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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

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

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

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) exam is intended for individuals who perform in a solutions architect role.
The exam validates a candidate’s ability to use AWS technologies to design solutions based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

The exam also validates a candidate’s ability to complete the following tasks:
• Design solutions that incorporate AWS services to meet current business requirements and future projected needs
• Design architectures that are secure, resilient, high-performing, and cost-optimized
• Review existing solutions and determine improvements

Unscored content
The exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score.
AWS collects information about candidate performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored questions. These unscored questions are not identified on the exam.

Target candidate description
The target candidate should have at least 1 year of hands-on experience designing cloud solutions that use AWS services

Your results for the exam are reported as a scaled score of 100–1,000. The minimum passing score is 720.
Your score shows how you performed on the exam as a whole and whether or not you passed. Scaled scoring models help equate scores across multiple exam forms that might have slightly different difficulty levels.

Content outline:
Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures 30%
Domain 2: Design Resilient Architectures 26%
Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures 24%
Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures 20%

Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures
This exam domain is focused on securing your architectures on AWS and comprises 30% of the exam. Task statements include:

Task Statement 1: Design secure access to AWS resources.
Knowledge of:
• Access controls and management across multiple accounts
• AWS federated access and identity services (for example, AWS Identity and Access Management [IAM], AWS Single Sign-On [AWS SSO])
• AWS global infrastructure (for example, Availability Zones, AWS Regions)
• AWS security best practices (for example, the principle of least privilege)
• The AWS shared responsibility model

Skills in:
• Applying AWS security best practices to IAM users and root users (for example, multi-factor authentication [MFA])
• Designing a flexible authorization model that includes IAM users, groups, roles, and policies
• Designing a role-based access control strategy (for example, AWS Security Token Service [AWS STS], role switching, cross-account access)
• Designing a security strategy for multiple AWS accounts (for example, AWS Control Tower, service control policies [SCPs])
• Determining the appropriate use of resource policies for AWS services
• Determining when to federate a directory service with IAM roles

Task Statement 2: Design secure workloads and applications.

Knowledge of:
• Application configuration and credentials security
• AWS service endpoints
• Control ports, protocols, and network traffic on AWS
• Secure application access
• Security services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon Cognito, Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Macie)
• Threat vectors external to AWS (for example, DDoS, SQL injection)

Skills in:
• Designing VPC architectures with security components (for example, security groups, route tables, network ACLs, NAT gateways)
• Determining network segmentation strategies (for example, using public subnets and private subnets)
• Integrating AWS services to secure applications (for example, AWS Shield, AWS WAF, AWS SSO, AWS Secrets Manager)
• Securing external network connections to and from the AWS Cloud (for example, VPN, AWS Direct Connect)

Task Statement 3: Determine appropriate data security controls.

Knowledge of:
• Data access and governance
• Data recovery
• Data retention and classification
• Encryption and appropriate key management

Skills in:
• Aligning AWS technologies to meet compliance requirements
• Encrypting data at rest (for example, AWS Key Management Service [AWS KMS])
• Encrypting data in transit (for example, AWS Certificate Manager [ACM] using TLS)
• Implementing access policies for encryption keys
• Implementing data backups and replications
• Implementing policies for data access, lifecycle, and protection
• Rotating encryption keys and renewing certificates

Domain 2: Design Resilient Architectures
This exam domain is focused on designing resilient architectures on AWS and comprises 26% of the exam. Task statements include:

Task Statement 1: Design scalable and loosely coupled architectures.
Knowledge of:
• API creation and management (for example, Amazon API Gateway, REST API)
• AWS managed services with appropriate use cases (for example, AWS Transfer Family, Amazon
Simple Queue Service [Amazon SQS], Secrets Manager)
• Caching strategies
• Design principles for microservices (for example, stateless workloads compared with stateful workloads)
• Event-driven architectures
• Horizontal scaling and vertical scaling
• How to appropriately use edge accelerators (for example, content delivery network [CDN])
• How to migrate applications into containers
• Load balancing concepts (for example, Application Load Balancer)
• Multi-tier architectures
• Queuing and messaging concepts (for example, publish/subscribe)
• Serverless technologies and patterns (for example, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda)
• Storage types with associated characteristics (for example, object, file, block)
• The orchestration of containers (for example, Amazon Elastic Container Service [Amazon ECS],Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service [Amazon EKS])
• When to use read replicas
• Workflow orchestration (for example, AWS Step Functions)

Skills in:
• Designing event-driven, microservice, and/or multi-tier architectures based on requirements
• Determining scaling strategies for components used in an architecture design
• Determining the AWS services required to achieve loose coupling based on requirements
• Determining when to use containers
• Determining when to use serverless technologies and patterns
• Recommending appropriate compute, storage, networking, and database technologies based on requirements
• Using purpose-built AWS services for workloads

Task Statement 2: Design highly available and/or fault-tolerant architectures.
Knowledge of:
• AWS global infrastructure (for example, Availability Zones, AWS Regions, Amazon Route 53)
• AWS managed services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Polly)
• Basic networking concepts (for example, route tables)
• Disaster recovery (DR) strategies (for example, backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby,
active-active failover, recovery point objective [RPO], recovery time objective [RTO])
• Distributed design patterns
• Failover strategies
• Immutable infrastructure
• Load balancing concepts (for example, Application Load Balancer)
• Proxy concepts (for example, Amazon RDS Proxy)
• Service quotas and throttling (for example, how to configure the service quotas for a workload in a standby environment)
• Storage options and characteristics (for example, durability, replication)
• Workload visibility (for example, AWS X-Ray)

Skills in:
• Determining automation strategies to ensure infrastructure integrity
• Determining the AWS services required to provide a highly available and/or fault-tolerant architecture across AWS Regions or Availability Zones
• Identifying metrics based on business requirements to deliver a highly available solution
• Implementing designs to mitigate single points of failure
• Implementing strategies to ensure the durability and availability of data (for example, backups)
• Selecting an appropriate DR strategy to meet business requirements
• Using AWS services that improve the reliability of legacy applications and applications not built for the cloud (for example, when application changes are not possible)
• Using purpose-built AWS services for workloads

Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures
This exam domain is focused on designing high-performing architectures on AWS and comprises 24% of the exam. Task statements include:

Task Statement 1: Determine high-performing and/or scalable storage solutions.

Knowledge of:
• Hybrid storage solutions to meet business requirements
• Storage services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic File System [Amazon EFS], Amazon Elastic Block Store [Amazon EBS])
• Storage types with associated characteristics (for example, object, file, block)

Skills in:
• Determining storage services and configurations that meet performance demands
• Determining storage services that can scale to accommodate future needs

Task Statement 2: Design high-performing and elastic compute solutions.
Knowledge of:
• AWS compute services with appropriate use cases (for example, AWS Batch, Amazon EMR, Fargate)
• Distributed computing concepts supported by AWS global infrastructure and edge services
• Queuing and messaging concepts (for example, publish/subscribe)
• Scalability capabilities with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, AWS Auto Scaling)
• Serverless technologies and patterns (for example, Lambda, Fargate)
• The orchestration of containers (for example, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS)

Skills in:
• Decoupling workloads so that components can scale independently
• Identifying metrics and conditions to perform scaling actions
• Selecting the appropriate compute options and features (for example, EC2 instance types) to meet business requirements
• Selecting the appropriate resource type and size (for example, the amount of Lambda memory) to meet business requirements

Task Statement 3: Determine high-performing database solutions.
Knowledge of:
• AWS global infrastructure (for example, Availability Zones, AWS Regions)
• Caching strategies and services (for example, Amazon ElastiCache)
• Data access patterns (for example, read-intensive compared with write-intensive)
• Database capacity planning (for example, capacity units, instance types, Provisioned IOPS)
• Database connections and proxies
• Database engines with appropriate use cases (for example, heterogeneous migrations, homogeneous migrations)
• Database replication (for example, read replicas)
• Database types and services (for example, serverless, relational compared with non-relational, in-memory)

Skills in:
• Configuring read replicas to meet business requirements
• Designing database architectures
• Determining an appropriate database engine (for example, MySQL compared with
PostgreSQL)
• Determining an appropriate database type (for example, Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB)
• Integrating caching to meet business requirements

Task Statement 4: Determine high-performing and/or scalable network architectures.
Knowledge of:
• Edge networking services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator)
• How to design network architecture (for example, subnet tiers, routing, IP addressing)
• Load balancing concepts (for example, Application Load Balancer)
• Network connection options (for example, AWS VPN, Direct Connect, AWS PrivateLink)

Skills in:
• Creating a network topology for various architectures (for example, global, hybrid, multi-tier)
• Determining network configurations that can scale to accommodate future needs
• Determining the appropriate placement of resources to meet business requirements
• Selecting the appropriate load balancing strategy

Task Statement 5: Determine high-performing data ingestion and transformation solutions.
Knowledge of:
• Data analytics and visualization services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon Athena, AWS Lake Formation, Amazon QuickSight)
• Data ingestion patterns (for example, frequency)
• Data transfer services with appropriate use cases (for example, AWS DataSync, AWS Storage Gateway)
• Data transformation services with appropriate use cases (for example, AWS Glue)
• Secure access to ingestion access points
• Sizes and speeds needed to meet business requirements
• Streaming data services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon Kinesis)

Skills in:
• Building and securing data lakes
• Designing data streaming architectures
• Designing data transfer solutions
• Implementing visualization strategies
• Selecting appropriate compute options for data processing (for example, Amazon EMR)
• Selecting appropriate configurations for ingestion
• Transforming data between formats (for example, .csv to .parquet)

Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
This exam domain is focused optimizing solutions for cost-effectiveness on AWS and comprises 20% of the exam. Task statements include:

Task Statement 1: Design cost-optimized storage solutions.
Knowledge of:
• Access options (for example, an S3 bucket with Requester Pays object storage)
• AWS cost management service features (for example, cost allocation tags, multi-account billing)
• AWS cost management tools with appropriate use cases (for example, AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, AWS Cost and Usage Report)
• AWS storage services with appropriate use cases (for example, Amazon FSx, Amazon EFS, Amazon S3, Amazon EBS)
• Backup strategies
• Block storage options (for example, hard disk drive [HDD] volume types, solid state drive [SSD] volume types)
• Data lifecycles
• Hybrid storage options (for example, DataSync, Transfer Family, Storage Gateway)
• Storage access patterns
• Storage tiering (for example, cold tiering for object storage)
• Storage types with associated characteristics (for example, object, file, block)

Skills in:
• Designing appropriate storage strategies (for example, batch uploads to Amazon S3 compared with individual uploads)
• Determining the correct storage size for a workload
• Determining the lowest cost method of transferring data for a workload to AWS storage
• Determining when storage auto scaling is required
• Managing S3 object lifecycles
• Selecting the appropriate backup and/or archival solution
• Selecting the appropriate service for data migration to storage services
• Selecting the appropriate storage tier
• Selecting the correct data lifecycle for storage
• Selecting the most cost-effective storage service for a workload

Task Statement 2: Design cost-optimized compute solutions.
Knowledge of:
• AWS cost management service features (for example, cost allocation tags, multi-account billing)
• AWS cost management tools with appropriate use cases (for example, Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, AWS Cost and Usage Report)
• AWS global infrastructure (for example, Availability Zones, AWS Regions)
• AWS purchasing options (for example, Spot Instances, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans)
• Distributed compute strategies (for example, edge processing)
• Hybrid compute options (for example, AWS Outposts, AWS Snowball Edge)
• Instance types, families, and sizes (for example, memory optimized, compute optimized, virtualization)
• Optimization of compute utilization (for example, containers, serverless computing, microservices)
• Scaling strategies (for example, auto scaling, hibernation)

Skills in:
• Determining an appropriate load balancing strategy (for example, Application Load Balancer [Layer 7] compared with Network Load Balancer [Layer 4] compared with Gateway Load Balancer)
• Determining appropriate scaling methods and strategies for elastic workloads (for example, horizontal compared with vertical, EC2 hibernation)
• Determining cost-effective AWS compute services with appropriate use cases (for example, Lambda, Amazon EC2, Fargate)
• Determining the required availability for different classes of workloads (for example, production workloads, non-production workloads)
• Selecting the appropriate instance family for a workload
• Selecting the appropriate instance size for a workload

Task Statement 3: Design cost-optimized database solutions.
Knowledge of:
• AWS cost management service features (for example, cost allocation tags, multi-account billing)
• AWS cost management tools with appropriate use cases (for example, Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, AWS Cost and Usage Report)
• Caching strategies
• Data retention policies
• Database capacity planning (for example, capacity units)
• Database connections and proxies
• Database engines with appropriate use cases (for example, heterogeneous migrations, homogeneous migrations)
• Database replication (for example, read replicas)
• Database types and services (for example, relational compared with non-relational, Aurora, DynamoDB)

Skills in:
• Designing appropriate backup and retention policies (for example, snapshot frequency)
• Determining an appropriate database engine (for example, MySQL compared with PostgreSQL)
• Determining cost-effective AWS database services with appropriate use cases (for example, DynamoDB compared with Amazon RDS, serverless)
• Determining cost-effective AWS database types (for example, time series format, columnar format)
• Migrating database schemas and data to different locations and/or different database engines

Task Statement 4: Design cost-optimized network architectures.
Knowledge of:
• AWS cost management service features (for example, cost allocation tags, multi-account billing)
• AWS cost management tools with appropriate use cases (for example, Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, AWS Cost and Usage Report)
• Load balancing concepts (for example, Application Load Balancer)
• NAT gateways (for example, NAT instance costs compared with NAT gateway costs)
• Network connectivity (for example, private lines, dedicated lines, VPNs)
• Network routing, topology, and peering (for example, AWS Transit Gateway, VPC peering)
• Network services with appropriate use cases (for example, DNS)

Skills in:
• Configuring appropriate NAT gateway types for a network (for example, a single shared NAT
gateway compared with NAT gateways for each Availability Zone)
• Configuring appropriate network connections (for example, Direct Connect compared with VPN compared with internet)
• Configuring appropriate network routes to minimize network transfer costs (for example, Region to Region, Availability Zone to Availability Zone, private to public, Global Accelerator, VPC endpoints)
• Determining strategic needs for content delivery networks (CDNs) and edge caching
• Reviewing existing workloads for network optimizations
• Selecting an appropriate throttling strategy
• Selecting the appropriate bandwidth allocation for a network device (for example, a single VPN compared with multiple VPNs, Direct Connect speed)

Which key tools, technologies, and concepts might be covered on the exam?
The following is a non-exhaustive list of the tools and technologies that could appear on the exam.
This list is subject to change and is provided to help you understand the general scope of services, features, or technologies on the exam.
The general tools and technologies in this list appear in no particular order.
AWS services are grouped according to their primary functions. While some of these technologies will likely be covered more than others on the exam, the order and placement of them in this list is no indication of relative weight or importance:
• Compute
• Cost management
• Database
• Disaster recovery
• High performance
• Management and governance
• Microservices and component decoupling
• Migration and data transfer
• Networking, connectivity, and content delivery
• Resiliency
• Security
• Serverless and event-driven design principles
• Storage

AWS Services and Features
There are lots of new services and feature updates in scope for the new AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate certification! Here’s a list of some of the new services that will be in scope for the new version of the exam:

Analytics:
• Amazon Athena
• AWS Data Exchange
• AWS Data Pipeline
• Amazon EMR
• AWS Glue
• Amazon Kinesis
• AWS Lake Formation
• Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)
• Amazon OpenSearch Service (Amazon Elasticsearch Service)
• Amazon QuickSight
• Amazon Redshift

Application Integration:
• Amazon AppFlow
• AWS AppSync
• Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events)
• Amazon MQ
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
• AWS Step Functions

AWS Cost Management:
• AWS Budgets
• AWS Cost and Usage Report
• AWS Cost Explorer
• Savings Plans

Compute:
• AWS Batch
• Amazon EC2
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk
• AWS Outposts
• AWS Serverless Application Repository
• VMware Cloud on AWS
• AWS Wavelength

Containers:
• Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR)
• Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
• Amazon ECS Anywhere
• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)
• Amazon EKS Anywhere
• Amazon EKS Distro

Database:
• Amazon Aurora
• Amazon Aurora Serverless
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)
• Amazon DynamoDB
• Amazon ElastiCache
• Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)
• Amazon Neptune
• Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB)
• Amazon RDS
• Amazon Redshift
• Amazon Timestream

Developer Tools:
• AWS X-Ray

Front-End Web and Mobile:
• AWS Amplify
• Amazon API Gateway
• AWS Device Farm
• Amazon Pinpoint

Machine Learning:
• Amazon Comprehend
• Amazon Forecast
• Amazon Fraud Detector
• Amazon Kendra
• Amazon Lex
• Amazon Polly
• Amazon Rekognition
• Amazon SageMaker
• Amazon Textract
• Amazon Transcribe
• Amazon Translate

Management and Governance:
• AWS Auto Scaling
• AWS CloudFormation
• AWS CloudTrail
• Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI)
• AWS Compute Optimizer
• AWS Config
• AWS Control Tower
• AWS License Manager
• Amazon Managed Grafana
• Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus
• AWS Management Console
• AWS Organizations
• AWS Personal Health Dashboard
• AWS Proton
• AWS Service Catalog
• AWS Systems Manager
• AWS Trusted Advisor
• AWS Well-Architected Tool

Media Services:
• Amazon Elastic Transcoder
• Amazon Kinesis Video Streams

Migration and Transfer:
• AWS Application Discovery Service
• AWS Application Migration Service (CloudEndure Migration)
• AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)
• AWS DataSync
• AWS Migration Hub
• AWS Server Migration Service (AWS SMS)
• AWS Snow Family
• AWS Transfer Family

Networking and Content Delivery:
• Amazon CloudFront
• AWS Direct Connect
• Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
• AWS Global Accelerator
• AWS PrivateLink
• Amazon Route 53
• AWS Transit Gateway
• Amazon VPC
• AWS VPN

Security, Identity, and Compliance:
• AWS Artifact
• AWS Audit Manager
• AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)
• AWS CloudHSM
• Amazon Cognito
• Amazon Detective
• AWS Directory Service
• AWS Firewall Manager
• Amazon GuardDuty
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• Amazon Inspector
• AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)
• Amazon Macie
• AWS Network Firewall
• AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM)
• AWS Secrets Manager
• AWS Security Hub
• AWS Shield
• AWS Single Sign-On
• AWS WAF

Serverless:
• AWS AppSync
• AWS Fargate
• AWS Lambda

Storage:
• AWS Backup
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
• Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
• Amazon FSx (for all types)
• Amazon S3
• Amazon S3 Glacier
• AWS Storage Gateway

Out-of-scope AWS services and features
The following is a non-exhaustive list of AWS services and features that are not covered on the exam.
These services and features do not represent every AWS offering that is excluded from the exam content.

Analytics:
• Amazon CloudSearch

Application Integration:
• Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (Amazon MWAA)

AR and VR:
• Amazon Sumerian

Blockchain:
• Amazon Managed Blockchain

Compute:
• Amazon Lightsail

Database:
• Amazon RDS on VMware

Developer Tools:
• AWS Cloud9
• AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK)
• AWS CloudShell
• AWS CodeArtifact
• AWS CodeBuild
• AWS CodeCommit
• AWS CodeDeploy
• Amazon CodeGuru
• AWS CodeStar
• Amazon Corretto
• AWS Fault Injection Simulator (AWS FIS)
• AWS Tools and SDKs

Front-End Web and Mobile:
• Amazon Location Service

Game Tech:
• Amazon GameLift
• Amazon Lumberyard
Internet of Things:
• All services

Which new AWS services will be covered in the SAA-C03?
AWS Data Exchange,
AWS Data Pipeline,
AWS Lake Formation,
Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka,
Amazon AppFlow,
AWS Outposts,
VMware Cloud on AWS,
AWS Wavelength,
Amazon Neptune,
Amazon Quantum Ledger Database,
Amazon Timestream,
AWS Amplify,
Amazon Comprehend,
Amazon Forecast,
Amazon Fraud Detector,
Amazon Kendra,
AWS License Manager,
Amazon Managed Grafana,
Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus,
AWS Proton,
Amazon Elastic Transcoder,
Amazon Kinesis Video Streams,
AWS Application Discovery Service,
AWS WAF Serverless,
AWS AppSync,

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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.

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 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.

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Reference: AWS Solution Architect Associate Exam Prep

Top 100 AWS Solution Architect Associate Exam Prep Questions and Answers Dump – SAA-C03

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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Q8: A Solution 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

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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

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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

Show Answer

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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

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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

Show Answer

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

Show Answer

Answer: A.

 

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

Show Answer

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

Show Answer

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.

Show Answer

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.

Show Answer

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.

Show Answer

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.

Show Answer

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).

Show Answer

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.

Show Answer

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.

Show Answer

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

Show Answer

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.

Show Answer

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/

Show Answer

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.

Show Answer

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

Show Answer

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

Show Answer

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

Show Answer

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

Show Answer

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.

Show Answer

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.

Show Answer

Q34: After several issues with your application and unplanned downtime, your recommendation to migrate your application to AWS is approved. You have set up high availability on the front end with a load balancer and an Auto Scaling Group. What step can you take with your database to configure high-availability and ensure minimal downtime (under five minutes)?

A. Create a read replica.

B. Enable Multi-AZ failover on the database.

C. Take frequent snapshots of your database.

D. Create your database using CloudFormation and save the template for reuse.

Show Answer

Q35: A new startup is considering the advantages of using DynamoDB versus a traditional relational database in AWS RDS. The NoSQL nature of DynamoDB presents a small learning curve to the team members who all have experience with traditional databases. The company will have multiple databases, and the decision will be made on a case-by-case basis. Which of the following use cases would favour DynamoDB? Select two.

A. Strong referential integrity between tables

B. Storing BLOB data

C. Storing infrequently accessed data

D. Managing web session data

E. Storing metadata for S3 objects

Show Answer

Q36: You have been tasked with designing a strategy for backing up EBS volumes attached to an instance-store-backed EC2 instance. You have been asked for an executive summary on your design, and the executive summary should include an answer to the question, “What can an EBS volume do when snapshotting the volume is in progress”?

A. The volume can be used normally while the snapshot is in progress.

B. The volume can only accommodate writes while a snapshot is in progress.

C. The volume can not be used while a snapshot is in progress.

D. The volume can only accommodate reads while a snapshot is in progress.

Show Answer

Q37: You are working as a Solutions Architect in a large healthcare organization. You have many Auto Scaling Groups that you need to create. One requirement is that you need to reuse some software licenses and therefore need to use dedicated hosts on EC2 instances in your Auto Scaling Groups. What step must you take to meet this requirement?

A. Create your launch configuration, but manually change the instances to Dedicated Hosts in the EC2 console.

B. Use a launch template with your Auto Scaling Group.

C. Create the Dedicated Host EC2 instances, then add them to an existing Auto Scaling Group.

D. Make sure your launch configurations are using Dedicated Hosts.

Show Answer

Q38: Your organization uses AWS CodeDeploy for deployments. Now you are starting a project on the AWS Lambda platform. For your deployments, you’ve been given a requirement of performing blue-green deployments. When you perform deployments, you want to split traffic, sending a small percentage of the traffic to the new version of your application. Which deployment configuration will allow this splitting of traffic?

A. Canary

B. All at Once

C. Linear

D. Weighted routing

Show Answer

Q39: A financial institution has an application that produces huge amounts of actuary data, which is ultimately expected to be in the terabyte range. There is a need to run complex analytic queries against terabytes of structured data, using sophisticated query optimization, columnar storage on high-performance storage, and massively parallel query execution. Which storage service will best meet this requirement?

A. RDS

B. DynamoDB

C. Redshift

D. ElastiCache

Show Answer

Q40: A company has an application for sharing static content, such as photos. The popularity of the application has grown, and the company is now sharing content worldwide. This worldwide service has caused some issues with latency. What AWS services can be used to host a static website, serve content to globally dispersed users, and address latency issues, while keeping cost under control? Choose two.

A. EC2 placement group

B. S3

C. Cloudfront

D. AWS Global Accelerator

E. AWS CloudFormation

Show Answer

Q41: You have just been hired by a large organization which uses many different AWS services in their environment. Some of the services which handle data include: RDS, Redshift, ElastiCache, DynamoDB, S3, and Glacier. You have been instructed to configure a web application using stateless web servers. Which services can you use to handle session state data? Choose two.

A. RDS

B. Glacier

C. Redshift

D. Elasticache

E. DynamoDB

Show Answer

Q42: 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 based on the requirements you are given. Your primary requirement is the necessity for a private, dedicated connection, which bypasses the Internet and can provide throughput of 10 Gbps. Which option will you select?

A. AWS Direct Connect

B. VPC Peering

C. AWS VPN

D. AWS Direct Gateway

Show Answer

Q43: An application is hosted on an EC2 instance in a VPC. The instance is in a subnet in the VPC, and the instance has a public IP address. There is also an internet gateway and a security group with the proper ingress configured. But your testers are unable to access the instance from the Internet. What could be the problem?

A. Make sure the instance has a private IP address.

B. Add a route to the route table, from the subnet containing the instance, to the Internet Gateway.

C. A NAT gateway needs to be configured.

D. A Virtual private gateway needs to be configured.

Show Answer

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

Show Answer

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

Show Answer

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.

Show Answer

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

Show Answer

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

Show Answer

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.

Show Answer

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

Show Answer

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.

Show Answer

Q52: A software gaming company has produced an online racing game which uses CloudFront for fast delivery to worldwide users. The game also uses DynamoDB for storing in-game and historical user data. The DynamoDB table has a preconfigured read and write capacity. Users have been reporting slow down issues, and an analysis has revealed that the DynamoDB table has begun throttling during peak traffic times. Which step can you take to improve game performance?

A. Add a load balancer in front of the web servers.

B. Add ElastiCache to cache frequently accessed data in memory.

C. Add an SQS Queue to queue requests which could be lost.

D. Make sure DynamoDB Auto Scaling is turned on.

Show Answer

Q53: You have configured an Auto Scaling Group of EC2 instances. You have begun testing the scaling of the Auto Scaling Group using a stress tool to force the CPU utilization metric being used to force scale out actions. The stress tool is also being manipulated by removing stress to force a scale in. But you notice that these actions are only taking place in five-minute intervals. What is happening?

A. Auto Scaling Groups can only scale in intervals of five minutes or greater.

B. The Auto Scaling Group is following the default cooldown procedure.

C. A load balancer is managing the load and limiting the effectiveness of stressing the servers.

D. The stress tool is configured to run for five minutes.

Show Answer

Q54: A team of architects is designing a new AWS environment for a company which wants to migrate to the Cloud. The architects are considering the use of EC2 instances with instance store volumes. The architects realize that the data on the instance store volumes are ephemeral. Which action will not cause the data to be deleted on an instance store volume?

A. Reboot

B. The underlying disk drive fails.

C. Hardware disk failure.

D. Instance is stopped

Show Answer

Q55: You work for an advertising company that has a real-time bidding application. You are also using CloudFront on the front end to accommodate a worldwide user base. Your users begin complaining about response times and pauses in real-time bidding. Which service can be used to reduce DynamoDB response times by an order of magnitude (milliseconds to microseconds)?

A. DAX

B. DynamoDB Auto Scaling

C. Elasticache

D. CloudFront Edge Caches

Show Answer

Answer: iOS – Android

Notes: Amazon RDS Read Replicas provide enhanced performance and durability for RDS database (DB) instances. They make it easy to elastically scale out beyond the capacity constraints of a single DB instance for read-heavy database workloads. You can create one or more replicas of a given source DB Instance and serve high-volume application read traffic from multiple copies of your data, thereby increasing aggregate read throughput. Read replicas can also be promoted when needed to become standalone DB instances. Read replicas are available in Amazon RDS for MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server as well as Amazon Aurora.

References: Amazon RDS Read Replicas

Answers: D

Notes: Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully-managed cloud data warehouse that makes it simple and cost-effective to analyze all your data using standard SQL and your existing Business Intelligence (BI) tools. It allows you to run complex analytic queries against terabytes to petabytes of structured data, using sophisticated query optimization, columnar storage on high-performance storage, and massively parallel query execution. Most results come back in seconds. With Redshift, you can start small for just $0.25 per hour with no commitments and scale out to petabytes of data for $1,000 per terabyte per year, less than a tenth the cost of traditional on-premises solutions. Amazon Redshift also includes Amazon Redshift Spectrum, allowing you to run SQL queries directly against exabytes of unstructured data in Amazon S3 data lakes. No loading or transformation is required, and you can use open data formats, including Avro, CSV, Grok, Amazon Ion, JSON, ORC, Parquet, RCFile, RegexSerDe, Sequence, Text, and TSV. Redshift Spectrum automatically scales query compute capacity based on the data retrieved, so queries against Amazon S3 run fast, regardless of data set size.

References: Redshift

Answers: C

Notes: Network Load Balancer Overview: A Network Load Balancer functions at the fourth layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. It can handle millions of requests per second. After the load balancer receives a connection request, it selects a target from the target group for the default rule. It attempts to open a TCP connection to the selected target on the port specified in the listener configuration. When you enable an Availability Zone for the load balancer, Elastic Load Balancing creates a load balancer node in the Availability Zone. By default, each load balancer node distributes traffic across the registered targets in its Availability Zone only. If you enable cross-zone load balancing, each load balancer node distributes traffic across the registered targets in all enabled Availability Zones. It is designed to handle tens of millions of requests per second while maintaining high throughput at ultra low latency, with no effort on your part. The Network Load Balancer is API-compatible with the Application Load Balancer, including full programmatic control of Target Groups and Targets. Here are some of the most important features:

• Static IP Addresses – Each Network Load Balancer provides a single IP address for each Availability Zone in its purview. If you have targets in us-west-2a and other targets in us-west-2c, NLB will create and manage two IP addresses (one per AZ); connections to that IP address will spread traffic across the instances in all the VPC subnets in the AZ. You can also specify an existing Elastic IP for each AZ for even greater control. With full control over your IP addresses, a Network Load Balancer can be used in situations where IP addresses need to be hard-coded into DNS records, customer firewall rules, and so forth.
• Zonality – The IP-per-AZ feature reduces latency with improved performance, improves availability through isolation and fault tolerance, and makes the use of Network Load Balancers transparent to your client applications. Network Load Balancers also attempt to route a series of requests from a particular source to targets in a single AZ while still providing automatic failover should those targets become unavailable.
• Source Address Preservation – With Network Load Balancer, the original source IP address and source ports for the incoming connections remain unmodified, so application software need not support X-Forwarded-For, proxy protocol, or other workarounds. This also means that normal firewall rules, including VPC Security Groups, can be used on targets.
• Long-running Connections – NLB handles connections with built-in fault tolerance, and can handle connections that are open for months or years, making them a great fit for IoT, gaming, and messaging applications.
• Failover – Powered by Route 53 health checks, NLB supports failover between IP addresses within and across regions.

References: Network Load Balancer

Answer: iOS – Android

Notes: You manage access in AWS by creating policies and attaching them to IAM identities (users, groups of users, or roles) or AWS resources. A policy is an object in AWS that, when associated with an identity or resource, defines their permissions. AWS evaluates these policies when an IAM principal (user or role) makes a request. Permissions in the policies determine whether the request is allowed or denied. Most policies are stored in AWS as JSON documents. AWS supports six types of policies: identity-based policies, resource-based policies, permissions boundaries, Organizations SCPs, ACLs, and session policies. IAM policies define permissions for an action regardless of the method that you use to perform the operation. For example, if a policy allows the GetUser action, then a user with that policy can get user information from the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS API. When you create an IAM user, you can choose to allow console or programmatic access. If console access is allowed, the IAM user can sign in to the console using a user name and password. Or if programmatic access is allowed, the user can use access keys to work with the CLI or API.

References: IAM Access Policy

Answers: C

Notes: The Amazon S3 notification feature enables you to receive notifications when certain events happen in your bucket. To enable notifications, you must first add a notification configuration that identifies the events you want Amazon S3 to publish and the destinations where you want Amazon S3 to send the notifications. An S3 notification can be set up to notify you when objects are restored from Glacier to S3.

References: S3 notifications

Answers: D

Notes: You can configure your application to use the KMS API to encrypt all data before saving it to disk. This link details how to choose an encryption service for various use cases:

References: AWS KMS

Answer: iOS – Android

Notes: The rules of a security group control the inbound traffic that’s allowed to reach the instances that are associated with the security group. The rules also control the outbound traffic that’s allowed to leave them. The following are the characteristics of security group rules:

• By default, security groups allow all outbound traffic.
• Security group rules are always permissive; you can’t create rules that deny access.
• Security groups are stateful. If you send a request from your instance, the response traffic for that request is allowed to flow in regardless of inbound security group rules. For VPC security groups, this also means that responses to allowed inbound traffic are allowed to flow out, regardless of outbound rules. For more information, see Connection tracking.
• You can add and remove rules at any time. Your changes are automatically applied to the instances that are associated with the security group. The effect of some rule changes can depend on how the traffic is tracked. For more information, see Connection tracking. When you associate multiple security groups with an instance, the rules from each security group are effectively aggregated to create one set of rules. Amazon EC2 uses this set of rules to determine whether to allow access. You can assign multiple security groups to an instance. Therefore, an instance can have hundreds of rules that apply. This might cause problems when you access the instance. We recommend that you condense your rules as much as possible.

References: Security Groups Rules

Answers: D

Notes: Your VPC includes a default security group. You can’t delete this group, however, you can change the group’s rules. The procedure is the same as modifying any other security group. For more information, see Adding, removing, and updating rules.

References: VPC Security Groups

Answer: iOS – Android

Notes: Network ACLs are stateless, which means that responses to allowed inbound traffic are subject to the rules for outbound traffic (and vice versa).

The following are the basic characteristics of security groups for your VPC:

• There are quotas on the number of security groups that you can create per VPC, the number of rules that you can add to each security group, and the number of security groups that you can associate with a network interface. For more information, see Amazon VPC quotas.
• You can specify allow rules, but not deny rules.
• You can specify separate rules for inbound and outbound traffic.
• When you create a security group, it has no inbound rules. Therefore, no inbound traffic originating from another host to your instance is allowed until you add inbound rules to the security group.
• By default, a security group includes an outbound rule that allows all outbound traffic. You can remove the rule and add outbound rules that allow specific outbound traffic only. If your security group has no outbound rules, no outbound traffic originating from your instance is allowed.
• Security groups are stateful. If you send a request from your instance, the response traffic for that request is allowed to flow in regardless of inbound security group rules. Responses to allowed inbound traffic are allowed to flow out, regardless of outbound rules.
• References: VPC Security Groups – NACL

Answers: B

Notes: AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) is the service that you can use to create and provide trusted users with temporary security credentials that can control access to your AWS resources. Temporary security credentials work almost identically to the long-term access key credentials that your IAM users can use. You can use the AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) to create and provide trusted users with temporary security credentials that can control access to your AWS resources. Temporary security credentials work almost identically to the long-term access key credentials that your IAM users can use, with the following differences: Temporary security credentials are short-term, as the name implies. They can be configured to last for anywhere from a few minutes to several hours. After the credentials expire, AWS no longer recognizes them or allows any kind of access from API requests made with them. Temporary security credentials are not stored with the user but are generated dynamically and provided to the user when requested. When (or even before) the temporary security credentials expire, the user can request new credentials, as long as the user requesting them still has permissions to do so.

References: AWS STS

Answer: iOS – Android

Notes: A VPC spans all the Availability Zones in the region. After creating a VPC, you can add one or more subnets in each Availability Zone. When you create a subnet, you specify the CIDR block for the subnet, which is a subset of the VPC CIDR block. Each subnet must reside entirely within one Availability Zone and cannot span zones. Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to be isolated from failures in other Availability Zones. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from the failure of a single location. A VPC spans all of the Availability Zones in the Region. After creating a VPC, you can add one or more subnets in each Availability Zone. You can optionally add subnets in a Local Zone, which is an AWS infrastructure deployment that places compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to your end users. A Local Zone enables your end users to run applications that require single-digit millisecond latencies. For information about the Regions that support Local Zones, see Available Regions in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances. When you create a subnet, you specify the CIDR block for the subnet, which is a subset of the VPC CIDR block. We assign a unique ID to each subnet.

References: VPC Subnets

Answer: A B D
Notes: The correct answers are Enterprise, Business, Developer.
References: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/

Answer: B
Notes: Poor timing of SQS processes can significantly impact the cost effectiveness of the solution. To prevent other consumers from processing the message again, Amazon SQS sets a visibility timeout, a period of time during which Amazon SQS prevents other consumers from receiving and processing the message. The default visibility timeout for a message is 30 seconds. The minimum is 0 seconds. The maximum is 12 hours.
References: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sqs

Answer: B
Notes: Immediately
References:
References: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/iam

Answer: B
Notes: Amazon SWF (not Amazon SQS) keeps track of all tasks and events in an application. Amazon SQS requires you to implement your own application-level tracking, especially if your application uses multiple queues. Amazon SWF FAQs.
References:
References: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sqs

Answer: A and B
Notes: Create an IAM user for the auditor and explain that the firewall functionality is implemented as stateful Security Groups, and stateless subnet NACLs. AWS has removed the Firewall appliance from the hub of the network and implemented the firewall functionality as stateful Security Groups, and stateless subnet NACLs. This is not a new concept in networking, but rarely implemented at this scale.
References: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/iam

Answer: D
Notes: 1
References: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc

Answer: A
Notes: Messages can be retained in queues for up to 14 days.
References: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sqs

Answer: C
Notes: Scheduled scaling allows you to set your own scaling schedule. For example, let’s say that every week the traffic to your web application starts to increase on Wednesday, remains high on Thursday, and starts to decrease on Friday. You can plan your scaling actions based on the predictable traffic patterns of your web application. Scaling actions are performed automatically as a function of time and date.
Reference: Scheduled scaling for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling. 

Answer: D
Notes: the EC2 instance had an instance store volume attached to it. Instance store volumes are ephemeral, meaning that data in attached instance store volumes is lost if the instance stops.
Reference: Instance store lifetime 

Answer: B and C
Notes: Virtual-host-style URLs and Path-Style URLs (soon to be retired) are supported by AWS. DNS compliant names are recommended for the URLs to access S3.
References: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/s3

Answer: A and C
Notes: Although there is no direct way to encrypt an existing unencrypted volume or snapshot, you can encrypt them by creating either a volume or a snapshot. Reference: Encrypting unencrypted resources. You can create an encrypted volume from a snapshot of another encrypted volume.
References: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ebs

Answer: C
Notes: With a multi-AZ configuration, an additional reliability point is scored as the entire Availability Zone itself is ruled out as a single point of failure. This ensures high availability. Wherever possible, use simple solutions such as spreading the load out rather than expensive high tech solutions.
References: AZ

Answer: C
Notes: RDS Replicas can substantially increase the Read performance of your database. Multiple read replicas can be made to increase performance further. It will also require the least modifications to any code, and is generally possible to be implemented in the timeframe specified
References: RDS

Answer: B
Notes: A file gateway supports a file interface into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and combines a service and a virtual software appliance. By using this combination, you can store and retrieve objects in Amazon S3 using industry-standard file protocols such as Network File System (NFS) and Server Message Block (SMB). The software appliance, or gateway, is deployed into your on-premises environment as a virtual machine (VM) running on VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, or Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. The gateway provides access to objects in S3 as files or file share mount points. You can manage your S3 data using lifecycle policies, cross-region replication, and versioning. You can think of a file gateway as a file system mount on S3.
Reference: What is AWS Storage Gateway? .

Answer: B

Notes: Rules are evaluated starting with the lowest numbered rule. As soon as a rule matches traffic, it’s applied immediately regardless of any higher-numbered rule that may contradict it. The following are the basic things that you need to know about network ACLs: Your VPC automatically comes with a modifiable default network ACL. By default, it allows all inbound and outbound IPv4 traffic and, if applicable, IPv6 traffic. You can create a custom network ACL and associate it with a subnet. By default, each custom network ACL denies all inbound and outbound traffic until you add rules. Each subnet in your VPC must be associated with a network ACL. If you don’t explicitly associate a subnet with a network ACL, the subnet is automatically associated with the default network ACL. You can associate a network ACL with multiple subnets. However, a subnet can be associated with only one network ACL at a time. When you associate a network ACL with a subnet, the previous association is removed. A network ACL contains a numbered list of rules. We evaluate the rules in order, starting with the lowest-numbered rule, to determine whether traffic is allowed in or out of any subnet associated with the network ACL. The highest number that you can use for a rule is 32766. We recommend that you start by creating rules in increments (for example, increments of 10 or 100) so that you can insert new rules where you need to later on. A network ACL has separate inbound and outbound rules, and each rule can either allow or deny traffic. Network ACLs are stateless, which means that responses to allowed inbound traffic are subject to the rules for outbound traffic (and vice versa).

References: network ACL

Answer: A

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

You can add or remove rules from the default network ACL, or create additional network ACLs for your VPC. When you add or remove rules from a network ACL, the changes are automatically applied to the subnets that it’s associated with. A network access control list (ACL) is an optional layer of security for your VPC that acts as a firewall for controlling traffic in and out of one or more subnets. You might set up network ACLs with rules similar to your security groups in order to add an additional layer of security to your VPC. The following are the parts of a network ACL rule:

• Rule number. Rules are evaluated starting with the lowest-numbered rule. As soon as a rule matches traffic, it’s applied regardless of any higher-numbered rule that might contradict it.
• Type. The type of traffic, for example, SSH. You can also specify all traffic or a custom range.
• Protocol. You can specify any protocol that has a standard protocol number. For more information, see Protocol Numbers. If you specify ICMP as the protocol, you can specify any or all of the ICMP types and codes.
• Port range. The listening port or port range for the traffic. For example, 80 for HTTP traffic.
• Source. [Inbound rules only] The source of the traffic (CIDR range).
• Destination. [Outbound rules only] The destination for the traffic (CIDR range).
• Allow/Deny. Whether to allow or deny the specified traffic.
• Reference: NACL Rules

Answer: C

Notes: S3 Standard-IA is for data that is accessed less frequently, but requires rapid access when needed. S3 Standard-IA offers the high durability, high throughput, and low latency of S3 Standard, with a low-per-GB storage price and per GB retrieval fee. This combination of low cost and high performance make S3 Standard-IA ideal for long-term storage, backups, and as a data store for disaster recovery files. S3 Storage Classes can be configured at the object level and a single bucket can contain objects stored across S3 Standard, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Standard-IA, and S3 One Zone-IA. You can also use S3 Lifecycle policies to automatically transition objects between storage classes without any application changes.

Reference: S3 Standard-IA

A VPN  provides a connection between an on-premises network and a VPC, using a secure and private connection with IPsec and TLS.

A VPC/VPN Connection utilizes IPSec to establish encrypted network connectivity between your intranet and Amazon VPC over the Internet. VPN Connections can be configured in minutes and are a good solution if you have an immediate need, have low-to-modest bandwidth requirements, and can tolerate the inherent variability in Internet-based connectivity.

AWS Client VPN is a managed client-based VPN service that enables you to securely access your AWS resources or your on-premises network. With AWS Client VPN, you configure an endpoint to which your users can connect to establish a secure TLS VPN session. This enables clients to access resources in AWS or on-premises from any location using an OpenVPN-based VPN client.

You can create an IPsec VPN connection between your VPC and your remote network. On the AWS side of the Site-to-Site VPN connection, a virtual private gateway or transit gateway provides two VPN endpoints (tunnels) for automatic failover. You configure your customer gateway device on the remote side of the Site-to-Site VPN connection.

AWS Snowball Edge.

The AWS Snowball Edge is a type of Snowball device with on-board storage and compute power for select AWS capabilities. Snowball Edge can undertake local processing and edge-computing workloads in addition to transferring data between your local environment and the AWS Cloud.

Each Snowball Edge device can transport data at speeds faster than the internet. This transport is done by shipping the data in the appliances through a regional carrier. The appliances are rugged shipping containers, complete with E Ink shipping labels. The AWS Snowball Edge device differs from the standard Snowball because it can bring the power of the AWS Cloud to your on-premises location, with local storage and compute functionality.

Snowball Edge devices have three options for device configurations: storage optimized, compute optimized, and with GPU. When this guide refers to Snowball Edge devices, it’s referring to all options of the device. Whenever specific information applies to only one or more optional configurations of devices, like how the Snowball Edge with GPU has an on-board GPU, it will be called out. For more information, see Snowball Edge Device Options.  

EC2 instance OS Patching

Notes: Security and compliance is a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer. This shared model can help relieve the customer’s operational burden as AWS operates, manages, and controls the components from the host operating system and virtualization layer down to the physical security of the facilities in which the service operates. The customer assumes responsibility for, and management of, the guest operating system (including updates and security patches), other associated application software, and the configuration of the AWS provided security group firewall. Customers should carefully consider the services they choose, as their responsibilities vary depending on the services used, the integration of those services into their IT environment, and applicable laws and regulations. The nature of this shared responsibility also provides the flexibility and customer control that permits the deployment. As shown in the chart below, this differentiation of responsibility is commonly referred to as Security “of” the Cloud versus Security “in” the Cloud.

Customers that deploy an Amazon EC2 instance are responsible for management of the guest operating system (including updates and security patches), any application software or utilities installed by the customer on the instances, and the configuration of the AWS-provided firewall (called a security group) on each instance.

Answer: C and D
Notes: The best answers are to allow versioning on the bucket and to protect the objects by configuring MFA-protected API access.
Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/s3

Answer: A E and F
Notes: When Amazon EC2 is going to interrupt your Spot Instance, it emits an event two minutes prior to the actual interruption (except for hibernation, which gets the interruption notice, but not two minutes in advance because hibernation begins immediately).

In rare situations, Spot blocks may be interrupted due to Amazon EC2 capacity needs. In these cases, AWS provides a two-minute warning before the instance is terminated, and customers are not charged for the terminated instances even if they have used them.

It is possible that your Spot Instance is terminated before the warning can be made available.
Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ec2

Answer: B.
Notes: The elements included in a policy document that make up the “EAR” are effect, action, and resource.
Reference:  Policies and Permissions in IAM 

Q91: _____ provides real-time streaming of data.

A. Kinesis Data Analytics
B. Kinesis Data Firehose
C. Kinesis Data Streams
D. SQS

Show Answer

Answer: C
Notes: Kinesis Data Streams offers real-time data streaming
Reference: Amazon Kinesis Data Streams – 

Answer: A
Notes: Kinesis Data Streams offers real-time data streaming
Reference: Glue and Athena are correct – 

Answer: C
Notes: EMR excels at extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs.
Reference: Apache EMR – https://aws.amazon.com/emr/

Answer: B
Notes: Kinesis Data Analytics allows you to transform data using SQL.
Reference: Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics –

Answer: A. B.
Notes: – A NAT gateway forwards traffic from the EC2 instances in the private subnet to the internet or other AWS services, and then sends the response back to the instances. After a NAT gateway is created, the route tables for private subnets must be updated to point internet traffic to the NAT gateway.

Reference: NAT Gateway – 

Answer: C.
Notes: Hibernating EC2 instances save the contents of instance memory to an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) root volume. When the instances restart, the instance memory contents are reloaded.

Reference: Hibernating – 

Answer: C.
Notes: A secondary elastic network interface can be added to an EC2 instance. While primary network interfaces cannot be detached from an instance, secondary network interfaces can be detached and attached to a different EC2 instance.

Reference: A secondary elastic network interface – 

Answer: A.
Notes: Web browsers will block running a script that originates from a server with a domain name that is different from the webpage. Amazon S3 can be configured with CORS to send HTTP headers that allow the script to run

Reference: Amazon S3 can be configured with CORS – 

Answer: C. D.
Notes: Server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C) enables Amazon S3 to encrypt objects on the server side using an encryption key provided in the PUT request. The same key must be provided in the GET requests for Amazon S3 to decrypt the object. Customers also have the option to encrypt data on the client side before uploading it to Amazon S3, and then they can decrypt the data after downloading it. AWS software development kits (SDKs) provide an S3 encryption client that streamlines the process.

Reference: Server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C) – 

Answer: A.
Notes: While Spot Instances would be the least costly option, they are not suitable for jobs that cannot be interrupted or must complete within a certain time period. On-Demand Instances would be billed for the number of seconds they are running.

Reference: Spot Instances –  On-Demand instances

Answer: C.
Notes: – Decouple the ingestion of votes from the database to allow the voting system to continue processing votes without waiting for the database writes. Add dedicated workers to read from the SQS queue to allow votes to be entered into the database at a controllable rate. The votes will be added to the database as fast as the database can process them, but no votes will be lost.

Reference: Decouple – 

Answer: B. E.
Notes: Create new subnets in a new Availability Zone (AZ) to provide a redundant network. Create an Auto Scaling group with instances in two AZs behind the load balancer to ensure high availability of the web application and redistribution of web traffic between the two public AZs. Create an RDS DB instance in the two private subnets to make the database tier highly available too.

Reference: Auto Scaling group with instances in two AZs behind the load balancer – 

Answer: C.
Notes: The current configuration puts new EC2 instances into service before they are able to respond to transactions. This could also cause the instances to overscale. With a step scaling policy, you can specify the number of seconds that it takes for a newly launched instance to warm up. Until its specified warm-up time has expired, an EC2 instance is not counted toward the aggregated metrics of the Auto Scaling group. While scaling out, the Auto Scaling logic does not consider EC2 instances that are warming up as part of the current capacity of the Auto Scaling group. Therefore, multiple alarm breaches that fall in the range of the same step adjustment result in a single scaling activity. This ensures that you do not add more instances than you need.

Reference: Step scaling policy – 

Answer: C.
Notes: Aurora Replicas provide a way to offload read traffic. Aurora Replicas share the same underlying storage as the main database, so lag time is generally very low. Aurora Replicas have their own endpoints, so the application will need to be configured to direct read traffic to the new endpoints.
Reference: Aurora Replicas 

Answer: B.
Notes: Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides fully managed, highly reliable, and scalable file storage that is accessible over the industry-standard Service Message Block (SMB) protocol. It is built on Windows Server, delivering a wide range of administrative features such as user quotas, end-user file restore, and Microsoft Active Directory (AD) integration. Amazon FSx is accessible from Windows, Linux, and MacOS compute instances and devices. Thousands of compute instances and devices can access a file system concurrently.
ReferenceText: FSx

Answer: B.
Notes: Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides fully managed, highly reliable, and scalable file storage that is accessible over the industry-standard Service Message Block (SMB) protocol. It is built on Windows Server, delivering a wide range of administrative features such as user quotas, end-user file restore, and Microsoft Active Directory (AD) integration. Amazon FSx is accessible from Windows, Linux, and MacOS compute instances and devices. Thousands of compute instances and devices can access a file system concurrently.
Reference: FSx
Category: Design Resilient Architectures

Answer: A.
Notes: Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments provide enhanced availability and durability for Database (DB) Instances, making them a natural fit for production database workloads. When you provision a Multi-AZ DB Instance, Amazon RDS automatically creates a primary DB Instance and synchronously replicates the data to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone (AZ). Each AZ runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure, and is engineered to be highly reliable.
Reference: RDS Multi AZ
Category: Design Resilient Architectures

Answer: B.
Notes: You can configure Amazon Redshift to copy snapshots for a cluster to another region. To configure cross-region snapshot copy, you need to enable this copy feature for each cluster and configure where to copy snapshots and how long to keep copied automated snapshots in the destination region. When cross-region copy is enabled for a cluster, all new manual and automatic snapshots are copied to the specified region.
Reference: Redshift Snapshots

Category: Design Resilient Architectures

Answer: A. D.
Notes: Using an Elastic Load Balancer is an ideal solution for adding elasticity to your application. Alternatively, you can also create a policy in Route 53, such as a Weighted routing policy, to evenly distribute the traffic to 2 or more EC2 instances. Hence, setting up two EC2 instances and then put them behind an Elastic Load balancer (ELB) and setting up two EC2 instances and using Route 53 to route traffic based on a Weighted Routing Policy are the correct answers.
Reference: Elastic Load Balancing
Category: Design Resilient Architectures

Answer: B.
Notes: Amazon ECS lets you run batch workloads with managed or custom schedulers on Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, or Spot Instances. You can launch a combination of EC2 instances to set up a cost-effective architecture depending on your workload. You can launch Reserved EC2 instances to process the mission-critical data and Spot EC2 instances for processing non-essential batch jobs. There are two different charge models for Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS): Fargate Launch Type Model and EC2 Launch Type Model. With Fargate, you pay for the amount of vCPU and memory resources that your containerized application requests while for EC2 launch type model, there is no additional charge. You pay for AWS resources (e.g. EC2 instances or EBS volumes) you create to store and run your application. You only pay for what you use, as you use it; there are no minimum fees and no upfront commitments. In this scenario, the most cost-effective solution is to 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. You can use Scheduled Reserved Instances (Scheduled Instances) which enables you to purchase capacity reservations that recur on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, with a specified start time and duration, for a one-year term. This will ensure that you have an uninterrupted compute capacity to process your mission-critical batch jobs.
Reference: Emazon ECS

Category: Design Resilient Architectures

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Question 111: A company has recently adopted a hybrid cloud architecture and is planning to migrate a database hosted on-premises to AWS. The database currently has over 50 TB of consumer data, handles highly transactional (OLTP) workloads, and is expected to grow. The Solutions Architect should ensure that the database is ACID-compliant and can handle complex queries of the application. Which type of database service should the Architect use?

A. Amazon DynamoDB
B. Amazon RDS
C. Amazon Redshift
D. Amazon Aurora

Show Answer

Answer: D.
Notes: Amazon Aurora (Aurora) is a fully managed relational database engine that’s compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. You already know how MySQL and PostgreSQL combine the speed and reliability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases. The code, tools, and applications you use today with your existing MySQL and PostgreSQL databases can be used with Aurora. With some workloads, Aurora can deliver up to five times the throughput of MySQL and up to three times the throughput of PostgreSQL without requiring changes to most of your existing applications. Aurora includes a high-performance storage subsystem. Its MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible database engines are customized to take advantage of that fast distributed storage. The underlying storage grows automatically as needed, up to 64 tebibytes (TiB). Aurora also automates and standardizes database clustering and replication, which are typically among the most challenging aspects of database configuration and administration.
Reference: Aurora
Category: Design Resilient Architectures

Answer: C. D.
Notes: Expedited retrievals allow you to quickly access your data when occasional urgent requests for a subset of archives are required. For all but the largest archives (250 MB+), data accessed using Expedited retrievals are typically made available within 1–5 minutes. Provisioned Capacity ensures that retrieval capacity for Expedited retrievals is available when you need it. To make an Expedited, Standard, or Bulk retrieval, set the Tier parameter in the Initiate Job (POST jobs) REST API request to the option you want, or the equivalent in the AWS CLI or AWS SDKs. If you have purchased provisioned capacity, then all expedited retrievals are automatically served through your provisioned capacity. Provisioned capacity ensures that your retrieval capacity for expedited retrievals is available when you need it. Each unit of capacity provides that at least three expedited retrievals can be performed every five minutes and provides up to 150 MB/s of retrieval throughput. You should purchase provisioned retrieval capacity if your workload requires highly reliable and predictable access to a subset of your data in minutes. Without provisioned capacity Expedited retrievals are accepted, except for rare situations of unusually high demand. However, if you require access to Expedited retrievals under all circumstances, you must purchase provisioned retrieval capacity.
Reference: Amazon Glacier
Category: Design Resilient Architectures

Answer: D.
Notes: AWS DataSync allows you to copy large datasets with millions of files, without having to build custom solutions with open source tools, or license and manage expensive commercial network acceleration software. You can use DataSync to migrate active data to AWS, transfer data to the cloud for analysis and processing, archive data to free up on-premises storage capacity, or replicate data to AWS for business continuity. AWS DataSync enables you to migrate your on-premises data to Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, and Amazon FSx for Windows File Server. You can configure DataSync to make an initial copy of your entire dataset, and schedule subsequent incremental transfers of changing data towards Amazon S3. Enabling S3 Object Lock prevents your existing and future records from being deleted or overwritten. AWS DataSync is primarily used to migrate existing data to Amazon S3. On the other hand, AWS Storage Gateway is more suitable if you still want to retain access to the migrated data and for ongoing updates from your on-premises file-based applications.
ReferenceText: AWS DataSync
ReferenceUrl: https://aws.amazon.com/datasync/faqs/
Category: Design Secure Applications and Architectures

Answer: B.
Notes: With dynamic host port mapping, multiple tasks from the same service are allowed for each container instance. You can use weighted routing policies to route traffic to instances at proportions that you specify. You cannot use weighted routing policies to manage multiple tasks on a single container.
Notes: With dynamic host port mapping, multiple tasks from the same service are allowed for each container instance. You can use weighted routing policies to route traffic to instances at proportions that you specify. You cannot use weighted routing policies to manage multiple tasks on a single container. 
Reference: Choosing a routing policy
Category: Design Cost-Optimized Architecures

Answer: B.
Notes: When the word durability pops out, the first service that should come to your mind is Amazon S3. Since this service is not available in the answer options, we can look at the other data store available which is Amazon DynamoDB. DynamoDB is durable, scalable, and highly available data store which can be used for real-time tabulation. You can also use AppSync with DynamoDB to make it easy for you to build collaborative apps that keep shared data updated in real time. You just specify the data for your app with simple code statements and AWS AppSync manages everything needed to keep the app data updated in real time. This will allow your app to access data in Amazon DynamoDB, trigger AWS Lambda functions, or run Amazon Elasticsearch queries and combine data from these services to provide the exact data you need for your app.

Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/faqs/
Category: Design High-Performing Architectures

Answer: D.
Notes: FIFO queues will solve problems that occur when messages are processed out of order. FIFO queues will not improve performance during sudden volume increases. Additionally, you cannot convert SQS queues after you create them.
Reference: FIFO Queues

A. All data moving between the volume and the instance are encrypted.
B. Snapshots are automatically encrypted.
C. The volumes created from the encrypted snapshot are not encrypted.
D. Snapshots are not automatically encrypted.
E. Only the data in the volume is encrypted and not all the data moving between the volume and the instance.
Answer: A. B.
Notes: Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides block level storage volumes for use with EC2 instances. EBS volumes are highly available and reliable storage volumes that can be attached to any running instance that is in the same Availability Zone. EBS volumes that are attached to an EC2 instance are exposed as storage volumes that persist independently from the life of the instance. Encryption operations occur on the servers that host EC2 instances, ensuring the security of both data-at-rest and data-in-transit between an instance and its attached EBS storage. You can encrypt both the boot and data volumes of an EC2 instance.
Reference: EBS

Answer: D.
Notes: By default, Elastic Load Balancing waits 300 seconds before the completion of the deregistration process, which can help in-flight requests to the target become complete. To change the amount of time that Elastic Load Balancing waits, update the deregistration delay value.
Reference: Deregistration Delay.

Answer: C.
Notes: To remove the Spot Instances, the appropriate steps are to cancel the Spot request and then to terminate the Spot Instances.
Reference: Spot Instances

Answer: C. D.
Notes: A virtual private gateway is attached to a VPC to create a site-to-site VPN connection on AWS. You can accept private encrypted network traffic from an on-premises data center into your VPC without the need to traverse the open public internet. A customer gateway is required for the VPN connection to be established. A customer gateway device is set up and configured in the customer’s data center.
Reference: What is AWS Site-to-Site VPN?

Answer: C.
Notes: AWS WAF can detect the presence of SQL code that is likely to be malicious (known as SQL injection). AWS WAF also can detect the presence of a script that is likely to be malicious (known as cross-site scripting).
Reference: AWS WAF.

Answer: A.
Notes: SSD-Backed Storage Optimized (i2) instances provide more than 365,000 random IOPS. The instance store has no additional cost, compared with the regular hourly cost of the instance.
Reference: Amazon EC2 pricing.

Answer: A.
Notes: When Amazon ECS uses Fargate for compute, it incurs no costs when the application is idle. Aurora Serverless also incurs no compute costs when it is idle.
Reference: AWS Fargate Pricing.

What are the 6 pillars of a well architected framework:

AWS Well-Architected helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads. Based on five pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization — AWS Well-Architected provides a consistent approach for customers and partners to evaluate architectures, and implement designs that can scale over time.

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.

 

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.

 

Other AWS Facts and Summaries and Questions/Answers Dump

• AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate Exam Prep App
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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

#!/bin/bash

yum update -y

yum install -y httpd.x86_64

systemctl start httpd.service

systemctl enable httpd.service

echo “Hello World from $(hostname -f)” > /var/www/html/index.html