All practice questions

A financial services company is modernizing its on-premises core transaction processing API by refactoring it to a serverless architecture on AWS. The new architecture uses an Amazon API Gateway regional REST API integrated with AWS Lambda functions deployed in private subnets, which write transactions to an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database. The database is hosted in a dedicated database account, while the API Gateway and Lambda functions are hosted in an application account. During peak hours, transaction volume spikes unpredictably. The company must ensure that database connection limits are not exceeded, Lambda executions do not exhaust the regional concurrency limit, and database credentials stored in AWS Secrets Manager in the database account are automatically rotated using a cross-account IAM role.

Which architectural design meets these requirements?

A logistics company is designing a high-throughput package tracking ingestion API. During peak hours, the API must handle sudden spikes of up to $150,000$ write requests per second. The architecture must ingest the data with minimal latency, decouple the ingestion layer from the backend database processing, and scale automatically to prevent data loss. Which two options should the solutions architect select to meet these requirements?

A municipal transit authority is modernizing its on-premises ticketing system by migrating to a serverless architecture on AWS. The application will expose a public API for third-party transit applications to query real-time schedule updates and purchase tickets, which is expected to experience sudden, massive spikes in traffic during rush hours. The backend database is an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL DB instance situated in private subnets within a VPC. The new design must scale dynamically to handle rush-hour spikes, protect the database from connection exhaustion, ensure that traffic bursts do not throttle other critical serverless workloads in the AWS account, and encrypt all data at rest using customer-managed keys (CMKs). Which architectural design meets these requirements?

A manufacturing corporation is launching a global IoT device fleet configuration management platform. The primary system runs on Amazon EC2 instances within a private subnet across three Availability Zones in the us-east-1 Region, communicating externally through NAT Gateways. The database tier uses Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. The business requires a disaster recovery solution in the us-west-2 Region with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 minute. Which two options should the Solutions Architect choose to implement a highly available and resilient architecture that meets these requirements?

A financial services company is designing a new compliance auditing architecture using AWS Organizations. The security team operates from a centralized Audit account (111122223333) and must analyze sensitive transaction logs stored in an Amazon S3 bucket within a separate Production account (444455556666). The logs must be encrypted at rest. The solution must enforce the principle of least privilege, allowing only the auditing IAM role AuditReaderRole in the Audit account to read the logs, while preventing any other access. Which configuration will successfully enable this cross-account access while meeting the security requirements?

CloudSentry Solutions is designing a new medical archiving system. The application runs on AWS Fargate inside a private subnet in an Application Account. The Fargate tasks need to write processed medical records directly to a centralized Amazon S3 bucket located in a dedicated Compliance Account. All data written to the S3 bucket must be encrypted at rest using SSE-KMS. Which of the following configurations should the solutions architect recommend to satisfy these requirements securely?

A media company is launching a global mobile voting application for a live televised talent show. The show expects up to $5$ million users to submit votes concurrently within a televised $5$-minute window. The votes must be ingested, validated, and aggregated in real-time, with results displayed on screen. The ingestion tier must handle an immediate jump from zero traffic to over $100,000$ write requests per second. The backend database requires single-digit millisecond latency for write operations and must scale horizontally to handle the peak write volume. Which of the following architectures provides the most performant, scalable, and operationally efficient solution to meet these requirements?

A logistics company is designing the database strategy for a new delivery tracking application (OLTP workload). The application requires a relational database that can handle highly concurrent write operations and must scale read operations dynamically during peak hours. The database design must support a recovery point objective (RPO) of $0$ (no data loss) and a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than $10$ minutes. The database administrator also needs to archive historical delivery logs to a central Amazon S3 bucket in a separate auditing account. The archived logs must be encrypted at rest using a KMS key where the auditing account controls key policies and rotation. Which database and storage design meets these requirements?

A global e-commerce company is designing a new microservice that runs on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling Group in the Application Account (account ID 111122223333). The microservice needs to upload transaction records to a centralized Amazon S3 bucket located in a separate Compliance Account (account ID 444455556666). The transaction records contain sensitive customer data and must be encrypted at rest using a Customer Managed Key (CMK) in AWS KMS that is managed in the Compliance Account. The solutions architect must design a secure, cross-account access solution that adheres to the principle of least privilege. Which combination of actions will allow the microservice to securely write the encrypted transaction records to the S3 bucket? (Select TWO.)

A company is designing a new cloud-native application that requires a relational database. The database must support high availability across multiple Availability Zones with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of $0$. The application will generate sudden, unpredictable bursts of complex read queries, scaling from $100$ queries per second to over $10,000$ queries per second, which could saturate the database CPU. The solutions architect needs to design the database tier to handle these scaling spikes without affecting write performance or availability. Which database design meets these requirements?

AeroQuest Diagnostics is developing a new telemetry analysis platform. Flight telemetries are collected from on-premises sensors and written to an Amazon S3 bucket in a Processing Account (111111111111). An analytics application running on Amazon EKS in an Analytics Account (222222222222) must read these objects to perform machine learning analysis. All objects in the S3 bucket are encrypted at rest using a Customer Managed Key (CMK) in the Processing Account. The solution must follow the principle of least privilege and use direct cross-account access without assuming cross-account IAM roles. Which combination of configurations must the Solutions Architect implement to allow the EKS application to successfully read the encrypted telemetry objects? (Select TWO.)

A healthcare organization is modernizing its on-premises patient registration system by migrating to a serverless architecture on AWS. The application will expose an internal API to multiple business partners operating in separate AWS accounts within the same AWS Organization.

The new architecture uses Amazon API Gateway private REST APIs and AWS Lambda functions that retrieve data from an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database.

The architecture must satisfy the following requirements:
- The API must only be accessible over private connections from the partners' VPCs.
- The API Gateway endpoint must resolve using the default private DNS hostnames, and cross-account DNS resolution must be functional.
- The Lambda functions must handle sudden bursts in registration requests without exhausting the database connection pool or throttling other critical workloads in the host account.

Which TWO configurations must a solutions architect implement to satisfy these requirements? (Select TWO.)

An IoT energy company is launching a smart grid monitoring platform to ingest and analyze electricity consumption data from over $12$ million smart meters. During extreme weather events, the platform experiences sudden, massive surges in telemetry queries as utility providers run diagnostic reports. Read traffic is expected to spike from $500$ queries per second (QPS) to over $200,000$ QPS within less than $3$ minutes. The backend application runs on Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB), accessing data stored in an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database cluster. Which two actions should a solutions architect recommend to optimize the performance and scalability of the architecture to handle these traffic spikes? (Select TWO.)

A company is designing a high-throughput IoT telemetry ingestion platform on AWS. The platform must process HTTPS data payloads from 500,000 IoT devices sending data every 10 seconds. The ingestion layer must handle sudden, unpredictable 10x spikes in traffic during device registration events without dropping messages. Additionally, the reporting interface requires real-time read access to consolidated sensor status. Which two actions should the solutions architect take to optimize the performance and scalability of this solution? (Select TWO.)

A healthcare provider is designing a claims portal that will store digital claims documents and transaction metadata. The claims documents (average size 2 MB) are accessed by internal processes and must also be shared securely with a third-party auditor operating in a separate AWS account. The documents require immediate retrieval for the first 30 days. After 30 days, they must be archived to a cheaper storage tier, but must remain retrievable within 5 minutes. The transaction metadata workload is relational, requires high availability across multiple Availability Zones, and experiences frequent spikes in analytical reporting queries that must not impact active write transactions. Which two of the following database and storage configurations should the solutions architect select to satisfy these requirements? (Select TWO.)

An advertising technology company is designing a real-time bidding (RTB) platform that must process incoming bid requests from multiple ad exchanges. The system must handle a peak load of $300,000$ write requests per second with a target response latency of less than $20$ milliseconds. The bid request data is highly transient and only needs to be persisted for $24$ hours for auditing, but the active campaign budget data must be updated in real-time with strict consistency to prevent overspending. Which combination of architectural decisions should the Solutions Architect recommend to achieve these requirements with the lowest latency and highest scalability? (Select TWO.)

A European Union public sector agency is designing a secure document archiving solution across a multi-account organization. The architecture includes a centralized Archive Account (account 111122223333) with an Amazon S3 bucket, and multiple departmental Agency Accounts. Applications in the Agency Accounts run on Amazon EC2 instances and must upload official records directly to the centralized S3 bucket.

To meet strict data sovereignty compliance, all uploaded objects must be encrypted using server-side encryption with AWS KMS (SSE-KMS) using a key managed by the security team in the Archive Account. The security team wants to ensure that:
1. Departmental applications can upload files only if they are encrypted with the approved key.
2. The Archive Account retains full control over the encryption key and the data.
3. The departmental applications cannot delete or modify archives once uploaded.

The security team creates a Customer Managed Key (CMK) in the Archive Account. How should the security team configure the policies to allow the Agency Account (account 444455556666) applications to upload encrypted documents to the S3 bucket?

A company is launching a ticket booking platform that expects an instantaneous surge of $150,000$ concurrent users within a $3$-minute window when a major event is announced. The application is hosted on Amazon ECS tasks behind an Application Load Balancer. The database tier uses an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster. The initial user activity is heavily read-intensive, with users repeatedly checking ticket availability.

Which architectural design will provide the most performant and scalable solution to handle this traffic spike while minimizing latency?

A global ride-sharing platform is designing a backend for its new real-time driver tracking and rider-matching service. The platform must ingest location telemetry from $600,000$ active drivers every $3$ seconds (approximately $200,000$ write requests per second). Riders will query the database to find the $5$ nearest available drivers within a $3$-mile radius, requiring sub-$10$ millisecond response times. The location telemetry database must scale seamlessly during peak hours without administrative overhead. Which architecture represents the most performant, scalable, and operationally efficient solution to meet these requirements?

A financial technology company is designing a new international transaction processing system (OLTP workload). The system must meet the following requirements:

* The transactional database must handle high-volume write traffic, support complex relational queries, and maintain a recovery point objective (RPO) of less than 1 second and a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than 1 minute across two AWS regions.
* The database must scale read capacity dynamically to handle regional analytics queries based on CPU utilization.
* Transaction receipts must be archived to an Amazon S3 bucket in a separate auditing AWS account. The archived data must be encrypted at rest, and the application in the primary account must write directly to this bucket using cross-account encryption key delegation.

Which database and storage strategy meets these requirements?