All practice questions

A news agency hosts a dynamic web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). During breaking news events, traffic spikes significantly, occasionally causing backend database exhaustion and HTTP 503 Service Unavailable errors. The agency has created a static backup site in an Amazon S3 bucket. A solutions architect must design a highly resilient caching solution that automatically serves this static backup content globally with the lowest latency when the primary ALB is unavailable or failing. Which solution meets these requirements with the least operational complexity?

A pharmaceutical research company operates a clinical trial monitoring application. The application stores real-time patient telemetry data in an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster. The company requires a disaster recovery strategy across two AWS Regions. The database configuration must achieve a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than $2$ seconds and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than $2$ minutes. Additionally, researchers in both regions need low-latency access to read the telemetry data. Which database configuration meets these requirements with the least operational complexity?

A logistics company is migrating its package tracking system and customer portal to AWS. The database tier has two main requirements:

1. A relational database to store package status updates, which must support high availability with a recovery time objective (RTO) of under $60$ seconds, while also handling heavy read traffic from customer queries.
2. A NoSQL session state store that experiences highly unpredictable, spiky traffic with sudden write bursts during peak holiday delivery seasons.

The company wants to minimize overall database costs while meeting all performance and availability requirements. Which of the following database configurations is the most cost-effective?

A logistics company is designing an automated route simulation platform. The platform receives route telemetry data files in an Amazon S3 bucket. A processing task must analyze each file to simulate traffic conditions and update a central tracking database. Each simulation must run sequentially in the exact chronological order the data is received to ensure state consistency. A single simulation run typically takes between $12$ to $20$ minutes to complete. The volume of incoming telemetry files is highly unpredictable, with periods of zero activity followed by sudden bursts of hundreds of uploads. The company needs to design a highly available, serverless, and cost-effective architecture.

Which TWO configurations should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)

A company is building a corporate internal application that runs on Amazon DynamoDB. The database experiences short, highly unpredictable spikes in query volume at random times throughout the day, followed by long periods of inactivity with no requests. The primary objective is to minimize database costs. Which capacity planning strategy is the most cost-effective for this workload?

A company runs a web application where the frontend static assets (images, CSS, and JavaScript files) are stored in an Amazon S3 bucket, and the backend dynamic API is hosted on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The company wants to use a single Amazon CloudFront distribution to serve both the static assets and the dynamic API to prevent Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) issues. The dynamic API responses are user-specific and must never be cached, while the static assets should be cached at the edge to maximize performance and minimize origin load. Which configuration should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements?

A startup is deploying a data ingestion application that must run continuously 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to consume a steady stream of updates from an external API. The processing load is constant and predictable. The startup wants to minimize compute costs for running this worker.

Which compute option is the MOST cost-effective solution for this workload?

A marketing agency is hosting a short-term promotional campaign website. During the promotion, users can submit contact forms that trigger a brief confirmation email and record the submission details. The website will experience massive, unpredictable traffic spikes during ad broadcasts, but will have zero traffic at night. The database needs to scale automatically to support these spikes, and the compute layer must run code only when a form is submitted to minimize idle costs.

Which two solutions should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements?

A bioinformatics research institute is deploying a distributed genomic sequence alignment pipeline on Amazon EC2 instances. The analysis nodes must communicate with each other using a specialized Message Passing Interface (MPI) implementation, requiring sub-millisecond, low-latency node-to-node network performance. Client requests are distributed across these instances using a Network Load Balancer (NLB) that routes incoming traffic to a custom processing engine listening on TCP port $9999$. A lightweight status daemon is running on TCP port $80$ on each instance to monitor the node's system-level health. Which combination of actions should a solutions architect take to meet these requirements? (Choose TWO.)

An engineering team is deploying a collaborative CAD (Computer-Aided Design) application on a fleet of Linux-based Amazon EC2 instances distributed across two Availability Zones. The application requires concurrent read and write access to a shared directory containing active project design files. The storage solution must support POSIX compliance, provide sub-millisecond latencies for active files, and scale automatically to handle unpredictable file access spikes. Which storage solution should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements?

A financial services firm runs a risk analysis platform on AWS. The platform has a steady-state baseline workload consisting of containerized microservices running on Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate. Every night, the firm runs a memory-intensive batch processing job on Amazon EC2 that takes exactly 3 hours to complete. The batch processing application is resilient and can save its state, allowing it to resume if interrupted. During execution, the batch job writes large amounts of temporary intermediate data to Amazon S3, which is deleted automatically after 5 days. The database layer consists of an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database instance. Which two actions should a solutions architect recommend to optimize compute and storage costs? (Select TWO.)

A global multiplayer gaming platform uses Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and an Amazon DynamoDB table to store and serve live game leaderboards. During peak tournament events, users experience high latency when retrieving leaderboard standings, and the DynamoDB table experiences read throttling. The company needs a caching solution to reduce response latency to milliseconds and offload read queries from the database. Which two actions should the solutions architect take to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

A company is designing a cost-optimized database architecture for a non-critical internal application. The architecture includes two databases:

1. An Amazon RDS for MySQL database that has a predictable baseline workload of `$500$` writes/second and `$1,000$` reads/second. During a weekly `$4$-hour` batch processing job, the read workload spikes to `$10,000$` reads/second. A short period of downtime is acceptable during database updates or failures.
2. An Amazon DynamoDB table that stores temporary session state data. The write traffic is highly volatile and unpredictable, spiking from `$10$` writes/second to `$8,000$` writes/second within seconds, followed by long periods of idle time.

Which two strategies should the solutions architect implement to meet these requirements in the most cost-effective manner? (Select TWO.)

A digital publishing platform hosts its content delivery tier in VPC Alpha and its logging and analytics cluster in VPC Beta, both located in the `eu-west-1` Region. Every month, the content delivery tier transfers $75\text{ TB}$ of raw log files to the analytics cluster. The instances in both VPCs reside in private subnets. Which TWO configuration steps should a Solutions Architect recommend to achieve the most cost-effective network routing? (Select TWO.)

A company wants to allow external development contractors to deploy application resources in a development AWS account. The contractors manage their users in an external identity provider (IdP) that supports SAML 2.0. The security team requires that the contractors only be able to create IAM roles for their applications that do not exceed a specific security baseline. The contractors must not be able to escalate their own permissions or create roles that grant access to unauthorized services. Which TWO options should a solutions architect combine to meet these requirements securely? (Select TWO.)

A media monitoring company processes video and audio news broadcasts. External feeds drop media files of varying sizes into an Amazon S3 bucket. A metadata file specifies a strict processing sequence (chronological ordering) that must be maintained for downstream sentiment analysis. The processing jobs extract transcripts using a CPU-heavy transcription engine, which takes between $12$ to $25$ minutes per file. The current system relies on a fixed fleet of Amazon EC2 instances, which results in high idle costs during periods of low activity. A solutions architect must design a serverless, automated scaling architecture that minimizes costs, scales to zero when there is no activity, and ensures the strict processing order of media files is preserved. Which architecture meets these requirements most cost-effectively?

A genomics research company runs a batch sequence analysis pipeline on a cluster of Linux EC2 instances. The pipeline requires a shared, high-performance file system that can deliver sub-millisecond latencies and throughput of up to 10 GB/s to ingest and process raw sequence data stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. The file system only needs to exist during the execution of the batch processing jobs, after which the processed results are written back to Amazon S3. Which combination of actions should a solutions architect take to meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)

An advertising technology company is deploying a real-time bidding (RTB) engine on Amazon EC2 instances to process ad auctions. The engine must maintain sub-millisecond node-to-node network latency to synchronize internal state tables across the cluster. The bidding application runs on a custom port, $9080$, on each EC2 instance. The company deploys a Network Load Balancer (NLB) with a listener on port $80$ to receive incoming HTTP requests from external ad exchanges and route them to the EC2 instances. During initial testing, the NLB marks all EC2 instances as unhealthy, and node-to-node communication latency is higher than expected. Which combination of EC2 placement and load balancer target group configuration will resolve these issues while meeting the performance requirements?

An enterprise manages a multi-account AWS environment using AWS Organizations. The operations team needs to implement a cost-monitoring strategy with two primary requirements:
1. Receive proactive alerts within a few hours if there is a sudden, unexpected spike in AWS usage costs.
2. Receive an alert if the total monthly cost of resources tagged with Project: Alpha is projected to exceed a specific budget.

The strategy must minimize operational overhead. Which combination of actions should the solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)

A digital marketing firm processes web interaction logs that are saved to an Amazon S3 bucket. The logs average $15\text{ KB}$ in size. These files are frequently accessed during the first $10\text{ days}$ for campaign optimization. After $10\text{ days}$, access drops significantly, but the files must be kept for an additional $10\text{ days}$ (total of $20\text{ days}$ from creation) before being permanently deleted. Which two configurations should the solutions architect implement to achieve the most cost-effective storage strategy? (Select TWO.)