All practice questions

A company hosts a media portal on AWS that serves high-traffic static images and video clips. The static assets are stored in an Amazon S3 bucket in the us-east-1 Region. To ensure maximum availability, the company replicates these assets to another S3 bucket in the us-west-2 Region. The company wants to implement a solution that caches content globally to reduce latency for users. The architecture must automatically serve assets from the backup Region if the primary S3 bucket returns server errors (HTTP 500-class). Additionally, the portal must be protected against application-layer (Layer 7) HTTP flood attacks. The solution should minimize latency and operational overhead.

Which combination of actions should a solutions architect take to meet these requirements? (Select two.)

A manufacturing corporation needs to establish a secure, encrypted network connection between its on-premises factory control center and three VPCs in the us-west-2 Region. The network must support a sustained transfer rate of at least $2\text{ Gbps}$ to replicate real-time telemetry data to AWS. Which TWO actions should a solutions architect take to design a high-performing and scalable network architecture? (Select TWO.)

An engineering firm is designing a high-performance compute (HPC) system on AWS to run tightly-coupled computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The simulations utilize Message Passing Interface (MPI) for inter-node communication and require sub-millisecond network latency and high throughput. The control interface of the worker nodes runs on a custom service bound to TCP port 8443. An Application Load Balancer (ALB) will distribute control traffic to these worker nodes. The compute cluster must dynamically scale based on demand. Which architecture satisfies these requirements while maximizing performance and ensuring high availability of the control traffic?

A financial technology firm runs a high-frequency risk assessment platform on AWS. The platform consists of the following components:

* A web portal and API gateway hosted on AWS Fargate that requires a continuous baseline capacity of $25\text{ vCPUs}$ and $50\text{ GB}$ of RAM $24/7$ to handle dashboard queries.
* A backend distributed processing grid of Amazon EC2 instances that runs short-lived, containerized simulation jobs. These jobs are highly parallel, run for $2$ to $3$ hours at a time, write checkpoints to an external storage layer, and must complete within a flexible $18$-hour daily window.
* A database layer hosted on Amazon DynamoDB that stores user session tokens and transaction metadata. The database experiences sudden, unpredictable traffic spikes up to $10,000\text{ requests per second}$, followed by several hours of idle state.

The firm wants to optimize its architecture to achieve the maximum possible cost savings for its compute resources. Which two options should the solutions architect recommend to satisfy these requirements at the lowest cost?

A manufacturing facility has $20,000$ IoT sensors monitoring machine vibrations. Every $10$ seconds, each sensor generates a $5 \text{ KB}$ JSON payload containing health telemetry. A solutions architect needs to design a high-performing ingestion pipeline that buffers this data, converts the JSON format to Apache Parquet, and writes the transformed data to Amazon S3. The solution must handle spikes up to three times the average ingestion rate and minimize operational overhead. Which solution meets these requirements with the lowest operational overhead?

A media company is migrating its video processing pipeline to AWS. The architecture consists of the following components:

1. An orchestration and management web portal that runs continuously 24/7 on Amazon ECS Fargate, requiring a stable baseline of compute resources.
2. A batch video transcoding workload that runs containerized tasks on Amazon ECS Fargate. Individual transcoding jobs can run for several hours, are designed to be fault-tolerant, and can be retried if interrupted.
3. A metadata backend database running on an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster that must be available 24/7.

Which combination of configurations and purchasing strategies is the MOST cost-effective to meet these requirements?

A company hosts a database on a single Amazon EC2 instance. The database requires a $200$ GiB storage volume that must deliver a consistent performance of $10,000$ IOPS and $300$ MiB/s throughput. Which TWO actions should a solutions architect take to meet these performance requirements at the lowest cost?

A media company is launching a live interactive voting platform for a popular television tournament. During a 10-minute voting window, the platform must ingest a sudden burst of up to $100,000$ votes per second. Each vote payload consists of a unique `VoteID`, the `ContestantID` (representing one of 5 finalists), and a `Timestamp`. The platform requires microsecond-level latency to query real-time leaderboard statistics by `ContestantID` for display on the live broadcast. Which database architecture should a solutions architect recommend to support this scale and performance while preventing write throttling?

A healthcare provider is deploying a patient prescription tracking application across two AWS Regions: $us-east-1$ (Primary) and $us-west-2$ (Secondary). The application backend uses an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster. The solutions architect must design a highly resilient architecture that meets a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of under $5$ minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of under $1$ minute for regional disaster recovery, while also providing high availability within the primary region (RTO of under $60$ seconds, RPO of $0$) and scaling read traffic locally in $us-west-2$. Which two configurations should the solutions architect implement to meet these requirements? (Select two.)

A solutions architect is configuring an active-passive disaster recovery (DR) strategy for a simple web application using Amazon Route 53. The primary endpoint is located in the us-east-1 Region, and the secondary backup endpoint is located in the us-west-2 Region. Which two configurations are required to set up this active-passive failover? (Select TWO.)

A financial modeling firm is deploying a high-performance computing (HPC) application on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. The application requires concurrent, shared access to a POSIX-compliant file system. The file system must deliver sub-millisecond latencies and support parallel input/output (I/O) operations with a combined throughput of at least $8\text{ GB/s}$. Which two actions should a solutions architect take to meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)

An enterprise document management SaaS provider stores customer contract PDFs in an Amazon S3 bucket. The business requirements specify that:

- Files must be highly available and resilient against a single Availability Zone (AZ) failure, with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than $1$ minute.
- Any files deleted or modified must be recoverable immediately.
- For disaster recovery, a copy of the contracts must be replicated to a secondary AWS Region with an RTO of less than $15$ minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than $15$ minutes.
- Contracts are highly active for the first $45$ days and must be transitioned to a cheaper storage class afterward, while remaining instantly accessible.

Which combination of actions should the solutions architect take to meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)

A multinational e-commerce company serves a dynamic product recommendation API to users globally. The API is hosted on Application Load Balancers (ALBs) in two AWS Regions: a primary region in eu-west-1 and a secondary standby region in us-east-1. The company uses an Amazon CloudFront distribution to cache recommendation payloads at edge locations. To ensure high availability, the company needs to configure automated failover to the secondary region's ALB only if the primary ALB returns HTTP 502 (Bad Gateway) or HTTP 503 (Service Unavailable) status codes. The solution must minimize operational complexity, maintain edge caching benefits, and avoid client-side DNS propagation delays. Which architecture should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements?

A financial modeling firm is deploying a tightly coupled High-Performance Computing (HPC) simulation workload on Amazon EC2 instances in a single AWS Region. The application relies on the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library for node-to-node communication. To achieve maximum performance, the network architecture must support low latency and inter-instance throughput of up to $100\text{ Gbps}$. Which combination of network configuration and instance placement will meet these requirements?

A global news website serves static web assets (images, CSS, JS files) stored in an Amazon S3 bucket, and dynamic personalized articles generated by an API running on Amazon EC2 instances in private subnets behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The API retrieves article content from an Amazon RDS database. During breaking news events, the website experiences significant latency, and both the ALB and the S3 bucket are overloaded by traffic spikes. Additionally, the application generates transient log files that must be stored in Amazon S3 for exactly 7 days before deletion. Which TWO solutions should a solutions architect implement to optimize content delivery performance and minimize operational costs?

A company is deploying a media rendering application on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances distributed across three Availability Zones. The instances require concurrent, shared access to a $500\text{ GB}$ dataset. The workload is highly read-heavy and requires low-latency shared file access. The shared files are temporary and are deleted within $10\text{ days}$ of creation. Which storage solution should a solutions architect recommend to achieve the highest performance and cost-efficiency?

A logistics company operates a fleet tracking platform on AWS. The application architecture consists of:
1. An API ingest layer hosted on Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate that requires a continuous, predictable baseline of $16$ vCPUs and $32\text{ GB}$ of memory $24/7$.
2. A batch processing workload on Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate that analyzes historical telemetry data. These tasks are triggered daily, can tolerate interruptions, and do not have strict completion SLAs.
3. An Amazon DynamoDB table used to store real-time location metrics, which experiences sudden, highly unpredictable spikes in write traffic.

The company wants to optimize its compute and database costs over a $3$-year period.

Which two strategies should a solutions architect recommend to achieve the most cost-effective architecture? (Select TWO.)

A company is building an online auction application where users submit bids in real time. The backend database experiences write performance issues during high-traffic spikes at the end of auctions. To ensure fairness, the bids must be processed in the exact order they are received by the application. A solutions architect needs to design a decoupled architecture that buffers incoming bids and processes them sequentially. Which solution meets these requirements with the least operational overhead?

A financial technology company is migrating a critical, single-instance relational database to AWS. The database requires a single $2\text{ TB}$ volume that must sustain a consistent write throughput of $3,200\text{ MB/s}$ and $120,000\text{ IOPS}$ with sub-millisecond storage latency. Which Amazon EBS volume configuration should a solutions architect recommend to meet these performance requirements?

A solutions architect is designing a web application that uses an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database. The application is experiencing high read latency due to a large volume of read requests. Which solution will most effectively reduce read latency for frequently accessed data to sub-milliseconds?