous about this exam compared to SAA-C02, due to the practical labs. However, they turned out to be really easy with lots of time to fumble about, delete & recreate resources.
My labs:
Create S3 buckets, set access logs, set default encryption with KMS and create a bunch of lifecycle policies
Create a VPC with public/private subnets, create SGs, create & send flow logs to an S3 bucket.
Connect Lambda to a VPC, use RDS proxy to connect to an RDS Database. Select correct execution role for the Lambda.
Exam lab experience
I did not have any negative experiences with the lab environment (I heard a lot of horror stories), however I did take the exam at a testing center.
When you register for your SOA-C02, you gain access (via Pearson VUE E-mail) to a free sample exam lab at Login – OneLearn Training Management System – Skillable – this is the exact same testing environment you will have during the actual exam. I highly recommend you do this, especially if you’re doing the exam from home – any issues you have with the testing environment like laggy interface, copy/paste issues, etc you’ll probably also have during the exam.
Study resources
My study resources were:
Adrian Cantrill’s course
Jon Bonso’s (TutorialDojo) Practice Exams
uacantril’s courses are the best, most high quality courses I’ve ever taken for any subject.
Since I’ve done the SAA-C02 course before doing the SOA-C02 course, I was able to easily skip the shared lessons & demos (there heavy overlap between these two exams) and focus on the SOA-C02 specific topics.
uTutorials_Dojo’s practice exams are 10/10 as preparation material. They were a bit more tricky (in a ‘gotcha’ kind of way) compared to the exam questions, but they were very close to the real thing.
Study methodology
My study plan was as follows:
Study Time: 7:00-9:00 (morning) Mon-Fri, which included:
Going through Adrian’s course
Detailed notes in markdown
Doing potential exam labs in AWS console
Reading AWS official documentation (in case something is not clear)
Review Notes regularly (once course material finished)
Practice Exams
Doing exams in review mode
Delving deeper into topics I was lacking in
This was the plan, but I turned out to be somewhat inconsistent, taking the exam 3 months later than planned due to being a new father and not focusing on just one thing (also did some Python learning during the same period). But, still a pass!
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