Topic 1 - Single Topic

Question #1Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing an application that will encrypt all data in an Amazon
Redshift cluster.
Which action will encrypt the data at rest?

• A. Place the Redshift cluster in a private subnet.

• B. Use the AWS KMS Default Customer master key.
• C. Encrypt the Amazon EBS volumes.
• D. Encrypt the data using SSL/TLS.

Reveal Solution Discussion 29

Question #2Topic 1
A website experiences unpredictable traffic. During peak traffic times, the database is
unable to keep up with the write request.
Which AWS service will help decouple the web application from the database?

• A. Amazon SQS
• B. Amazon EFS
• C. Amazon S3
• D. AWS Lambda

Reveal Solution Discussion 15

Question #3Topic 1
A legacy application needs to interact with local storage using iSCSI. A team needs to
design a reliable storage solution to provision all new storage on AWS.
Which storage solution meets the legacy application requirements?

• A. AWS Snowball storage for the legacy application until the application can be re-
architected.
• B. AWS Storage Gateway in cached mode for the legacy application storage to write
data to Amazon S3.
• C. AWS Storage Gateway in stored mode for the legacy application storage to write
data to Amazon S3.
• D. An Amazon S3 volume mounted on the legacy application server locally using the
File Gateway service.

Reveal Solution Discussion 54

Question #4Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing an architecture for a mobile gaming application. The
application is expected to be very popular. The Architect needs to prevent the Amazon
RDS MySQL database from becoming a bottleneck due to frequently accessed queries.
Which service or feature should the Architect add to prevent a bottleneck?
• A. Multi-AZ feature on the RDS MySQL Database
• B. ELB Classic Load Balancer in front of the web application tier
• C. Amazon SQS in front of RDS MySQL Database
• D. Amazon ElastiCache in front of the RDS MySQL Database

Reveal Solution Discussion 15

Question #5Topic 1
A company is launching an application that it expects to be very popular. The company
needs a database that can scale with the rest of the application. The schema will
change frequently. The application cannot afford any downtime for database changes.
Which AWS service allows the company to achieve these objectives?

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

Reveal Solution Discussion 52

Question #6Topic 1
A Solution Architect is designing a disaster recovery solution for a 5 TB Amazon
Redshift cluster. The recovery site must be at least 500 miles (805 kilometers) from the
live site.
How should the Architect meet these requirements?

• A. Use AWS CloudFormation to deploy the cluster in a second region.

• B. Take a snapshot of the cluster and copy it to another Availability Zone.
• C. Modify the Redshift cluster to span two regions.
• D. Enable cross-region snapshots to a different region.

Reveal Solution Discussion 35

Question #7Topic 1
A customer has written an application that uses Amazon S3 exclusively as a data store.
The application works well until the customer increases the rate at which the application
is updating information. The customer now reports that outdated data occasionally
appears when the application accesses objects in Amazon S3.
What could be the problem, given that the application logic is otherwise correct?

• A. The application is reading parts of objects from Amazon S3 using a range header.
• B. The application is reading objects from Amazon S3 using parallel object requests.
• C. The application is updating records by writing new objects with unique keys.
• D. The application is updating records by overwriting existing objects with the same
keys.

Reveal Solution Discussion 55

Question #8Topic 1
 A Solutions Architect is designing a new social media application. The application must
provide a secure method for uploading profile photos. Each user should be able to
upload a profile photo into a shared storage location for one week after their profile is
created.
Which approach will meet all of these requirements?

• A. Use Amazon Kinesis with AWS CloudTrail for auditing the specific times when profile
photos are uploaded.
• B. Use Amazon EBS volumes with IAM policies restricting user access to specific time
periods.
• C. Use Amazon S3 with the default private access policy and generate pre-signed URLs
each time a new site profile is created.
• D. Use Amazon CloudFront with AWS CloudTrail for auditing the specific times when
profile photos are uploaded.

Reveal Solution Discussion 9

Question #9Topic 1
An application requires block storage for file updates. The data is 500 GB and must
continuously sustain 100 MiB/s of aggregate read/write operations.
Which storage option is appropriate for this application?

• A. Amazon S3
• B. Amazon EFS
• C. Amazon EBS
• D. Amazon Glacier

Reveal Solution Discussion 38

Question #10Topic 1
A mobile application serves scientific articles from individual files in an Amazon S3
bucket. Articles older than 30 days are rarely read. Articles older than 60 days no longer
need to be available through the application, but the application owner would like to
keep them for historical purposes.
Which cost-effective solution BEST meets these requirements?

• A. Create a Lambda function to move files older than 30 days to Amazon EBS and
move files older than 60 days to Amazon Glacier.
• B. Create a Lambda function to move files older than 30 days to Amazon Glacier and
move files older than 60 days to Amazon EBS.
• C. Create lifecycle rules to move files older than 30 days to Amazon S3 Standard
Infrequent Access and move files older than 60 days to Amazon Glacier.
• D. Create lifecycle rules to move files older than 30 days to Amazon Glacier and move
files older than 60 days to Amazon S3 Standard Infrequent Access.

Reveal Solution
 Question #11Topic 1
An organization is currently hosting a large amount of frequently accessed data
consisting of key-value pairs and semi-structured documents in their data center.
They are planning to move this data to AWS.
Which of one of the following services MOST effectively meets their needs?

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

Reveal Solution Discussion 18

Question #12Topic 1
A Lambda function must execute a query against an Amazon RDS database in a private
subnet.
Which steps are required to allow the Lambda function to access the Amazon RDS
database? (Select two.)

• A. Create a VPC Endpoint for Amazon RDS.

• B. Create the Lambda function within the Amazon RDS VPC.
• C. Change the ingress rules of Lambda security group, allowing the Amazon RDS security
group.
• D. Change the ingress rules of the Amazon RDS security group, allowing the Lambda
security group.
• E. Add an Internet Gateway (IGW) to the VPC, route the private subnet to the IGW.

Reveal Solution Discussion 49

Question #13Topic 1
A Solutions Architect needs to build a resilient data warehouse using Amazon Redshift.
The Architect needs to rebuild the Redshift cluster in another region.
Which approach can the Architect take to address this requirement?

• A. Modify the Redshift cluster and configure cross-region snapshots to the other region.
• B. Modify the Redshift cluster to take snapshots of the Amazon EBS volumes each day,
sharing those snapshots with the other region.
• C. Modify the Redshift cluster and configure the backup and specify the Amazon S3
bucket in the other region.
• D. Modify the Redshift cluster to use AWS Snowball in export mode with data delivered to
the other region.

Reveal Solution Discussion 36

Question #14Topic 1
A popular e-commerce application runs on AWS. The application encounters
performance issues. The database is unable to handle the amount of queries and load
during peak times. The database is running on the RDS Aurora engine on the largest
 instance size available.
What should an administrator do to improve performance?

• A. Convert the database to Amazon Redshift.

• B. Create a CloudFront distribution.
• C. Convert the database to use EBS Provisioned IOPS.
• D. Create one or more read replicas.

Reveal Solution Discussion 47

Question #15Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing the architecture for a new three-tier web-based e-
commerce site that must be available 24/7. Requests are expected to range from 100 to
10,000 each minute. Usage can vary depending on time of day, holidays, and
promotions. The design should be able to handle these volumes, with the ability to
handle higher volumes if necessary.
How should the Architect design the architecture to ensure the web tier is cost-
optimized and can handle the expected traffic? (Select two.)

• A. Launch Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an ELB.

• B. Store all static files in a multi-AZ Amazon Aurora database.
• C. Create an CloudFront distribution pointing to static content in Amazon S3.
• D. Use Amazon Route 53 to route traffic to the correct region.
• E. Use Amazon S3 multi-part uploads to improve upload times.

Reveal Solution Discussion 11

Question #16Topic 1
A Solution Architect is designing a three-tier web application. The Architect wants to
restrict access to the database tier to accept traffic from the application servers only.
However, these application servers are in an Auto Scaling group and may vary in
quantity.
How should the Architect configure the database servers to meet the requirements?

• A. Configure the database security group to allow database traffic from the application
server IP addresses.
• B. Configure the database security group to allow database traffic from the application
server security group.
• C. Configure the database subnet network ACL to deny all inbound non-database traffic
from the application-tier subnet.
• D. Configure the database subnet network ACL to allow inbound database traffic from the
application-tier subnet.

Reveal Solution Discussion 70

Question #17Topic 1
An Internet-facing multi-tier web application must be highly available. An ELB Classic
Load Balancer is deployed in front of the web tier. Amazon EC2 instances at the web
 application tier are deployed evenly across two Availability Zones. The database is
deployed using RDS Multi-AZ. A NAT instance is launched for Amazon
EC2 instances and database resources to access the Internet. These instances are not
assigned with public IP addresses.
Which component poses a potential single point of failure in this architecture?

• A. Amazon EC2
• B. NAT instance
• C. ELB Classic Load Balancer
• D. Amazon RDS

Reveal Solution Discussion 40

Question #18Topic 1
A call center application consists of a three-tier application using Auto Scaling groups to
automatically scale resources as needed. Users report that every morning at 9:00 AM
the system becomes very slow for about 15 minutes. A Solution Architect determines
that a large percentage of the call center staff starts work at 9:00
AM, so Auto Scaling does not have enough time to scale out to meet demand.
How can the Architect fix the problem?

• A. Change the Auto Scaling group's scale out event to scale based on network utilization.
• B. Create an Auto Scaling scheduled action to scale out the necessary resources at 8:30
AM every morning.
• C. Use Reserved Instances to ensure the system has reserved the right amount of
capacity for the scale-up events.
• D. Permanently keep a steady state of instances that is needed at 9:00 AM to guarantee
available resources, but leverage Spot Instances.

Reveal Solution Discussion 31

Question #19Topic 1
An e-commerce application is hosted in AWS. The last time a new product was
launched, the application experienced a performance issue due to an enormous spike in
traffic. Management decided that capacity must be doubled the week after the product
is launched.
Which is the MOST efficient way for management to ensure that capacity requirements
are met?

• A. Add a Step Scaling policy.

• B. Add a Dynamic Scaling policy.
• C. Add a Scheduled Scaling action.
• D. Add Amazon EC2 Spot Instances.

Reveal Solution Discussion 68

Question #20Topic 1
 A customer owns a simple API for their website that receives about 1,000 requests each
day and has an average response time of 50 ms. It is currently hosted on one c4.large
instance.
Which changes to the architecture will provide high availability at the LOWEST cost?

• A. Create an Auto Scaling group with a minimum of one instance and a maximum of two
instances, then use an Application Load Balancer to balance the traffic.
• B. Recreate the API using Amazon API Gateway and use AWS Lambda as the service
backend.
• C. Create an Auto Scaling group with a maximum of two instances, then use an
Application Load Balancer to balance the traffic.
• D. Recreate the API using Amazon API Gateway and integrate the new API with the
existing backend service.

Reveal Solution Discussion 33

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Question #21Topic 1
A Solution Architect is designing an application that uses Amazon EBS volumes. The
volumes must be backed up to a different region.
How should the Architect meet this requirement?

• A. Create EBS snapshots directly from one region to another.

• B. Move the data to an Amazon S3 bucket and enable cross-region replication.
• C. Create EBS snapshots and then copy them to the desired region.
• D. Use a script to copy data from the current Amazon EBS volume to the destination
Amazon EBS volume.

Hide Solution Discussion 14

Correct Answer: C

Question #22Topic 1
A company is using an Amazon S3 bucket located in us-west-2 to serve videos to their
customers. Their customers are located all around the world and the videos are
requested a lot during peak hours. Customers in Europe complain about experiencing
slow downloaded speeds, and during peak hours, customers in all locations report
experiencing HTTP 500 errors.
What can a Solutions Architect do to address these issues?

• A. Place an elastic load balancer in front of the Amazon S3 bucket to distribute the load
during peak hours.
• B. Cache the web content with Amazon CloudFront and use all Edge locations for content
delivery.
• C. Replicate the bucket in eu-west-1 and use an Amazon Route 53 failover routing policy
to determine which bucket it should serve the request to.
• D. Use an Amazon Route 53 weighted routing policy for the CloudFront domain name to
distribute the GET request between CloudFront and the Amazon S3 bucket directly.

Reveal Solution Discussion 40

Question #23Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a solution that includes a managed VPN connection.
To monitor whether the VPN connection is up or down, the Architect should use:

• A. an external service to ping the VPN endpoint from outside the VPC.
• B. AWS CloudTrail to monitor the endpoint.
• C. the CloudWatch TunnelState Metric.
• D. an AWS Lambda function that parses the VPN connection logs.

Reveal Solution Discussion 11

Question #24Topic 1
A social networking portal experiences latency and throughput issues due to an
increased number of users. Application servers use very large datasets from an
Amazon RDS database, which creates a performance bottleneck on the database.
Which AWS service should be used to improve performance?

• A. Auto Scaling
• B. Amazon SQS
• C. Amazon ElastiCache
• D. ELB Application Load Balancer

Reveal Solution Discussion 18

Question #25Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing network architecture for an application that has
compliance requirements. The application will be hosted on Amazon EC2 instances in a
private subnet and will be using Amazon S3 for storing data. The compliance
requirements mandate that the data cannot traverse the public
Internet.
What is the MOST secure way to satisfy this requirement?

• A. Use a NAT Instance.

• B. Use a NAT Gateway.
• C. Use a VPC endpoint.
• D. Use a Virtual Private Gateway.

Reveal Solution Discussion 9

Question #26Topic 1
Developers are creating a new online transaction processing (OLTP) application for a
small database that is very read-write intensive. A single table in the database is
 updated continuously throughout the day, and the developers want to ensure that the
database performance is consistent.
Which Amazon EBS storage option will achieve the MOST consistent performance to
help maintain application performance?

• A. Provisioned IOPS SSD

• B. General Purpose SSD
• C. Cold HDD
• D. Throughput Optimized HDD

Reveal Solution Discussion 14

Question #27Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a log-processing solution that requires storage that
supports up to 500 MB/s throughput. The data is sequentially accessed by an Amazon
EC2 instance.
Which Amazon storage type satisfies these requirements?

• A. EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1)

• B. EBS General Purpose SSD (gp2)
• C. EBS Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)
• D. EBS Cold HDD (sc1)

Reveal Solution Discussion 15

Question #28Topic 1
A company's development team plans to create an Amazon S3 bucket that contains
millions of images. The team wants to maximize the read performance of
Amazon S3.
Which naming scheme should the company use?

• A. Add a date as the prefix.

• B. Add a sequential id as the suffix.
• C. Add a hexadecimal hash as the suffix.
• D. Add a hexadecimal hash as the prefix.

Reveal Solution Discussion 35

Question #29Topic 1
A Solutions Architect needs to design a solution that will enable a security team to
detect, review, and perform root cause analysis of security incidents that occur in a
cloud environment. The Architect must provide a centralized view of all API events for
current and future AWS regions.
How should the Architect accomplish this task?

• A. Enable AWS CloudTrail logging in each individual region. Repeat this for all future
regions.
• B. Enable Amazon CloudWatch logs for all AWS services across all regions and
aggregate them in a single Amazon S3 bucket.
• C. Enable AWS Trusted Advisor security checks and report all security incidents for all
regions.
• D. Enable AWS CloudTrail by creating a new trail and apply the trail to all regions.

Reveal Solution Discussion 14

Question #30Topic 1
A company has a legacy application using a proprietary file system and plans to migrate
the application to AWS.
Which storage service should the company use?

• A. Amazon DynamoDB
• B. Amazon S3
• C. Amazon EBS
• D. Amazon EFS

Reveal Solution Discussion 41

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Question #31Topic 1
A company plans to use AWS for all new batch processing workloads. The company's
developers use Docker containers for the new batch processing. The system design
must accommodate critical and non-critical batch processing workloads 24/7.
How should a Solutions Architect design this architecture in a cost-efficient manner?

• A. Purchase Reserved Instances to run all containers. Use Auto Scaling groups to
schedule jobs.
• B. Host a container management service on Spot Instances. Use Reserved Instances to
run Docker containers.
• C. Use Amazon ECS orchestration and Auto Scaling groups: one with Reserve Instances,
one with Spot Instances.
• D. Use Amazon ECS to manage container orchestration. Purchase Reserved Instances to
run all batch workloads at the same time.

Reveal Solution Discussion 18

Question #32Topic 1
A company is evaluating Amazon S3 as a data storage solution for their daily analyst
reports. The company has implemented stringent requirements concerning the security
of the data at rest. Specifically, the CISO asked for the use of envelope encryption with
separate permissions for the use of an envelope key, automated rotation of the
encryption keys, and visibility into when an encryption key was used and by whom.
Which steps should a Solutions Architect take to satisfy the security requirements
requested by the CISO?
• A. Create an Amazon S3 bucket to store the reports and use Server-Side Encryption with
Customer-Provided Keys (SSE-C).
• B. Create an Amazon S3 bucket to store the reports and use Server-Side Encryption with
Amazon S3-Managed Keys (SSE-S3).
• C. Create an Amazon S3 bucket to store the reports and use Server-Side Encryption with
AWS KMS-Managed Keys (SSE-KMS).
• D. Create an Amazon S3 bucket to store the reports and use Amazon s3 versioning with
Server-Side Encryption with Amazon S3-Managed Keys (SSE-S3).

Reveal Solution Discussion 17

Question #33Topic 1
A customer has a production application that frequently overwrites and deletes data, the
application requires the most up-to-date version of the data every time it is requested.
Which storage should a Solutions Architect recommend to bet accommodate this use
case?

• A. Amazon S3
• B. Amazon RDS
• C. Amazon RedShift
• D. AWS Storage Gateway

Reveal Solution Discussion 40

Question #34Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a photo application on AWS. Every time a user
uploads a photo to Amazon S3, the Architect must insert a new item to a
DynamoDB table.
Which AWS-managed service is the BEST fit to insert the item?

• A. Lambda@Edge
• B. AWS Lambda
• C. Amazon API Gateway
• D. Amazon EC2 instances

Reveal Solution Discussion 23

Question #35Topic 1
An application relies on messages being sent and received in order. The volume will
never exceed more than 300 transactions each second.
Which service should be used?

• A. Amazon SQS
• B. Amazon SNS
• C. Amazon ECS
• D. AWS STS

Reveal Solution Discussion 10

 Question #36Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing an application on AWS that uses persistent block
storage. Data must be encrypted at rest.
Which solution meets the requirement?

• A. Enable SSL on Amazon EC2 instances.

• B. Encrypt Amazon EBS volumes on Amazon EC2 instances.
• C. Enable server-side encryption on Amazon S3.
• D. Encrypt Amazon EC2 Instance Storage.

Reveal Solution Discussion 8

Question #37Topic 1
A company is launching a static website using the zone apex (mycompany.com). The
company wants to use Amazon Route 53 for DNS.
Which steps should the company perform to implement a scalable and cost-effective
solution? (Choose two.)

• A. Host the website on an Amazon EC2 instance with ELB and Auto Scaling, and map a
Route 53 alias record to the ELB endpoint.
• B. Host the website using AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and map a Route 53 alias record to the
Beanstalk stack.
• C. Host the website on an Amazon EC2 instance, and map a Route 53 alias record to the
public IP address of the Amazon EC2 instance.
• D. Serve the website from an Amazon S3 bucket, and map a Route 53 alias record to the
website endpoint.
• E. Create a Route 53 hosted zone, and set the NS records of the domain to use Route 53
name servers.

Reveal Solution Discussion 53

Question #38Topic 1
A manufacturing company captures data from machines running at customer sites.
Currently, thousands of machines send data every 5 minutes, and this is expected to
grow to hundreds of thousands of machines in the near future. The data is logged with
the intent to be analyzed in the future as needed.
What is the SIMPLEST method to store this streaming data at scale?

• A. Create an Amazon Kinesis Firehouse delivery stream to store the data in Amazon S3.
• B. Create an Auto Scaling group of Amazon EC2 servers behind ELBs to write the data
into Amazon RDS.
• C. Create an Amazon SQS queue, and have the machines write to the queue.
• D. Create an Amazon EC2 server farm behind an ELB to store the data in Amazon EBS
Cold HDD volumes.

Reveal Solution Discussion 32

Question #39Topic 1
 A bank is writing new software that is heavily dependent upon the database
transactions for write consistency. The application will also occasionally generate
reports on data in the database, and will do joins across multiple tables. The database
must automatically scale as the amount of data grows.
Which AWS service should be used to run the database?

• A. Amazon S3
• B. Amazon Aurora
• C. Amazon DynamoDB
• D. Amazon Redshift

Reveal Solution Discussion 19

Question #40Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a new application that needs to access data in a
different AWS account located within the same region. The data must not be accessed
over the Internet.
Which solution will meet these requirements with the LOWEST cost?

• A. Add rules to the security groups in each account.

• B. Establish a VPC Peering connection between accounts.
• C. Configure Direct Connect in each account.
• D. Add a NAT Gateway to the data account.

Reveal Solution Discussion 12

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Question #41Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a mobile application that will capture receipt images
to track expenses. The Architect wants to store the images on Amazon S3.
However, uploading images through the web server will create too much traffic.
What is the MOST efficient method to store images from a mobile application on
Amazon S3?

• A. Upload directly to S3 using a pre-signed URL.

• B. Upload to a second bucket, and have a Lambda event copy the image to the primary
bucket.
• C. Upload to a separate Auto Scaling group of servers behind an ELB Classic Load
Balancer, and have them write to the Amazon S3 bucket.
• D. Expand the web server fleet with Spot Instances to provide the resources to handle the
images.

Reveal Solution Discussion 38

Question #42Topic 1
 A company requires that the source, destination, and protocol of all IP packets be
recorded when traversing a private subnet.
What is the MOST secure and reliable method of accomplishing this goal.

• A. Create VPC flow logs on the subnet.

• B. Enable source destination check on private Amazon EC2 instances.
• C. Enable AWS CloudTrail logging and specify an Amazon S3 bucket for storing log files.
• D. Create an Amazon CloudWatch log to capture packet information.

Reveal Solution Discussion 13

Question #43Topic 1
A Solutions Architect has a multi-layer application running in Amazon VPC. The
application has an ELB Classic Load Balancer as the front end in a public subnet, and
an Amazon EC2-based reverse proxy that performs content-based routing to two
backend Amazon EC2 instances hosted in a private subnet. The Architect sees
tremendous traffic growth and is concerned that the reverse proxy and current backend
set up will be insufficient.
Which actions should the Architect take to achieve a cost-effective solution that ensures
the application automatically scales to meet traffic demand? (Select two.)

• A. Replace the Amazon EC2 reverse proxy with an ELB internal Classic Load Balancer.
• B. Add Auto Scaling to the Amazon EC2 backend fleet.
• C. Add Auto Scaling to the Amazon EC2 reverse proxy layer.
• D. Use t2 burstable instance types for the backend fleet.
• E. Replace both the frontend and reverse proxy layers with an ELB Application Load
Balancer.

Reveal Solution Discussion 25

Question #44Topic 1
A company is launching a marketing campaign on their website tomorrow and expects a
significant increase in traffic. The website is designed as a multi-tiered web architecture,
and the increase in traffic could potentially overwhelm the current design.
What should a Solutions Architect do to minimize the effects from a potential failure in
one or more of the tiers?

• A. Migrate the database to Amazon RDS.

• B. Set up DNS failover to a statistic website.
• C. Use Auto Scaling to keep up with the demand.
• D. Use both a SQL and a NoSQL database in the design.

Reveal Solution Discussion 19

Question #45Topic 1
A web application experiences high compute costs due to serving a high amount of
static web content.
How should the web server architecture be designed to be the MOST cost-efficient?
• A. Create an Auto Scaling group to scale out based on average CPU usage.
• B. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution to pull static content from an Amazon S3
bucket.
• C. Leverage Reserved Instances to add additional capacity at a significantly lower price.
• D. Create a multi-region deployment using an Amazon Route 53 geolocation routing
policy.

Reveal Solution Discussion 14

Question #46Topic 1
A Solutions Architect plans to migrate NAT instances to NAT gateway. The Architect
has NAT instances with scripts to manage high availability.
What is the MOST efficient method to achieve similar high availability with NAT
gateway?

• A. Remove source/destination check on NAT instances.

• B. Launch a NAT gateway in each Availability Zone.
• C. Use a mix of NAT instances and NAT gateway.
• D. Add an ELB Application Load Balancer in front of NAT gateway.

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Question #47Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a solution to store a large quantity of event data in
Amazon S3. The Architect anticipates that the workload will consistently exceed 100
requests each second.
What should the Architect do in Amazon S3 to optimize performance?

• A. Randomize a key name prefix.

• B. Store the event data in separate buckets.
• C. Randomize the key name suffix.
• D. Use Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration.

Reveal Solution Discussion 10

Question #48Topic 1
A user is testing a new service that receives location updates from 3,600 rental cars
every hour.
Which service will collect data and automatically scale to accommodate production
workload?

• A. Amazon EC2
• B. Amazon Kinesis Firehose
• C. Amazon EBS
• D. Amazon API Gateway

Reveal Solution Discussion 44

Question #49Topic 1
 A Solutions Architect is designing a web application. The web and application tiers need
to access the Internet, but they cannot be accessed from the Internet.
Which of the following steps is required?

• A. Attach an Elastic IP address to each Amazon EC2 instance and add a route from the
private subnet to the public subnet.
• B. Launch a NAT gateway in the public subnet and add a route to it from the private
subnet.
• C. Launch Amazon EC2 instances in the public subnet and change the security group to
allow outbound traffic on port 80.
• D. Launch a NAT gateway in the private subnet and deploy a NAT instance in the private
subnet.

Reveal Solution Discussion 7

Question #50Topic 1
An application stack includes an Elastic Load Balancer in a public subnet, a fleet of
Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group, and an Amazon RDS
MySQL cluster. Users connect to the application from the Internet. The application
servers and database must be secure.
How should a Solutions Architect perform this task?

• A. Create a private subnet for the Amazon EC2 instances and a public subnet for the
Amazon RDS cluster.
• B. Create a private subnet for the Amazon EC2 instances and a private subnet for the
Amazon RDS cluster.
• C. Create a public subnet for the Amazon EC2 instances and a private subnet for the
Amazon RDS cluster.
• D. Create a public subnet for the Amazon EC2 instances and a public subnet for the
Amazon RDS cluster.

Reveal Solution Discussion 57

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uestion #51Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a solution for a media company that will stream large
amounts of data from an Amazon EC2 instance. The data streams are typically large
and sequential, and must be able to support up to 500 MB/s.
Which storage type will meet the performance requirements of this application?

• A. EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD

• B. EBS General Purpose SSD
• C. EBS Cold HDD
• D. EBS Throughput Optimized HDD
 Reveal Solution Discussion 12
Question #52Topic 1
A legacy application running in premises requires a Solutions Architect to be able to
open a firewall to allow access to several Amazon S3 buckets. The Architect has a VPN
connection to AWS in place.
How should the Architect meet this requirement?

• A. Create an IAM role that allows access from the corporate network to Amazon S3.
• B. Configure a proxy on Amazon EC2 and use an Amazon S3 VPC endpoint.
• C. Use Amazon API Gateway to do IP whitelisting.
• D. Configure IP whitelisting on the customer's gateway.

Reveal Solution Discussion 42

Question #53Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a database solution that must support a high rate of
random disk reads and writes. It must provide consistent performance, and requires
long-term persistence.
Which storage solution BEST meets these requirements?

• A. An Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volume

• B. An Amazon EBS General Purpose volume
• C. An Amazon EBS Magnetic volume
• D. An Amazon EC2 Instance Store

Reveal Solution Discussion 8

Question #54Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing solution with AWS Lambda where different
environments require different database passwords.
What should the Architect do to accomplish this in a secure and scalable way?

• A. Create a Lambda function for each individual environment.

• B. Use Amazon DynamoDB to store environmental variables.
• C. Use encrypted AWS Lambda environmental variables.
• D. Implement a dedicated Lambda function for distributing variables.

Reveal Solution Discussion 12

Question #55Topic 1
A news organization plans to migrate their 20 TB video archive to AWS. The files are
rarely accessed, but when they are, a request is made in advance and a 3 to
5-hour retrieval time frame is acceptable. However, when there is a breaking news
story, the editors require access to archived footage within minutes.
Which storage solution meets the needs of this organization while providing the
LOWEST cost of storage?
• A. Store the archive in Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage.
• B. Store the archive in Amazon Glacier and use standard retrieval for all content.
• C. Store the archive in Amazon Glacier and pay the additional charge for expedited
retrieval when needed.
• D. Store the archive in Amazon S3 with a lifecycle policy to move this to S3 Infrequent
Access after 30 days.

Reveal Solution Discussion 18

Question #56Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is building a multi-tier website. The web servers will be in a public
subnet, and the database servers will be in a private subnet. Only the web servers can
be accessed from the Internet. The database servers must have Internet access for
software updates.
Which solution meets the requirements?

• A. Assign Elastic IP addresses to the database instances.

• B. Allow Internet traffic on the private subnet through the network ACL.
• C. Use a NAT Gateway.
• D. Use an egress-only Internet Gateway.

Reveal Solution Discussion 10

Question #57Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a Lambda function that calls an API to list all running
Amazon RDS instances.
How should the request be authorized?

• A. Create an IAM access and secret key, and store it in the Lambda function.
• B. Create an IAM role to the Lambda function with permissions to list all Amazon RDS
instances.
• C. Create an IAM role to Amazon RDS with permissions to list all Amazon RDS instances.
• D. Create an IAM access and secret key, and store it in an encrypted RDS database.

Reveal Solution Discussion 15

Question #58Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is building an application on AWS that will require 20,000 IOPS on
a particular volume to support a media event. Once the event ends, the
IOPS need is no longer required. The marketing team asks the Architect to build the
platform to optimize storage without incurring downtime.
How should the Architect design the platform to meet these requirements?

• A. Change the Amazon EC2 instant types.

• B. Change the EBS volume type to Provisioned IOPS.
• C. Stop the Amazon EC2 instance and provision IOPS for the EBS volume.
• D. Enable an API Gateway to change the endpoints for the Amazon EC2 instances.
 Reveal Solution Discussion 15
Question #59Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is building a new feature using a Lambda to create metadata when
a user uploads a picture to Amazon S3. All metadata must be indexed.
Which AWS service should the Architect use to store this metadata?

• A. Amazon S3
• B. Amazon DynamoDB
• C. Amazon Kinesis
• D. Amazon EFC

Reveal Solution Discussion 13

Question #60Topic 1
An interactive, dynamic website runs on Amazon EC2 instances in a single subnet
behind an ELB Classic Load Balancer.
Which design changes will make the site more highly available?

• A. Move some Amazon EC2 instances to a subnet in a different way.

• B. Move the website to Amazon S3.
• C. Change the ELB to an Application Load Balancer.
• D. Move some Amazon EC2 instances to a subnet in the same Availability Zone.

Reveal Solution Discussion 33

Previous QuestionsNext Questions

Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a web application that is running on an Amazon EC2
instance. The application stores data in DynamoDB. The Architect needs to secure
access to the DynamoDB table.
What combination of steps does AWS recommend to achieve secure authorization?
(Select two.)

• A. Store an access key on the Amazon EC2 instance with rights to the Dynamo DB table.
• B. Attach an IAM user to the Amazon EC2 instance.
• C. Create an IAM role with permissions to write to the DynamoDB table.
• D. Attach an IAM role to the Amazon EC2 instance.
• E. Attach an IAM policy to the Amazon EC2 instance.

Reveal Solution Discussion 15

Question #62Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is about to deploy an API on multiple EC2 instances in an Auto
Scaling group behind an ELB. The support team has the following operational
requirements:
 1 They get an alert when the requests per second go over 50,000
2 They get an alert when latency goes over 5 seconds
3 They can validate how many times a day users call the API requesting highly-
sensitive data
Which combination of steps does the Architect need to take to satisfy these operational
requirements? (Select two.)

• A. Ensure that CloudTrail is enabled.

• B. Create a custom CloudWatch metric to monitor the API for data access.
• C. Configure CloudWatch alarms for any metrics the support team requires.
• D. Ensure that detailed monitoring for the EC2 instances is enabled.
• E. Create an application to export and save CloudWatch metrics for longer term trending
analysis.

Reveal Solution Discussion 51

Question #63Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a highly-available website that is served by multiple
web servers hosted outside of AWS. If an instance becomes unresponsive, the
Architect needs to remove it from the rotation.
What is the MOST efficient way to fulfill this requirement?

• A. Use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor utilization.

• B. Use Amazon API Gateway to monitor availability.
• C. Use an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer.
• D. Use Amazon Route 53 health checks.

Reveal Solution Discussion 38

Question #64Topic 1
A company hosts a popular web application. The web application connects to a
database running in a private VPC subnet. The web servers must be accessible only to
customers on an SSL connection. The RDS MySQL database server must be
accessible only from the web servers.
How should the Architect design a solution to meet the requirements without impacting
running applications?

• A. Create a network ACL on the web server's subnet, and allow HTTPS inbound and
MySQL outbound. Place both database and web servers on the same subnet.
• B. Open an HTTPS port on the security group for web servers and set the source to
0.0.0.0/0. Open the MySQL port on the database security group and attach it to the
MySQL instance. Set the source to Web Server Security Group.
• C. Create a network ACL on the web server's subnet, and allow HTTPS inbound, and
specify the source as 0.0.0.0/0. Create a network ACL on a database subnet, allow
MySQL port inbound for web servers, and deny all outbound traffic.
• D. Open the MySQL port on the security group for web servers and set the source to
0.0.0.0/0. Open the HTTPS port on the database security group and attach it to the
MySQL instance. Set the source to Web Server Security Group.

Reveal Solution Discussion 17

Question #65Topic 1
Which service should an organization use if it requires an easily managed and scalable
platform to host its web application running on Nginx?

• A. AWS Lambda
• B. Auto Scaling
• C. AWS Elastic Beanstalk
• D. Elastic Load Balancing

Reveal Solution Discussion 9

Question #66Topic 1
An Administrator is hosting an application on a single Amazon EC2 instance, which
users can access by the public hostname. The administrator is adding a second
instance, but does not want users to have to decide between many public hostnames.
Which AWS service will decouple the users from specific Amazon EC2 instances?

• A. Amazon SQS
• B. Auto Scaling group
• C. Amazon EC2 security group
• D. Amazon ELB

Reveal Solution Discussion 29

Question #67Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a microservices-based application using Amazon
ECS. The application includes a WebSocket component, and the traffic needs to be
distributed between microservices based on the URL.
Which service should the Architect choose to distribute the workload?

• A. ELB Classic Load Balancer

• B. Amazon Route 53 DNS
• C. ELB Application Load Balancer
• D. Amazon CloudFront

Reveal Solution Discussion 7

Question #68Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing the storage layer for a production relational database.
The database will run on Amazon EC2. The database is accessed by an application that
performs intensive reads and writes, so the database requires the LOWEST random I/O
latency.
Which data storage method fulfills the above requirements?
• A. Store data in a filesystem backed by Amazon Elastic File System (EFS).
• B. Store data in Amazon S3 and use a third-party solution to expose Amazon S3 as a
filesystem to the database server.
• C. Store data in Amazon Dynamo DB and emulate relational database semantics.
• D. Stripe data across multiple Amazon EBS volumes using RAID 0.

Reveal Solution Discussion 13

Question #69Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a VPC. Instances in a private subnet must be able to
establish IPv6 traffic to the Internet. The design must scale automatically and not incur
any additional cost.
This can be accomplished with:

• A. an egress-only internet gateway

• B. a NAT gateway
• C. a custom NAT instance
• D. a VPC endpoint

Reveal Solution Discussion 12

Question #70Topic 1
A web application stores all data in an Amazon RDS Aurora database instance. A
Solutions Architect wants to provide access to the data for a detailed report for the
Marketing team, but is concerned that the additional load on the database will affect the
performance of the web application.
How can the report be created without affecting the performance of the application?

• A. Create a read replica of the database.

• B. Provision a new RDS instance as a secondary master.
• C. Configure the database to be in multiple regions.
• D. Increase the number of provisioned storage IOPS.

Reveal Solution Discussion 26

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Question #71Topic 1
A company has an application that stores sensitive data. The company is required by
government regulations to store multiple copies of its data.
What would be the MOST resilient and cost-effective option to meet this requirement?

• A. Amazon EFS
• B. Amazon RDS
• C. AWS Storage Gateway
• D. Amazon S3

Reveal Solution Discussion 21

 Question #72Topic 1
A company is using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to secure their
Amazon RDS databases. An auditor has recommended that the company log all use of
their AWS KMS keys.
What is the SIMPLEST solution?

• A. Associate AWS KMS metrics with Amazon CloudWatch.

• B. Use AWS CloudTrail to log AWS KMS key usage.
• C. Deploy a monitoring agent on the RDS instances.
• D. Poll AWS KMS periodically with a scheduled job.

Reveal Solution Discussion 11

Question #73Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a stateful web application that will run for one year
(24/7) and then be decommissioned. Load on this platform will be constant, using a
number of r4.8xlarge instances. Key drivers for this system include high availability, but
elasticity is not required.
What is the MOST cost-effective way to purchase compute for this platform?

• A. Scheduled Reserved Instances

• B. Convertible Reserved Instances
• C. Standard Reserved Instances
• D. Spot Instances

Reveal Solution Discussion 14

Question #74Topic 1
A media company asked a Solutions Architect to design a highly available storage
solution to serve as a centralized document store for their Amazon EC2 instances. The
storage solution needs to be POSIX-compliant, scale dynamically, and be able to serve
up to 100 concurrent EC2 instances.
Which solution meets these requirements?

• A. Create an Amazon S3 bucket and store all of the documents in this bucket.
• B. Create an Amazon EBS volume and allow multiple users to mount that volume to their
EC2 instance(s).
• C. Use Amazon Glacier to store all of the documents.
• D. Create an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) to store and share the
documents.

Reveal Solution Discussion 10

Question #75Topic 1
A Solution Architect has a two-tier application with a single Amazon EC2 instance web
server and Amazon RDS MySQL Multi-AZ DB instances. The Architect is re-architecting
the application for high availability by adding instances in a second Availability Zone.
Which additional services will improve the availability of the application? (Choose two.)
• A. Auto Scaling group
• B. AWS CloudTrail
• C. ELB Classic Load Balancer
• D. Amazon DynamoDB
• E. Amazon ElastiCache

Reveal Solution Discussion 30

Question #76Topic 1
A company is migrating its data center to AWS. As part of this migration, there is a
three-tier web application that has strict data-at-rest encryption requirements.
The customer deploys this application on Amazon EC2 using Amazon EBS, and now
must provide encryption at-rest.
How can this requirement be met without changing the application?

• A. Use AWS Key Management Service and move the encrypted data to Amazon S3.
• B. Use an application-specific encryption API with AWS server-side encryption.
• C. Use encrypted EBS storage volumes with AWS-managed keys.
• D. Use third-party tools to encrypt the EBS data volumes with Key Management Service
Bring Your Own Keys.

Reveal Solution Discussion 11

Question #77Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is developing software on AWS that requires access to multiple
AWS services, including an Amazon EC2 instance. This is a security sensitive
application, and AWS credentials such as Access Key ID and Secret Access Key need
to be protected and cannot be exposed anywhere in the system.
What security measure would satisfy these requirements?

• A. Store the AWS Access Key ID/Secret Access Key combination in software comments.
• B. Assign an IAM user to the Amazon EC2 instance.
• C. Assign an IAM role to the Amazon EC2 instance.
• D. Enable multi-factor authentication for the AWS root account.

Reveal Solution Discussion 15

Question #78Topic 1
An AWS workload in a VPC is running a legacy database on an Amazon EC2 instance.
Data is stored on a 200GB Amazon EBS (gp2) volume. At peak load times, logs show
excessive wait time.
What solution should be implemented to improve database performance using
persistent storage?

• A. Migrate the data on the Amazon EBS volume to an SSD-backed volume.

• B. Change the EC2 instance type to one with EC2 instance store volumes.
• C. Migrate the data on the EBS volume to provisioned IOPS SSD (io1).
• D. Change the EC2 instance type to one with burstable performance.
 Reveal Solution Discussion 29
Question #79Topic 1
A company's website receives 50,000 requests each second, and the company wants to
use multiple applications to analyze the navigation patterns of the users on their website
so that the experience can be personalized.
What can a Solutions Architect use to collect page clicks for the website and process
them sequentially for each user?

• A. Amazon Kinesis Stream

• B. Amazon SQS standard queue
• C. Amazon SQS FIFO queue
• D. AWS CloudTrail trail

Reveal Solution Discussion 12

Question #80Topic 1
A company wants to migrate a highly transactional database to AWS. Requirements
state that the database has more than 6 TB of data and will grow exponentially.
Which solution should a Solutions Architect recommend?

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

Reveal Solution Discussion 23

Previous QuestionsNext Questions

Question #81Topic 1
A company hosts a two-tier application that consists of a publicly accessible web server
that communicates with a private database. Only HTTPS port 443 traffic to the web
server must be allowed from the Internet.
Which of the following options will achieve these requirements? (Choose two.)

• A. Security group rule that allows inbound Internet traffic for port 443.
• B. Security group rule that denies all inbound Internet traffic except port 443.
• C. Network ACL rule that allows port 443 inbound and all ports outbound for Internet
traffic.
• D. Security group rule that allows Internet traffic for port 443 in both inbound and
outbound.
• E. Network ACL rule that allows port 443 for both inbound and outbound for all Internet
traffic.

Reveal Solution Discussion 53

Question #82Topic 1
 A Solutions Architect is designing an Amazon VPC. Applications in the VPC must have
private connectivity to Amazon DynamoDB in the same AWS Region.
The design should route DynamoDB traffic through:

• A. VPC peering connection.

• B. NAT gateway
• C. VPC endpoint
• D. AWS Direct Connect

Reveal Solution Discussion 7

Question #83Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is architecting a workload that requires a performant object-based
storage system that must be shared with multiple Amazon EC2 instances.
Which AWS service meets this requirement?

• A. Amazon EFS
• B. Amazon S3
• C. Amazon EBS
• D. Amazon ElastiCache

Reveal Solution Discussion 43

Question #84Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is developing a solution for sharing files in an organization. The
solution must allow multiple users to access the storage service at once from different
virtual machines and scale automatically. It must also support file-level locking.
Which storage service meets the requirements of this use case?

• A. Amazon S3
• B. Amazon EFS
• C. Amazon EBS
• D. Cached Volumes

Reveal Solution Discussion 11

Question #85Topic 1
A company runs a legacy application with a single-tier architecture on an Amazon EC2
instance. Disk I/O is low, with occasional small spikes during business hours. The
company requires the instance to be stopped from 8 PM to 8 AM daily.
Which storage option is MOST appropriate for this workload?

• A. Amazon EC2 instance storage

• B. Amazon EBS General Purpose SSD (gp2) storage
• C. Amazon S3
• D. Amazon EBS Provision IOPS SSD (io1) storage
 Reveal Solution Discussion 16
Question #86Topic 1
As part of securing an API layer built on Amazon API gateway, a Solutions Architect has
to authorize users who are currently authenticated by an existing identity provider. The
users must be denied access for a period of one hour after three unsuccessful attempts.
How can the Solutions Architect meet these requirements?

• A. Use AWS IAM authorization and add least-privileged permissions to each respective
IAM role.
• B. Use an API Gateway custom authorizer to invoke an AWS Lambda function to validate
each user's identity.
• C. Use Amazon Cognito user pools to provide built-in user management.
• D. Use Amazon Cognito user pools to integrate with external identity providers.

Reveal Solution Discussion 25

Question #87Topic 1
An organization runs an online media site, hosted on-premises. An employee posted a
product review that contained videos and pictures. The review went viral and the
organization needs to handle the resulting spike in website traffic.
What action would provide an immediate solution?

• A. Redesign the website to use Amazon API Gateway, and use AWS Lambda to deliver
content.
• B. Add server instances using Amazon EC2 and use Amazon Route 53 with a failover
routing policy.
• C. Serve the images and videos via an Amazon CloudFront distribution created using the
news site as the origin.
• D. Use Amazon ElasticCache for Redis for caching and reducing the load requests from
the origin.

Reveal Solution Discussion 13

Question #88Topic 1
A client notices that their engineers often make mistakes when creating Amazon SQS
queues for their backend system.
Which action should a Solutions Architect recommend to improve this process?

• A. Use the AWS CLI to create queues using AWS IAM Access Keys.
• B. Write a script to create the Amazon SQS queue using AWS Lambda.
• C. Use AWS Elastic Beanstalk to automatically create the Amazon SQS queues.
• D. Use AWS CloudFormation Templates to manage the Amazon SQS queue creation.

Reveal Solution Discussion 6

Question #89Topic 1
A development team is building an application with front-end and backend application
tiers. Each tier consists of Amazon EC2 instances behind an ELB Classic
 Load Balancer. The instances run in Auto Scaling groups across multiple Availability
Zones. The network team has allocated the 10.0.0.0/24 address space for this
application. Only the front-end load balancer should be exposed to the Internet. There
are concerns about the limited size of the address space and the ability of each tier to
scale.
What should the VPC subnet design be in each Availability Zone?

• A. One public subnet for the load balancer tier, one public subnet for the front-end tier,
and one private subnet for the backend tier.
• B. One shared public subnet for all tiers of the application.
• C. One public subnet for the load balancer tier and one shared private subnet for the
application tiers.
• D. One shared private subnet for all tiers of the application.

Reveal Solution Discussion 37

Question #90Topic 1
A Solutions Architect must select the storage type for a big data application that
requires very high sequential I/O. The data must persist if the instance is stopped.
Which of the following storage types will provide the best fit at the LOWEST cost for the
application?

• A. An Amazon EC2 instance store local SSD volume.

• B. An Amazon EBS provisioned IOPS SSD volume.
• C. An Amazon EBS throughput optimized HDD volume.
• D. An Amazon EBS general purpose SSD volume.

Reveal Solution Discussion 16

Previous QuestionsNext Questions

Question #91Topic 1
Two Auto Scaling applications, Application A and Application B, currently run within a
shared set of subnets. A Solutions Architect wants to make sure that
Application A can make requests to Application B, but Application B should be denied
from making requests to Application A.
Which is the SIMPLEST solution to achieve this policy?

• A. Using security groups that reference the security groups of the other application
• B. Using security groups that reference the application server's IP addresses
• C. Using Network Access Control Lists to allow/deny traffic based on application IP
addresses
• D. Migrating the applications to separate subnets from each other

Reveal Solution Discussion 26

Question #92Topic 1
 Legacy applications currently send messages through a single Amazon EC2 instance,
which then routes the messages to the appropriate destinations. The
Amazon EC2 instance is a bottleneck and single point of failure, so the company would
like to address these issues.
Which services could address this architectural use case? (Choose two.)

• A. Amazon SNS
• B. AWS STS
• C. Amazon SQS
• D. Amazon Route 53
• E. AWS Glue

Reveal Solution Discussion 12

Question #93Topic 1
A Solutions Architect needs to design an architecture for a new, mission-critical batch
processing billing application. The application is required to run Monday,
Wednesday, and Friday from 5 AM to 11 AM.
Which is the MOST cost-effective Amazon EC2 pricing model?

• A. Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

• B. On-Demand Amazon EC2 Instances
• C. Scheduled Reserved Instances
• D. Dedicated Amazon EC2 Instances

Reveal Solution Discussion 23

Question #94Topic 1
A workload consists of downloading an image from an Amazon S3 bucket, processing
the image, and moving it to another Amazon S3 bucket. An Amazon EC2 instance runs
a scheduled task every hour to perform the operation.
How should a Solutions Architect redesign the process so that it is highly available?

• A. Change the Amazon EC2 instance to compute optimized.

• B. Launch a second Amazon EC2 instance to monitor the health of the first.
• C. Trigger a Lambda function when a new object is uploaded.
• D. Initially copy the images to an attached Amazon EBS volume.

Reveal Solution Discussion 12

Question #95Topic 1
An application is running on an Amazon EC2 instance in a private subnet. The
application needs to read and write data onto Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, and
corporate policy requires that this traffic should not go to the internet.
How can these requirements be met?
• A. Configure a NAT gateway in a public subnet and route all traffic to Amazon Kinesis
through the NAT gateway.
• B. Configure a gateway VPC endpoint for Kinesis and route all traffic to Kinesis through
the gateway VPC endpoint.
• C. Configure an interface VPC endpoint for Kinesis and route all traffic to Kinesis through
the gateway VPC endpoint.
• D. Configure an AWS Direct Connect private virtual interface for Kinesis and route all
traffic to Kinesis through the virtual interface.

Reveal Solution Discussion 11

Question #96Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is building an application that stores object data. Compliance
requirements state that the data stored is immutable.
Which service meets these requirements?

• A. Amazon S3
• B. Amazon Glacier
• C. Amazon EFS
• D. AWS Storage Gateway

Reveal Solution Discussion 24

Question #97Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is defining a shared Amazon S3 bucket where corporate
applications will save objects.
How can the Architect ensure that when an application uploads an object to the Amazon
S3 bucket, the object is encrypted?

• A. Set a CORS configuration.

• B. Set a bucket policy to encrypt all Amazon S3 objects.
• C. Enable default encryption on the bucket.
• D. Set permission for users.

Reveal Solution Discussion 39

Question #98Topic 1
An application tier currently hosts two web services on the same set of instances,
listening on different ports.
Which AWS service should a Solutions Architect use to route traffic to the service based
on the incoming request path?

• A. AWS Application Load Balancer

• B. Amazon CloudFront
• C. Amazon Classic Load Balancer
• D. Amazon Route 53

Reveal Solution Discussion 11

 Question #99Topic 1
A data analytics startup company asks a Solutions Architect to recommend an AWS
data store options for indexed data. The data processing engine will generate and input
more than 64 TB of processed data every day, with item sizes reaching up to 300 KB.
The startup is flexible with data storage and is more interested in a database that
requires minimal effort to scale with a growing dataset size.
Which AWS data store service should the Architect recommend?

• A. Amazon RDS
• B. Amazon Redshift
• C. Amazon DynamoDB
• D. Amazon S3

Reveal Solution Discussion 13

Question #100Topic 1
A Solutions Architect needs to allow developers to have SSH connectivity to web
servers. The requirements are as follows:
✑ Limit access to users origination from the corporate network.
✑ Web servers cannot have SSH access directly from the Internet.
✑ Web servers reside in a private subnet.
Which combination of steps must the Architect complete to meet these requirements?
(Choose two.)

• A. Create a bastion host that authenticates users against the corporate directory.
• B. Create a bastion host with security group rules that only allow traffic from the corporate
network.
• C. Attach an IAM role to the bastion host with relevant permissions.
• D. Configure the web servers' security group to allow SSH traffic from a bastion host.
• E. Deny all SSH traffic from the corporate network in the inbound network ACL.

Reveal Solution Discussion 38

Previous QuestionsNext Questions
 Question #101Topic 1
A Solutions Architect needs to use AWS to implement pilot light disaster recovery for a
three-tier web application hosted in an on-premises datacenter.
Which solution allows rapid provision of working, fully-scaled production environment?

• A. Continuously replicate the production database server to Amazon RDS. Use AWS
CloudFormation to deploy the application and any additional servers if necessary.
• B. Continuously replicate the production database server to Amazon RDS. Create one
application load balancer and register on-premises servers. Configure ELB Application
Load Balancer to automatically deploy Amazon EC2 instances for application and
additional servers if the on-premises application is down.
• C. Use a scheduled Lambda function to replicate the production database to AWS. Use
Amazon Route 53 health checks to deploy the application automatically to Amazon S3 if
production is unhealthy.
• D. Use a scheduled Lambda function to replicate the production database to AWS.
Register on-premises servers to an Auto Scaling group and deploy the application and
additional servers if production is unavailable.

Reveal Solution Discussion 34

Question #102Topic 1
A Solutions Architect notices slower response times from an application. The
CloudWatch metrics on the MySQL RDS indicate Read IOPS are high and fluctuate
significantly when the database is under load.
How should the database environment be re-designed to resolve the IOPS fluctuation?

• A. Change the RDS instance type to get more RAM.

• B. Change the storage type to Provisioned IOPS.
• C. Scale the web server tier horizontally.
• D. Split the DB layer into separate RDS instances.

Reveal Solution Discussion 14

Question #103Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a solution that can monitor memory and disk space
utilization of all Amazon EC2 instances running Amazon Linux and
Windows.
Which solution meets this requirement?

• A. Default Amazon CloudWatch metrics.

• B. Custom Amazon CloudWatch metrics.
• C. Amazon Inspector resource monitoring.
• D. Default monitoring of Amazon EC2 instances.

Reveal Solution Discussion 29

Question #104Topic 1
 A Solutions Architect is creating a new relational database. The Compliance team will
use the database, and mandates that data content must be stored across three different
Availability Zones.
Which of the following options should the Architect Use?

• A. Amazon Aurora
• B. Amazon RDS MySQL with Multi-AZ enabled
• C. Amazon DynamoDB
• D. Amazon ElastiCache

Reveal Solution Discussion 28

Question #105Topic 1
A company needs to quickly ensure that all files created in an Amazon S3 bucket in us-
east-1 are also available in another bucket in ap-southeast-2.
Which option represents the SIMPLIEST way to implement this design?

• A. Add an S3 lifecycle rule to move any files from the bucket in us-east-1 to the bucket in
ap-southeast-2.
• B. Create a Lambda function to be triggered for every new file in us-east-1 that copies the
file to the bucket in ap-southeast-2.
• C. Use SNS to notify the bucket in ap-southeast-2 to create a file whenever the file is
created in the bucket in us-east-1.
• D. Enable versioning and configure cross-region replication from the bucket in us-east-1
to the bucket in ap-southeast-2.

Reveal Solution Discussion 17

Question #106Topic 1
An organization has a long-running image processing application that runs on Spot
Instances that will be terminated when interrupted. A highly available workload must be
designed to respond to Spot Instance interruption notices. The solution must include a
two-minute warning when there is not enough capacity.
How can these requirements be met?

• A. Use Amazon CloudWatch Events to invoke an AWS Lambda function that can launch
On-Demand Instances.
• B. Regularly store data from the application on Amazon DynamoDB. Increase the
maximum number of instances in the AWS Auto Scaling group.
• C. Manually place a bid for additional Spot Instances at a higher price in the same AWS
Region and Availability Zone.
• D. Ensure that the Amazon Machine Image associated with the application has the latest
configurations for the launch configuration.

Reveal Solution Discussion 18

Question #107Topic 1
 A company has an Amazon RDS-managed online transaction processing system that
has very heavy read and write. The Solutions Architect notices throughput issues with
the system.
How can the responsiveness of the primary database be improved?

• A. Use asynchronous replication for standby to maximize throughput during peak demand.
• B. Offload SELECT queries that can tolerate stale data to READ replica.
• C. Offload SELECT and UPDATE queries to READ replica.
• D. Offload SELECT query that needs the most current data to READ replica.

Reveal Solution Discussion 23

Question #108Topic 1
A company is designing a failover strategy in Amazon Route 53 for its resources
between two AWS Regions. The company must have the ability to route a user's traffic
to the region with least latency, and if both regions are healthy, Route 53 should route
traffic to resources in both regions.
Which strategy should the Solutions Architect recommend?

• A. Configure active-active failover using Route 53 latency DNS records.

• B. Configure active-passive failover using Route 53 latency DNS records.
• C. Configure active-active failover using Route 53 failover DNS records.
• D. Configure active-passive failover using Route 53 failover DNS records.

Reveal Solution Discussion 10

Question #109Topic 1
A company is developing several critical long-running applications hosted on Docker.
How should a Solutions Architect design a solution to meet the scalability and
orchestration requirements on AWS?

• A. Use Amazon ECS and Service Auto Scaling.

• B. Use Spot Instances for orchestration and for scaling containers on existing Amazon
EC2 instances.
• C. Use AWS OpsWorks to launch containers in new Amazon EC2 instances.
• D. Use Auto Scaling groups to launch containers on existing Amazon EC2 instances.

Reveal Solution Discussion 14

Question #110Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is developing a new web application on AWS. The Architect
expects the application to become very popular, so the application must scale to
support the load. The Architect wants to focus on software development and deploying
new features without provisioning or managing instances.
What solution is appropriate?

• A. Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda

• B. Elastic Load Balancing with Auto Scaling groups and Amazon EC2
• C. Amazon API Gateway and Amazon EC2
• D. Amazon CloudFront and AWS Lambda

Reveal Solution Discussion 46

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Question #111Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is deploying a new production MySQL database on AWS. It is
critical that the database is highly available.
What should the Architect do to achieve this goal with Amazon RDS?

• A. Create a read replica of the primary database and deploy it in a different AWS Region.
• B. Enable multi-AZ to create a standby database in a different Availability Zone.
• C. Enable multi-AZ to create a standby database in a different AWS Region.
• D. Create a read replica of the primary database and deploy it in a different Availability
Zone.

Reveal Solution Discussion 24

Question #112Topic 1
An organization designs a mobile application for their customers to upload photos to a
site. The application needs a secure login with MFA. The organization wants to limit the
initial build time and maintenance of the solution.
Which solution should a Solutions Architect recommend to meet the requirements?

• A. Use Amazon Cognito Identity with SMS-based MFA.

• B. Edit AWS IAM policies to require MFA for all users.
• C. Federate IAM against corporate AD that requires MFA.
• D. Use Amazon API Gateway and require SSE for photos.

Reveal Solution Discussion 7

Question #113Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a solution to monitor weather changes by the minute.
The frontend application is hosted on Amazon EC2 instances. The backend must be
scalable to a virtually unlimited size, and data retrieval must occur with minimal latency.
Which AWS service should the Architect use to store the data and achieve these
requirements?

• A. Amazon S3
• B. Amazon DynamoDB
• C. Amazon RDS
• D. Amazon EBS
 Reveal Solution Discussion 47
Question #114Topic 1
A company hosts a website on premises. The website has a mix of static and dynamic
content, but users experience latency when loading static files.
Which AWS service can help reduce latency?

• A. Amazon CloudFront with on-premises servers as the origin

• B. ELB Application Load Balancer
• C. Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing
• D. Amazon EFS to store and server static files

Reveal Solution Discussion 12

Question #115Topic 1
A company wants to analyze all of its sales information aggregated over the last 12
months. The company expects there to be over 10TB of data from multiple sources.
What service should be used?

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

Reveal Solution Discussion 9

Question #116Topic 1
A media company has deployed a multi-tier architecture on AWS. Web servers are
deployed in two Availability Zones using an Auto Scaling group with a default
Auto Scaling termination policy. The web servers' Auto Scaling group currently has 15
instances running.
Which instance will be terminated first during a scale-in operation?

• A. The instance with the oldest launch configuration.

• B. The instance in the Availability Zone that has most instances.
• C. The instance closest to the next billing hour.
• D. The oldest instance in the group.

Reveal Solution Discussion 36

Question #117Topic 1
A retail company has sensors placed in its physical retail stores. The sensors send
messages over HTTP when customers interact with in-store product displays.
A Solutions Architect needs to implement a system for processing those sensor
messages; the results must be available for the Data Analysis team.
Which architecture should be used to meet these requirements?
• A. Implement an Amazon API Gateway to server as the HTTP endpoint. Have the API
Gateway trigger an AWS Lambda function to process the messages, and save the results
to an Amazon DynamoDB table.
• B. Create an Amazon EC2 instance to server as the HTTP endpoint and to process the
messages. Save the results to Amazon S3 for the Data Analysis team to download.
• C. Use Amazon Route 53 to direct incoming sensor messages to a Lambda function to
process the message and save the results to a Amazon DynamoDB table.
• D. Use AWS Direct Connect to connect sensors to DynamoDB so that data can be written
directly to a DynamoDB table where it can be accessed by the Data Analysis team.

Reveal Solution Discussion 20

Question #118Topic 1
A client is migrating a legacy web application to the AWS Cloud. The current system
uses an Oracle database as a relational database management system solution.
Backups occur every night, and the data is stored on-premises. The Solutions Architect
must automate the backups and identity a storage solution while keeping costs low.
Which AWS service will meet these requirements?

• A. Amazon RDS
• B. Amazon RedShift
• C. Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator
• D. Amazon ElastiCache

Reveal Solution Discussion 8

Question #119Topic 1
A company has an Amazon RDS database backing its production website. The Sales
team needs to run queries against the database to track training program effectiveness.
Queries against the production database cannot impact performance, and the solution
must be easy to maintain.
How can these requirements be met?

• A. Use an Amazon Redshift database. Copy the product database into Redshift and allow
the team to query it.
• B. Use an Amazon RDS read replica of the production database and allow the team to
query against it.
• C. Use multiple Amazon EC2 instances running replicas of the production database,
placed behind a load balancer.
• D. Use an Amazon DynamoDB table to store a copy of the data.

Reveal Solution Discussion 25

Question #120Topic 1
A company must collect temperature data from thousands of remote weather devices.
The company must also store this data in a data warehouse to run aggregations and
visualizations.
Which services will meet these requirements? (Choose two.)
• A. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehouse
• B. Amazon SQS
• C. Amazon Redshift
• D. Amazon SNS
• E. Amazon DynamoDB

Reveal Solution Discussion 27

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Question #121Topic 1
A company has a legal requirement to store point-in-time copies of its Amazon RDS
PostGreSQL database instance in facilities that are at least 200 miles apart.
Use of which of the following provides the easiest way to comply with this requirement?

• A. Cross-region read replica

• B. Multiple Availability Zone snapshot copy
• C. Multiple Availability Zone read replica
• D. Cross-region snapshot copy

Reveal Solution Discussion 36

Question #122Topic 1
After reviewing their logs, a startup company noticed large, random spikes in traffic to
their web application. The company wants to configure a cost-efficient Auto
Scaling solution to support high availability of the web application.
Which scaling plan should a Solutions Architect recommend to meet the company's
needs?

• A. Dynamic
• B. Scheduled
• C. Manual
• D. Lifecycle

Reveal Solution Discussion 8

Question #123Topic 1
To meet compliance standards, a company must have encrypted archival data storage.
Data will be accessed infrequently, with lead times well in advance of when archived
data must be recovered. The company requires that the storage be secure, durable,
and provided at the lowest price per 1TB of data stored.
What type of storage should be used?

• A. Amazon S3
• B. Amazon EBS
• C. Amazon Glacier
• D. Amazon EFS
 Reveal Solution Discussion 11
Question #124Topic 1
An online company wants to conduct real-time sentiment analysis about its products
from its social media channels using SQL.
Which of the following solutions has the LOWEST cost and operational burden?

• A. Set up a streaming data ingestion application on Amazon EC2 and connect it to a

Hadoop cluster for data processing. Send the output to Amazon S3 and use Amazon
Athena to analyze the data.
• B. Configure the input stream using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. Use Amazon Kinesis
Data Analytics to write SQL queries against the stream.
• C. Configure the input stream using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. Use Amazon Kinesis
Data Firehose to send data to an Amazon Redshift cluster, and then query directly against
Amazon Redshift
• D. Set up streaming data ingestion application on Amazon EC2 and send the output to
Amazon S3 using Kinesis Data Firehose. Use Athena to analyze the data.

Reveal Solution Discussion 10

Question #125Topic 1
An organization must process a stream of large-volume hashtag data in real time and
needs to run custom SQL queries on the data to get insights on certain tags.
The organization needs this solution to be elastic and does not want to manage
clusters.
Which of the following AWS services meets these requirements?

• A. Amazon Elasticsearch Service

• B. Amazon Athena
• C. Amazon Redshift
• D. Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics

Reveal Solution Discussion 18

Question #126Topic 1
Which requirements must be met in order for a Solutions Architect to specify that an
Amazon EC2 instance should stop rather than terminate when its Spot
Instance is interrupted? (Choose two.)

• A. The Spot Instance request type must be one-time.

• B. The Spot Instance request type must be persistent.
• C. The root volume must be an Amazon EBS volume.
• D. The root volume must be an instance store volume.
• E. The launch configuration is changed.

Reveal Solution Discussion 10

Question #127Topic 1
 An application hosted on AWS uses object storage for storing internal reports that are
accessed daily by the CFO. Currently, these reports are publicly available.
How should a Solutions Architect re-design this architecture to prevent unauthorized
access to these reports?

• A. Encrypt the files on the client side and store the files on Amazon Glacier, then decrypt
the reports on the client side.
• B. Move the files to Amazon ElastiCache and provide a username and password for
downloading the reports.
• C. Specify the use of AWS KMS server-side encryption at the time of an object creation
on Amazon S3.
• D. Store the files on Amazon S3 and use the application to generate S3 pre-signed URLs
to users.

Reveal Solution Discussion 24

Question #128Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing an application on AWS that will connect to the on-
premise data center through a VPN connection. The solution must be able to log
network traffic over the VPN.
Which service logs this network traffic?

• A. AWS CloudTrail logs

• B. Amazon VPC flow logs
• C. Amazon S3 bucket logs
• D. Amazon CloudWatch Logs

Reveal Solution Discussion 28

Question #129Topic 1
A company wants to durably store data in 8 KB chunks. The company will access the
data once every few months. However, when the company does access the data, it
must be done with as little latency as possible.
Which AWS service should a Solutions Architect recommend if cost is NOT a factor?

• A. Amazon DynamoDB
• B. Amazon EBS Throughput Optimized HDD Volumes
• C. Amazon EBS Cold HDD Volumes
• D. Amazon ElastiCache

Reveal Solution Discussion 21

Question #130Topic 1
A media company has more than 100TB of data to be stored and retrieved infrequently.
However, the company occasionally receives requests for data within an hour. The
company needs a low-cost retrieval method to handle the requests.
Which service meets this requirement?
• A. Amazon S3 Standard
• B. Amazon Glacier standard retrievals
• C. Amazon Glacier bulk retrievals
• D. Amazon S3 Standard Infrequent Access

Reveal Solution Discussion 9

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Question #131Topic 1
An on-premises database is experiencing significant performance problems when
running SQL queries. With 10 users, the lookups are performing as expected.
As the number of users increases, the lookups take three times longer than expected to
return values to an application.
Which action should a Solutions Architect take to maintain performance as the user
count increases?

• A. Use Amazon SQS.

• B. Deploy Multi-AZ RDS MySQL
• C. Configure Amazon RDS with additional read replicas.
• D. Migrate from MySQL to RDS Microsoft SQL Server.

Reveal Solution Discussion 27

Question #132Topic 1
A team has an application that detects new objects being uploaded into an Amazon S3
bucket. The uploads trigger a Lambda function to write object metadata into an Amazon
DynamoDB table and RDS PostgreSQL database.
Which action should the team take to ensure high availability?

• A. Enable cross-region replication in the Amazon S3 bucket.

• B. Create a Lambda function for each Availability Zone the application is deployed in.
• C. Enable multi-AZ on the RDS PostgreSQL database.
• D. Create a DynamoDB stream for the DynamoDB table.

Reveal Solution Discussion 20

Question #133Topic 1
A media company must store 10 TB of audio recordings. Retrieval happens infrequently
and requestors agree on an 8-hour turnaround time.
What is the MOST cost-effective solution to store the files?

• A. Amazon S3 Standard "" Infrequent Access (Standard "" IA)

• B. EBS Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)
• C. EBS Cold HDD (sc1)
• D. Amazon Glacier
 Reveal Solution Discussion 13
Question #134Topic 1
A company wants to improve the performance of their web application after receiving
customer complaints. An analysis concluded that the same complex database queries
were causing increased latency.
What should a Solutions Architect recommend to improve the application's
performance?

• A. Migrate the database to MySQL.

• B. Use Amazon RedShift to analyze the queries.
• C. Integrate Amazon ElastiCache into the application.
• D. Use a Lambda-triggered request to the backend database.

Reveal Solution Discussion 9

Question #135Topic 1
Which tool analyzes account resources and provides a detailed inventory of changes
over time?

• A. AWS Config
• B. AWS CloudFormation
• C. Amazon CloudWatch
• D. AWS Service Catalog

Reveal Solution Discussion 11

Question #136Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a solution that will include a database in Amazon
RDS. Corporate security policy mandates that the database, its logs, and its backups
are all encrypted.
Which is the MOST efficient option to fulfill the security policy using Amazon RDS?

• A. Launch an Amazon RDS instance with encryption enabled. Enable encryption for logs
and backups.
• B. Launch an Amazon RDS instance. Enable encryption for database, logs and backups.
• C. Launch an Amazon RDS instance with encryption enabled. Logs and backups are
automatically encrypted.
• D. Launch an Amazon RDS instance. Enable encryption for backups. Encrypt logs with a
database-engine feature.

Reveal Solution Discussion 17

Question #137Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a public-facing web application for employees to
upload images to their social media account. The application consists of multiple
Amazon EC2 instances behind an elastic load balancer, an Amazon S3 bucket where
uploaded images are stored, and an Amazon DynamoDB table for storing image
metadata.
 Which AWS service can the Architect use to automate the process of updating
metadata in the DynamoDB table upon image upload?

• A. Amazon CloudWatch
• B. AWS CloudFormation
• C. AWS Lambda
• D. Amazon SQS

Reveal Solution Discussion 11

Question #138Topic 1
A company's policy requires that all data stored in Amazon S3 is encrypted. The
company wants to use the option with the least overhead and does not want to manage
any encryption keys.
Which of the following options will meet the company's requirements?

• A. AWS CloudHSM
• B. AWS Trusted Advisor
• C. Server Side Encryption (SSE-S3)
• D. Server Side Encryption (SSE-KMS)

Reveal Solution Discussion 15

Question #139Topic 1
A company has gigabytes of web log files stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. A Solutions
Architect wants to copy those files into Amazon Redshift for analysis. The company's
security policy mandates that data is encrypted at rest both in the Amazon Redshift
cluster and the Amazon S3 bucket.
Which process will fulfill the security requirements?

• A. Enable server-side encryption on the Amazon S3 bucket. Launch an unencrypted

Amazon Redshift cluster. Copy the data into the Amazon Redshift cluster.
• B. Enable server-side encryption on the Amazon S3 bucket. Copy data from the Amazon
S3 bucket into an unencrypted Redshift cluster. Enable encryption on the cluster.
• C. Launch an encrypted Amazon Redshift cluster. Copy the data from the Amazon S3
bucket into the Amazon Redshift cluster. Copy data back to the Amazon S3 bucket in
encrypted form.
• D. Enable server-side encryption on the Amazon S3 bucket. Launch an encrypted
Amazon Redshift cluster. Copy the data into the Amazon Redshift cluster.

Reveal Solution Discussion 15

Question #140Topic 1
An application runs on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. When
instances are terminated, the Systems Operations team cannot determine the route
cause, because the logs reside on the terminated instances and are lost.
How can the root cause be determined?
• A. Use ephemeral volumes to store the log files.
• B. Use a scheduled Amazon CloudWatch Event to take regular Amazon EBS snapshots.
• C. Use an Amazon CloudWatch agent to push the logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.
• D. Use AWS CloudTrail to pull the logs from the Amazon EC2 instances.

Reveal Solution Discussion 6

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uestion #141Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a customer order processing application that will likely
have high usage spikes.
What should the Architect do to ensure that customer orders are not lost before being
written to an Amazon RDS database? (Choose two.)

• A. Use Amazon CloudFront to deliver the application front end.

• B. Use Elastic Load Balancing with a round-robin routing algorithm.
• C. Have the orders written into an Amazon SQS queue.
• D. Scale the number of processing nodes based on pending order volume.
• E. Have a standby Amazon RDS instance in a separate Availability Zone.

Reveal Solution Discussion 22

Question #142Topic 1
Employees from several companies use an application once a year during a specific 30-
day period. The periods are different for each company. Traffic to the application spikes
during these 30-day periods.
How can the application be designed to handle these traffic spikes?

• A. Use an Amazon Route 53 latency routing policy to route traffic to an Amazon EC2
instance with the least lag time.
• B. Use Amazon S3 to cache static elements of the website requests.
• C. Use an Auto Scaling group to scale the number of EC2 instances to match the site
traffic.
• D. Use Amazon Cloud Front to serve static assets to decrease the load on the EC2
instances.

Reveal Solution Discussion 28

Question #143Topic 1
A restaurant reservation application needs the ability to maintain a waiting list. When a
customer tries to reserve a table, and none are available, the customer must be put on
the waiting list, and the application must notify the customer when a table becomes free.
What service should the Solutions Architect recommend to ensure that the system
respects the order in which the customer requests are put onto the waiting list?

• A. Amazon SNS
• B. AWS Lambda with sequential dispatch
• C. A FIFO queue in Amazon SQS
• D. A standard queue in Amazon SQS

Reveal Solution Discussion 16

Question #144Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a solution for a dynamic website, "example.com," that
is deployed in two regions: Tokyo, Japan and Sydney, Australia. The
Architect wants to ensure that users located in Australia are directed to the website
deployed in the Sydney region and users located in Japan are redirected to the website
in the Tokyo region when they browse to "example.com".
Which service should the Architect use to achieve this goal with the LEAST
administrative effort?

• A. Amazon CloudFront with geolocation routing

• B. Amazon Route 53
• C. Application Load Balancer
• D. Network Load Balancer deployed across multiple regions

Reveal Solution Discussion 12

Question #145Topic 1
A company has a popular multi-player mobile game hosted in its on-premises
datacenter. The current infrastructure can no longer keep up with demand and the
company is considering a move to the cloud.
Which solution should a Solutions Architect recommend as the MOST scalable and
cost-effective solution to meet these needs?

• A. Amazon EC2 and an Application Load Balancer

• B. Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront
• C. Amazon EC2 and Amazon Elastic Transcoder
• D. AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway

Reveal Solution Discussion 51

Question #146Topic 1
A company has instances in private subnets that require outbound access to the
internet.
This requires:

• A. Assigning a public IP address to the instance.

• B. Updating the route table associated with the subnet to point internet traffic through a
NAT gateway.
• C. Updating the security group associated with the subnet to allow ingress on 0.0.0.0/0.
• D. Routing traffic from the instance through a VPC endpoint that has internet access.

Reveal Solution Discussion 6

 Question #147Topic 1
An organization regularly backs up their application data. The application backups are
required to be stored on Amazon S3 for a certain amount of time. The backups should
be accessed instantly in the event of a disaster recovery.
Which of the following Amazon S3 storage classes would be the MOST cost-effective
option to meet the needs of this scenario?

• A. Glacier Storage Class

• B. Standard Storage Class
• C. Standard "" Infrequent Access (IA)
• D. Reduced Redundancy Class (RRS)

Reveal Solution Discussion 23

Question #148Topic 1
An organization runs an online voting system for a television program. During
broadcasts, hundreds of thousands of votes are submitted within minutes and sent to a
front-end fleet of auto-scaled Amazon EC2 instances. The EC2 instances push the
votes to an RDBMS database. The database is unable to keep up with the front-end
connection requests.
What is the MOST efficient and cost-effective way of ensuring that votes are processed
in a timely manner?

• A. Each front-end node should send votes to an Amazon SQS queue. Provision worker
instances to read the SQS queue and process the message information into RDBMS
database.
• B. As the load on the database increases, horizontally-scale the RDBMS database with
additional memory-optimized instances. When voting has ended, scale down the
additional instances.
• C. Re-provision the RDBMS database with larger, memory-optimized instances. When
voting ends, re-provision the back-end database with smaller instances.
• D. Send votes from each front-end node to Amazon DynamoDB. Provision worker
instances to process the votes in DynamoDB into the RDBMS database.

Reveal Solution Discussion 22

Question #149Topic 1
An application publishes Amazon SNS messages in response to several events. An
AWS Lambda function subscribes to these messages. Occasionally the function will fail
while processing a message, so the original event message must be preserved for root
cause analysis.
What architecture will meet these requirements without changing the workflow?

• A. Subscribe an Amazon SQS queue to the Amazon SNS topic and trigger the Lambda
function from the queue.
• B. Configure Lambda to write failures to an SQS Dead Letter Queue.
• C. Configure a Dead Letter Queue for the Amazon SNS topic.
• D. Configure the Amazon SNS topic to invoke the Lambda function synchronously.

Reveal Solution Discussion 66

Question #150Topic 1
An application uses an Amazon RDS MySQL cluster for the database layer. Database
growth requires periodic resizing of the instance. Currently, administrators check the
available disk space manually once a week.
How can this process be improved?

• A. Use the largest instance type for the database.

• B. Use AWS CloudTrail to monitor storage capacity.
• C. Use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor storage capacity.
• D. Use Auto Scaling to increase storage size.

Reveal Solution Discussion 34

Previous QuestionsNext Questions

Question #151Topic 1
A customer owns a MySQL database that is accessed by various clients who expect, at
most, 100 ms latency on requests. Once a record is stored in the database, it rarely
changed. Clients only access one record at a time.
Database access has been increasing exponentially due to increased client demand.
The resultant load will soon exceed the capacity of the most expensive hardware
available for purchase. The customer wants to migrate to AWS, and is willing to change
database systems.
Which service would alleviate the database load issue and offer virtually unlimited
scalability for the future?

• A. Amazon RDS
• B. Amazon DynamoDB
• C. Amazon Redshift
• D. AWS Data Pipeline

Reveal Solution Discussion 20

Question #152Topic 1
A business team requires a structured storage solution to store all of a company's
historical sales data. Currently there are 4 TB of data, which will grow to hundreds of
terabytes within a few years. The team must be able to regularly run queries against the
data using current business intelligence tools. Fast performance is required despite the
dataset growth.
Which solution should the company use?

• A. Amazon Redshift
• B. Amazon Aurora
• C. Amazon DynamoDB
• D. Amazon S3

Reveal Solution Discussion 8

Question #153Topic 1
A prediction process requires access to a trained model that is stored in an Amazon S3
bucket. The process takes a few seconds to process an image and make a prediction.
The process is not overly resource-intensive, does not require any specialized
hardware, and takes less than 512 MB of memory to run.
What would be the MOST effective compute solution for this use case?

• A. Amazon ECS
• B. Amazon EC2 Spot instances
• C. AWS Lambda functions
• D. AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Reveal Solution Discussion 5

Question #154Topic 1
An application that runs on an Amazon EC2 instance must make secure calls to
Amazon S3 buckets.
Which steps can a Solutions Architect take to ensure that the calls are made without
exposing credentials?

• A. Generate an access key ID and a secret key, and assign an IAM role with least
privilege.
• B. Create an IAM policy granting access to all services and assign it to the Amazon EC2
instance profile.
• C. Create an IAM role granting least privilege and assign it to the Amazon EC2 instance
profile.
• D. Generate temporary access keys to grant users temporary access to the Amazon EC2
instance.

Reveal Solution Discussion 3

Question #155Topic 1
A Solutions Architect needs to design a centralized logging solution for a group of web
applications running on Amazon EC2 instances. The solution requires minimal
development effort due to budget constraints.
Which of the following should the Architect recommend?

• A. Create a crontab job script in each instance to push the logs regularly to Amazon S3.
• B. Install and configure Amazon CloudWatch Logs agent in the Amazon EC2 instances.
• C. Enable Amazon CloudWatch Events in the AWS Management Console.
• D. Enable AWS CloudTrail to map all API calls invoked by the applications.

Reveal Solution Discussion 8

Question #156Topic 1
 A company is using Amazon S3 as its local repository for weekly analysis reports. One
of the company-wide requirements is to secure data at rest using encryption. The
company chose Amazon S3 server-side encryption. The company wants to know how
the object is decrypted when a GET request is issued.
Which of the following answers this question?

• A. The user needs to place a PUT request to decrypt the object.

• B. The user needs to decrypt the object using a private key.
• C. Amazon S3 manages encryption and decryption automatically.
• D. Amazon S3 provides a server-side key for decrypting the object.

Reveal Solution Discussion 32

Question #157Topic 1
A company is looking for a fully-managed solution to store its players' state information
for a rapidly growing game. The application runs on multiple Amazon EC2 nodes, which
can scale according to the incoming traffic. The request can be routed to any of the
nodes, therefore, the state information must be stored in a centralized database. The
players' state information needs to be read with strong consistency and needs
conditional updates for any changes.
Which service would be MOST cost-effective, and scale seamlessly?

• A. Amazon S3
• B. Amazon DynamoDB
• C. Amazon RDS
• D. Amazon Redshift

Reveal Solution Discussion 24

Question #158Topic 1
An application is running on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load
Balancer. The instances run in an Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability
Zones. Four instances are required to handle a predictable traffic load. The Solutions
Architect wants to ensure that the operation is fault-tolerant up to the loss of one
Availability Zone.
Which is the MOST cost-efficient way to meet these requirements?

• A. Deploy two instances in each of three Availability Zones.

• B. Deploy two instances in each of two Availability Zones.
• C. Deploy four instances in each of two Availability Zones.
• D. Deploy one instance in each of three Availability Zones.

Reveal Solution Discussion 23

Question #159Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a three-tier web application that includes an Auto
Scaling group of Amazon EC2 instances running behind an ELB Classic Load
Balancer. The security team requires that all web servers must be accessible only
 through the Load Balancer, and that none of the web servers are directly accessible
from the Internet.
How should the Architect meet these requirements?

• A. Use a Load Balancer installed on an Amazon EC2 instance.

• B. Configure the web servers' security group to deny traffic from the public Internet.
• C. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the ELB Classic Load Balancer.
• D. Configure the web tier security group to allow only traffic from the ELB Classic Load
Balancer.

Reveal Solution Discussion 5

Question #160Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a web application that will be hosted on Amazon EC2
instances in a public subnet. The web application uses a MySQL database in a private
subnet. The database should be accessible to database administrators.
Which of the following options should the Architect recommend? (Choose two.)

• A. Create a bastion host in a public subnet, and use the bastion host to connect to the
database.
• B. Log in to the web servers in the public subnet to connect to the database.
• C. Perform DB maintenance after using SSH to connect to the NAT Gateway in a public
subnet.
• D. Create an IPSec VPN tunnel between the customer site and the VPC, and use the
VPN tunnel to connect to the database.
• E. Attach an Elastic IP address to the database.

Reveal Solution Discussion 31

Previous QuestionsNext Questions

Question #161Topic 1
A web application running on Amazon EC2 instances writes data synchronously to an
Amazon DynamoDB table configured for 60 write capacity units. During normal
operation the application writes 50 KB/s to the tale, but can scale up to 500 KB/ s during
peak hours. The application is currently throttling errors from the
DynamoDB table during peak hours.
What is the MOST cost-efficient change to support the increased traffic with minimal
changes to the application?

• A. Use Amazon SQS to manage the write operations to the DynamoDB table.
• B. Change DynamoDB table configuration to 600 write capacity units.
• C. Increase the number of Amazon EC2 instances to support the traffic.
• D. Configure Amazon DynamoDB Auto Scaling to handle the extra demand.

Reveal Solution Discussion 20

Question #162Topic 1
 One company wants to share the contents of their Amazon S3 bucket with another
company. Security requirements mandate that only the other company's AWS accounts
have access to the contents of the Amazon S3 bucket.
Which Amazon S3 feature will allow secure access to the Amazon S3 bucket?

• A. Bucket policy
• B. Object tagging
• C. CORS configuration
• D. Lifecycle policy

Reveal Solution Discussion 18

Question #163Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a service that must have four Amazon EC2 instances
running between 8 AM and 6 PM daily. The service requires one EC2 instance outside
of those hours.
What is the MOST cost-effective way to provide enough compute?

• A. Use one Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance and use an Auto Scaling group to add and
remove EC2 instances based on CPU utilization.
• B. Use one Amazon EC2 On-Demand instance and use an Auto Scaling group to add and
remove EC2 instances based on CPU utilization.
• C. Use one Amazon EC2 On-Demand instance and use an Auto Scaling Group scheduled
action to add three EC2 Spot instances at 7:30 AM and remove three instances at 6:10
PM.
• D. Use one Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance and use an Auto Scaling Group scheduled
action to add three EC2 On-Demand instances at 7:30 AM and remove three instances at
6:10 PM.

Reveal Solution Discussion 21

Question #164Topic 1
A company plans to use an Amazon VPC to deploy a web application consisting of an
elastic load balancer, a fleet of web and application servers, and an
Amazon RDS MySQL database that should not be accessible from the Internet. The
proposed design must be highly available and distributed over two Availability
Zones.
What would be the MOST appropriate VPC design for this specific use case?

• A. Two public subnets for the elastic load balancer, two public subnets for the web
servers, and two public subnets for Amazon RDS.
• B. One public subnet for the elastic load balancer, two private subnets for the web
servers, and two private subnets for Amazon RDS.
• C. One public subnet for the elastic load balancer, one public subnet for the web servers,
and one private subnet for the database.
• D. Two public subnets for the elastic load balancer, two private subnets for the web
servers, and two private subnets for RDS.
 Reveal Solution Discussion 55
Question #165Topic 1
A workload in an Amazon VPC consists of a single web server launched from a custom
AMI. Session state is stored in a database.
How should the Solutions Architect modify this workload to be both highly available and
scalable?

• A. Create a launch configuration with a desired capacity of two web servers across
multiple Availability Zones. Create an Auto Scaling group with the AMI ID of the web
server image. Use Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing to balance traffic across the
Auto Scaling group.
• B. Create a launch configuration with the AMI ID of the web server image. Create an Auto
Scaling group using the newly-created launch configuration, and a desired capacity of two
web servers across multiple regions. Use an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to balance
traffic across the Auto Scaling group.
• C. Create a launch configuration with the AMI ID of the web server image. Create an Auto
Scaling group using the newly-created launch configuration, and a desired capacity of two
web servers across multiple Availability Zones. Use an ALB to balance traffic across the
Auto Scaling group.
• D. Create a launch configuration with the AMI ID of the web server image. Create an Auto
Scaling group using the newly-created launch configuration, and a desired capacity of two
web servers across multiple Availability Zones. Use Amazon Route 53 weighted routing to
balance traffic across the Auto Scaling group.

Reveal Solution Discussion 24

Question #166Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is developing a new web application on AWS. The services must
scale to support an increasing load. The Architect wants to focus on software
development and deploying new features rather than provisioning or managing servers.
Which AWS service is appropriate?

• A. Auto Scaling
• B. Elastic Beanstalk
• C. EC2 Container Service
• D. CloudFormation

Reveal Solution Discussion 5

Question #167Topic 1
A company wants to migrate a three-tier web application to AWS. The company wants
to control the placement of the instances and have visibility into underlying sockets and
cores for licensing purposes.
Which compute model should a Solutions Architect choose to accomplish this task?

• A. EC2 Reserved Instances

• B. EC2 Spot Instances
• C. EC2 Dedicated Hosts
• D. EC2 Placement Groups

Reveal Solution Discussion 6

Question #168Topic 1
An application runs on multiple Amazon EC2 instances. Each running instance of the
application must have access to a shared file system.
Where should the data be stored?

• A. Amazon S3
• B. Amazon DynamoDB
• C. Amazon EFS
• D. Amazon EBS

Reveal Solution Discussion 3

Question #169Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a microservice to process records from Amazon
Kinesis Streams. The metadata must be stored in Amazon DynamoDB. The
microservice must be capable of concurrently processing 10,000 records daily as they
arrive in the Kinesis stream.
The MOST scalable way to design the microservice is:

• A. As an AWS Lambda function.

• B. As a process on an Amazon EC2 instance.
• C. As a Docker container running on Amazon ECS.
• D. As a Docker container on an EC2 instance.

Reveal Solution Discussion 51

Question #170Topic 1
A university is running an internal web application on AWS that students can access
from the university network to check their exam results. The web application runs on
Amazon EC2 instances and pulls results from an Amazon DynamoDB table. Auto
Scaling is currently configured to add a new web server when CPU is greater than 80%
for 5 minutes. DynamoDB is configured to increase both read and write capacity units
by five when utilization is greater than 80%. Exam results are released at 9:00 a.m.
each Monday, and 80% of students, attempt to access their unique result within the first
30 minutes. Despite Auto Scaling being enabled, students are complaining of slow
response times and errors when they view the site. There are no performance
complaints after 9:30 a.m. on Monday.
Which recommendation should a Solutions Architect make to improve performance in a
cost-effective manner?

• A. Scale out the EC2 instances to ensure that the environment scales up and down based
on the highest load.
• B. Implement Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator to improve database performance and
remove the need to scale the read/write units.
• C. Use a scheduled job to scale out EC2 before 9:00 a.m. on Monday and to scale down
after 9:30 a.m.
• D. Use Amazon CloudFront to cache web request and reduce the load on EC2 and
DynamoDB.

Reveal Solution Discussion 50

Previous QuestionsNext Questions

Question #171Topic 1
As part of a migration strategy, a Solutions Architect needs to analyze workloads that
can be optimized for performance and cost. The Solutions Architect has identified a
stateless application that serves static content as a potential candidate to move to the
cloud. The Solutions Architect has the flexibility to choose an identity solution between
Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon.
Which AWS solution offers flexibility and ease of use, and the LEAST operational
overhead for this migration?

• A. Use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for managing identities, and migrate
the application to run on Amazon S3, Amazon API Gateway, and AWS Lambda.
• B. Use a third-party solution for managing identities, and migrate the application to run on
Amazon S3, EC2 Spot Instances, and Amazon EC2.
• C. Use Amazon Cognito for managing identities, and migrate the application to run on
Amazon S3, Amazon API Gateway, and AWS Lambda.
• D. Use Amazon Cognito for managing identities, and migrate the application to run on
Amazon S3, EC2 Spot Instances, and Amazon EC2.

Reveal Solution Discussion 38

Question #172Topic 1
A company needs to capture all client connection information from its Application Load
Balancer every five minutes. This data will be used to analyze traffic patterns and
troubleshoot the application.
How can a Solutions Architect meet this requirement?

• A. Enable AWS CloudTrail for the Application Load Balancer.

• B. Enable Access Logs on the Application Load Balancer.
• C. Install CloudWatch Agent on the Application Load Balancer.
• D. Enable CloudWatch metrics on the Application Load Balancer.

Reveal Solution Discussion 10

Question #173Topic 1
An application runs on EC2 instances behind an Elastic Load Balancing Application
Load Balancer. The instances run in an EC2 Auto Scaling group across multiple
 Availability Zones. The application provides a RESTful interface with both synchronous
and asynchronous operations. The asynchronous operations require up to 5 minutes to
complete. Although the application must remain available at all times, after business
hours, the traffic going to the application is greatly reduced and often results in the Auto
Scaling group running the minimum number of On-Demand Instances.
What should the Solutions Architect recommend to optimize the cost of the environment
after business hours?

• A. Change the Availability Zones in which the instances were created to another
Availability Zone in the same region with a lower cost.
• B. Replace all On-Demand Instances with Spot Instances in the Auto Scaling group.
• C. Purchase Reserved Instances for the minimum number of Auto Scaling instances.
• D. Reduce the number of minimum instances to 0. New requests to the Application Load
Balancer create new instances.

Reveal Solution Discussion 17

Question #174Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a web application for document sharing. The users
will upload documents that are then made available to other users. There will be tens of
thousands of these documents.
What is the MOST cost-effective storage solution?

• A. Amazon EFS
• B. Amazon S3
• C. Amazon Glacier
• D. Amazon EBS

Reveal Solution Discussion 17

Question #175Topic 1
A Solutions Architect was tasked with reviewing several templates that build VPCs and
ensuring that they meet specific security requirements. After reviewing the templates,
the Architect realizes that all of the templates are missing important security best
practices.
What should the Architect do to implement security best practices in an efficient
manner?

• A. Use VPC peering to enforce network consistency

• B. Restrict users from deploying an AWS CloudFormation template
• C. Provide the teams a nested AWS CloudFormation template that builds the VPC
correctly
• D. Create AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies that enforce the
corporate VPC architecture standards

Reveal Solution Discussion 27

Question #176Topic 1
 A Solutions Architect has been given the following requirements for a company's VPC:
✑ The solution is a two-tiered application with a web tier and a database tier.
✑ All web traffic to the environment must be directed from the Internet to an Application
Load Balancer.
✑ The web servers and the databases should not obtain public IP addresses or be
directly accessible from the public Internet.
✑ Because of security requirements, databases may not share a route table or subnet
with any other service.
✑ The environment must be highly available within the same VPC for all services.
What is the minimum number of subnets that the Solutions Architect will need based on
these requirements and best practices?

• A. 2
• B. 3
• C. 4
• D. 6

Reveal Solution Discussion 42

Question #177Topic 1
An application currently stores objects in Amazon S3-Standard. The application
accesses new objects frequently for one week. After one week, they are accessed
occasionally for analysis batch jobs. A Solutions Architect has been asked to reduce
storage costs for the application while allowing immediate access for batch jobs.
How can costs be reduced without reducing data durability?

• A. Create a lifecycle policy that moves Amazon S3 data to Amazon S3 One Zone-
Infrequent Access storage after 7 days. After 30 days, move the data to Amazon Glacier.
• B. Keep the data on Amazon S3, and create a lifecycle policy to move S3 data to Amazon
Glacier after 7 days.
• C. Move all Amazon S3 data to S3 Standard-Infrequent Access storage, and create a
lifecycle policy to move the data to Amazon Glacier after 7 days.
• D. Keep the data on Amazon S3, then create a lifecycle policy to move the data to S3
Standard-Infrequent Access storage after 7 days.

Reveal Solution Discussion 61

Question #178Topic 1
A company is building a critical ingestion service on AWS that will receive 1,000
incoming events per second. The events must be processed in order, and no events
may be lost. Multiple applications will need to process each event. The company will
expose the service as RESTful calls through an API Gateway.
What should a Solutions Architect use to receive the events based on these
requirements?

• A. Amazon Kinesis Data Stream

• B. Amazon DynamoDB
• C. Amazon SQS
• D. Amazon SNS

Reveal Solution Discussion 22

Question #179Topic 1
An AWS Lambda function requires access to an Amazon RDS for SQL Server instance.
It is against company policy to store passwords in Lambda functions.
How can a Solutions Architect enable the Lambda function to retrieve the database
password without violating company policy?

• A. Add an IAM policy for IAM database access to the Lambda execution role.
• B. Store a one-way hash of the password in the Lambda function.
• C. Have the Lambda function use the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store.
• D. Connect to the Amazon RDS for SQL Server instance by using a role assigned to the
Lambda function.

Reveal Solution Discussion 10

Question #180Topic 1
A company has two different types of reporting needs on their 200-GB data warehouse:
✑ Data scientists run a small number of concurrent ad hoc SQL queries that can take
several minutes each to run.
✑ Display screens throughout the company run many fast SQL queries to populate
dashboards.
Which design would meet these requirements with the LEAST cost?

• A. Replicate relevant data between Amazon Redshift and Amazon DynamoDB. Data
scientists use Redshift. Dashboards use DynamoDB.
• B. Configure auto-replication between Amazon Redshift and Amazon RDS. Data
scientists use Redshift. Dashboards use RDS.
• C. Use Amazon Redshift for both requirements, with separate query queues configured in
workload management.
• D. Use Amazon Redshift for Data Scientists. Run automated dashboard queries against
Redshift and store the results in Amazon ElastiCache. Dashboards query ElastiCache.

Reveal Solution Discussion 18

Previous QuestionsNext Questions

Question #181Topic 1
A company has an application that uses Amazon CloudFront for content that is hosted
on an Amazon S3 bucket. After an unexpected refresh, the users are still seeing old
content.
Which step should the Solutions Architect take to ensure that new content is displayed?
• A. Perform a cache refresh on the CloudFront distribution that is serving the content.
• B. Perform an invalidation on the CloudFront distribution that is serving the content.
• C. Create a new cache behavior path with the updated content.
• D. Change the TTL value for removing the old objects.

Reveal Solution Discussion 37

Question #182Topic 1
A company expects its user base to increase five times over one year. Its application is
hosted in one region and uses an Amazon RDS MySQL database, an ELB
Application Load Balancer, and Amazon ECS to host the website and its microservices.
Which design changes should a Solutions Architect recommend to support the expected
growth? (Choose two.)

• A. Move static files from ECS to Amazon S3

• B. Use an Amazon Route 53 geolocation routing policy
• C. Scale the environment based on real-time AWS CloudTrail logs
• D. Create a dedicated Elastic Load Balancer for each microservice
• E. Create RDS read replicas and change the application to use these replicas

Reveal Solution Discussion 19

Question #183Topic 1
A company is rolling out a new web service, but is unsure how many customers the
service will attract. However, the company is unwilling to accept any downtime.
What could a Solutions Architect recommend to the company in order to keep track of
customers' current session data?

• A. Amazon EC2
• B. Amazon RDS
• C. AWS CloudTrail
• D. Amazon DynamoDB

Reveal Solution Discussion 23

Question #184Topic 1
A web application is running on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Elastic Load
Balancing Application Load Balancer (ALB). The EC2 instances should receive no
traffic, except for web requests to the application.
Based on these requirements, what security group rules should be put on the Amazon
EC2 instances?

• A. An inbound rule allowing traffic from the security group attached to the ALB
• B. An inbound rule allowing traffic from the network ACLs attached to the ALB
• C. An outbound rule allowing traffic to the security group attached to the ALB
• D. An outbound rule blocking all traffic to the Internet

Reveal Solution Discussion 7

 Question #185Topic 1
A Solutions Architect must migrate a monolithic on-premises application to AWS. It is a
web application with a load balancer, web server, application server, and relational
database. The key requirement driving the migration is that the application should
perform better and be more elastic.
Which of the following architectures would meet these requirements?

• A. Re-host the application on Amazon EC2 with lift and shift of existing application code.
Configure an Elastic Load Balancing load balancer to handle incoming requests. Use
Amazon CloudWatch alarms to receive notification of scaling issues. Increase and
decrease the size of the Amazon EC2 instances using AWS CLI or AWS Management
Console as required.
• B. Re-architect the application as a three-tier application. Move the database to Amazon
RDS. Use read replicas and Amazon ElastiCache with RDS for better performance. Use
an Application Load Balancer to forward incoming requests to web and application servers
running on-premises.
• C. Re-platform the application as a three-tier application. Use Elastic Load Balancing for
incoming requests. Use EC2 for web and application tiers. Use RDS at the database tier.
Use CloudWatch alarms and Auto Scaling for horizontal scaling at the web tier.
• D. Re-architect the application as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Run database and
application servers on-premises. Run web-facing EC2 servers. Use an Enterprise Service
Bus to handle communications between different parts of the application running on-
premises and in the cloud.

Reveal Solution Discussion 18

Question #186Topic 1
A company has asked the Solutions Architect to modify its AWS-hosted internal
application to allow for load balancing. The customer requests always come from the
company domain (example.net). The company requires that incoming HTTP and
HTTPS traffic is routed based on the path element of the URL in the request.
Which implementation can satisfy all requirements?

• A. Configure a Network Load Balancer with listeners for appropriate path patterns for the
target groups.
• B. Configure an Application Load Balancer with host-based routing based on the domain
field in the HTTP header.
• C. Configure a Network Load Balancer and enable cross-zone load balancing to ensure
that all EC2 instances are used.
• D. Configure an Application Load Balancer with listeners for appropriate path patterns for
the target group.

Reveal Solution Discussion 14

Question #187Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is asked to improve the fault tolerance of an existing Python
application. The web application places 1-MB images is an S3 bucket. The application
 then uses a single t2.large instance to transform the image to include a watermark with
the company's brand before writing the image back to the S3 bucket.
What should the Solutions Architect recommend to increase the fault tolerance of the
solution?

• A. Convert the code to a Lambda function triggered by scheduled Amazon CloudWatch

Events.
• B. Increase the instance size to m4.xlarge and configure Enhanced Networking.
• C. Convert the code to a Lambda function triggered by Amazon S3 events.
• D. Create an Amazon SQS queue to send the images to the t2.large instance.

Reveal Solution Discussion 21

Question #188Topic 1
A Solutions Architect has been asked to deliver video content stored on Amazon S3 to
specific users from Amazon CloudFront while restricting access by unauthorized users.
How can the Architect implement a solution to meet these requirements?

• A. Configure CloudFront to use signed-URLs to access Amazon S3.

• B. Store the videos as private objects in Amazon S3, and let CloudFront serve the objects
by using only Origin Access Identity (OAI).
• C. Use Amazon S3 static website as the origin of CloudFront, and configure CloudFront to
deliver the videos by generating a signed URL for users.
• D. Use OAI for CloudFront to access private S3 objects and select the Restrict Viewer
Access option in CloudFront cache behavior to use signed URLs.

Reveal Solution Discussion 26

Question #189Topic 1
A Solutions Architect needs to deploy a node.js-based web application that is highly
available and scales automatically. The Marketing team needs to roll back on
application releases quickly, and they need to have an operational dashboard. The
Marketing team does not want to manage deployment of OS patches to the
Linux servers.
Use of which AWS service will satisfy these requirements?

• A. Amazon EC2
• B. Amazon API Gateway
• C. AWS Elastic Beanstalk
• D. Amazon EC2 Container Service

Reveal Solution Discussion 8

Question #190Topic 1
A company has a website running on Amazon EC2. The application DNS name points
to an Elastic IP address associated with the EC2 instance. In the event of an attack on
the website coming from a specific IP address, the company wants a way to block the
 offending IP address.
Which tool or service should a Solutions Architect recommend to block the IP address?

• A. Security groups
• B. Network ACL
• C. AWS WAF
• D. AWS Shield

Reveal Solution Discussion 34

Previous QuestionsNext Questions

Question #191Topic 1
A customer is looking for a storage archival solution for 1,000 TB of data. The customer
requires that the solution be durable and data be available within a few hours of
requesting it, but not exceeding a day. The solution should be as cost-effective as
possible. To meet security compliance policies, data must be encrypted at rest. The
customer expects they will need to fetch the data two times in a year.
Which storage solution should a Solutions Architect recommend to meet these
requirements?

• A. Copy data to Amazon S3 buckets by using server-side encryption. Move data to

Amazon S3 to reduce redundancy storage (RRS).
• B. Copy data to encrypted Amazon EBS volumes, then store data into Amazon S3.
• C. Copy each object into a separate Amazon Glacier vault, and let Amazon Glacier take
care of encryption.
• D. Copy data to Amazon S3 with server-side encryption. Configure lifecycle management
policies to move data to Amazon Glacier after 0 days.

Reveal Solution Discussion 38

Question #192Topic 1
A web application runs on 10 EC2 instances launched from a single customer Amazon
Machine Image (AMI). The EC2 instances are behind an Internet
Application Load Balancer. Amazon Route 53 provides DNS for the application.
How should a Solutions Architect automate recovery when a web server instance stops
replying to request?

• A. Launch the instances in an Auto Scaling group with an Elastic Load Balancing health
check.
• B. Launch instances in multiple Availability Zones and set the load balancer to Multi-AZ.
• C. Add CloudWatch alarm actions for each instance to restart if the Status Check (Any)
fails.
• D. Add Route 53 records for each instance with an instance health check.

Reveal Solution Discussion 37

 Question #193Topic 1
A company has a Node.js application running on Amazon EC2 that currently retrieves
data for customers from a DynamoDB table. The company is seeing many repeat
queries for the same items, and the number of queries is continuing to increase as the
application gains popularity.
What solution will reduce the number of read capacity units (RCUs) required while
minimizing the amount of refactoring that must be done to the application?

• A. Use Amazon ElastiCache to provide a caching layer

• B. Use a Lambda function to make concurrent requests for caching
• C. Use Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) to provide a caching layer
• D. Obtain Reserved Capacity for Amazon DynamoDB to manage the increased number of
queries

Reveal Solution Discussion 25

Question #194Topic 1
A company has an application that accesses a MySQL database installed on a single
EC2 instance. The instance recently experienced a fault and brought down the entire
application for several hours. The company wants to address the issue but is concerned
about spending too much time modifying application code or managing the legacy
application.
What should the Solutions Architect recommend to remove this single point of failure
with the FEWEST changes to the application code and the LEAST amount of
administrative effort?

• A. Implement a caching layer by using Amazon ElastiCache to store query results of

frequently accessed information.
• B. Deploy a second EC2 instance with MySQL installed, and configure replication
between this instance and the existing MySQL instance.
• C. Migrate the database to an RDS MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance, and point the
application servers to the new RDS instance.
• D. Create a DynamoDB table to use as a cache layer, and update the application to query
data from Amazon DynamoDB before querying MySQL.

Reveal Solution Discussion 24

Question #195Topic 1
A team is launching a marketing campaign and the peak database read activity in
Amazon Aurora for MySQL is expected to increase. A Solutions Architect decides to
add two Read Replicas to the cluster.
How should the Solutions Architect ensure that the connections for read activities are
load balanced?

• A. Reader endpoint for Amazon Aurora

• B. Cluster endpoint for Amazon Aurora
• C. Primary DB instance endpoint for Amazon Aurora
• D. Replica DB instances endpoint for Aurora

Reveal Solution Discussion 22

Question #196Topic 1
A company plans to migrate a website to AWS to use a serverless architecture. The
website contains both static and dynamic content and is accessed by users across the
world. The website should maintain sessions for returning users to improve the user
experience.
Which service should a Solutions Architect use for a cost-efficient solution with the
LOWEST latency?

• A. Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon DynamoDB
• B. Amazon CloudFront, AWS Lambda, API Gateway, and Amazon RDS
• C. Amazon CloudFront, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon EC2, and Amazon RDS
• D. Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon
DynamoDB.

Reveal Solution Discussion 36

Question #197Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is helping a customer migrate an application to AWS. The
application is composed of a fleet of Linux servers that currently use a shared file
system to read and write data. One of the goals of moving this application to AWS is to
increase the reliability of the storage tier.
What solution would increase reliability while minimizing the operational overhead of
managing this infrastructure?

• A. Create an EBS volume and mount it to all the servers.

• B. Create an EFS file system and mount it to all the servers.
• C. Create an S3 bucket that can be accessed through an S3 VPC Endpoint.
• D. Create two EC2 instances in separate Availability Zones that act as file servers.

Reveal Solution Discussion 4

Question #198Topic 1
A Solution Architect is designing a two-tier application for maximum security, with a web
tier running on EC2 instances and the data stored in an RDS DB instance.
The web tier should accept user access only through HTTPS connections (port 443)
from the Internet, and the data must be encrypted in transit to and from the database.
What combination of steps will MOST securely meet the stated requirements? (Choose
two.)

• A. Create a security group for the web tier instances that allows inbound traffic only over
port 443.
• B. Enforce Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) on the RDS database.
• C. Create a network ACL that allows inbound traffic only over port 443.
• D. Configure the web servers to communicate with RDS by using SSL, and issue
certificates to the web tier EC2 instances.
• E. Create a customer master key in AWS KMS and apply it to encrypt the RDS instance.

Reveal Solution Discussion 26

Question #199Topic 1
A credit card processing application, hosted on an on-premises server, needs to
communicate directly with a database hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance running in a
private subnet of a VPC. Compliance requirements state that end-to-end
communication should be encrypted.
Which solution will ensure that this requirement is met?

• A. Use HTTPS for traffic over VPC peering between the VPC and the on-premises
datacenter.
• B. Use HTTPS for traffic over the Internet between the on-premises server and the
Amazon EC2 instance.
• C. Use HTTPS for traffic over a VPN connection between the VPC and the on-premises
datacenter.
• D. Use HTTPS for traffic over gateway VPC endpoints that have been configured for the
Amazon EC2 instance.

Reveal Solution Discussion 18

Question #200Topic 1
A company has asked a Solutions Architect to ensure that data is protected during data
transfer to and from Amazon S3.
Use of which service will protect the data in transit?

• A. AWS KMS
• B. HTTPS
• C. SFTP
• D. FTPS

Reveal Solution Discussion 6

Previous QuestionsNext Questions

Question #201Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is trying to bring a data warehouse workload to an Amazon EC2
instance. The data will reside in Amazon EBS volumes and full table scans will be
executed frequently.
What type of Amazon EBS volume would be most suitable in this scenario?

• A. Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)

• B. Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1)
• C. General Purpose SSD (gp2)
• D. Cold HDD (sc1)
 Reveal Solution Discussion 12
Question #202Topic 1
A Solutions Architect has a three-tier web application that serves customers worldwide.
Analysis reveals that product images take more time to load than expected.
Which action will improve the image load time?

• A. Store product images on Amazon EBS-optimized storage volumes

• B. Store product images in an Amazon S3 bucket
• C. Use an Amazon CloudFront distribution for product images
• D. Use an Auto Scaling group to add instances for product images

Reveal Solution Discussion 3

Question #203Topic 1
A gaming application is heavily dependent on caching and uses Amazon ElastiCache
for Redis. The application performance was recently degraded due to failure of the
cache node.
What should a Solutions Architect recommend to minimize performance degradation in
the future?

• A. Migrate from ElastiCache to Amazon RDS

• B. Configure automatic backup to save cache data
• C. Configure ElastiCache Multi-AZ with automatic failover
• D. Use Auto Scaling to provision cache nodes based on CPU usage

Reveal Solution Discussion 10

Question #204Topic 1
A client has set up an Auto Scaling group associated with a load balancer. The client
has noticed that instances launched by the Auto Scaling group are reported unhealthy
as the result of an Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) health check, but these unhealthy
instances are not being terminated.
What can a Solutions Architect do to ensure that the instances marked unhealthy will be
terminated and replaced?

• A. Increase the value for the health check interval set on the ELB load balancer.
• B. Change the thresholds set on the Auto Scaling group health check.
• C. Change the health check type to ELB for the Auto Scaling group.
• D. Change the health check set on the ELB load balancer to use TCP rather than HTTP
checks.

Reveal Solution Discussion 26

Question #205Topic 1
A Solutions Architect must review an application deployed on EC2 instances that
currently stores multiple 5-GB files on attached instance store volumes. The company
recently experienced a significant data loss after stopping and starting their instances
and wants to prevent the data loss from happening again. The solution should minimize
 performance impact and the number of code changes required.
What should the Solutions Architect recommend?

• A. Store the application data in Amazon S3

• B. Store the application data in an EBS volume
• C. Store the application data in Amazon ElastiCache
• D. Store the application data in Amazon DynamoDB

Reveal Solution Discussion 9

Question #206Topic 1
An organization is deploying Amazon ElastiCache for Redis and requires password
protection to improve their data security posture.
Which solution should a Solutions Architect recommend?

• A. Redis Auth
• B. AWS Single Sign-On
• C. IAM database authentication
• D. VPC security group for Redis

Reveal Solution Discussion 8

Question #207Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a solution to send Amazon CloudWatch Alarm
notifications to a group of users on a smartphone mobile application.
What are the key steps to this solution? (Choose two.)

• A. Configure the CloudWatch Alarm to send the notification to an Amazon SNS topic
whenever there is an alarm.
• B. Configure the CloudWatch Alarm to send the notification to a mobile phone number
whenever there is an alarm.
• C. Configure the CloudWatch Alarm to send the notification to the email addresses
whenever there is an alarm.
• D. Create the platform endpoints for mobile devices and subscribe the SNS topic with
platform endpoints.
• E. Subscribe the SNS topic with an Amazon SQS queue, and poll the messages
continuously from the queue. Use each mobile platform's libraries to send the message to
the mobile application.

Reveal Solution Discussion 8

Question #208Topic 1
A company uses Amazon S3 for storing a variety of files. A Solutions Architect needs to
design a feature that will allow users to instantly restore any deleted files within 30 days
of deletion.
Which is the MOST cost-efficient solution?
• A. Create lifecycle policies that move the objects to Amazon Glacier and delete them after
30 days.
• B. Enable cross-region replication. Empty the replica bucket every 30 days using an AWS
Lambda function.
• C. Enable versioning and create a lifecycle policy to remove expired versions after 30
days.
• D. Enable versioning and MFA Delete. Using a Lambda function, remove MFA delete from
objects more than 30 days old.

Reveal Solution Discussion 17

Question #209Topic 1
An application running on Amazon EC2 has been experiencing performance issues
when accessing an Amazon RDS for Oracle database. The database has been
provisioned correctly for average workloads, but there are several usage spikes each
day that have saturated the database, causing the application to time out. The
application is write-heavy, updating information more often than reading information. A
Solutions Architect has been asked to review the application design.
What should the Solutions Architect recommend to improve performance?

• A. Put an Amazon ElastiCache cluster in front of the database and use lazy loading to
limit database access during peak periods.
• B. Put an Amazon Elasticsearch domain in front of the database and use a Write-Through
cache to reduce database access during peak periods.
• C. Configure an Amazon RDS Auto Scaling group to automatically scale the RDS
instance during load spikes.
• D. Change the Amazon RDS instance storage type from General Purpose SSD to
provisioned IOPS SSD.

Reveal Solution Discussion 16

Question #210Topic 1
During performance testing of an application, the Amazon RDS database caused a
performance bottleneck.
What steps can be taken to improve the database performance? (Choose two.)

• A. Change the RDS database instance to multiple Availability Zones.

• B. Scale up to a larger RDS instance type.
• C. Redirect read queries to RDS read replicas.
• D. Scale out using an Auto Scaling group for RDS.
• E. Use RDS in a separate AWS Region.

Reveal Solution Discussion 16

Previous QuestionsNext Questions

Question #211Topic 1
 A Solutions Architect must design an Amazon DynamoDB table to store data about
customer activities. The data is used to analyze recent customer behavior, so data that
is less than a week old is heavily accessed and older data is accessed infrequently.
Data that is more than one month old never needs to be referenced by the application,
but needs to be archived for year-end analytics.
What is the MOST cost-efficient way to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

• A. Use DynamoDB time-to-live settings to expire items after a certain time period.
• B. Provision a higher write capacity unit to minimize the number of partitions.
• C. Create separate tables for each week's data with higher throughput for the current
week.
• D. Pre-process data to consolidate multiple records to minimize write operations.
• E. Export the old table data from DynamoDB to Amazon S3 using AWS Data Pipeline,
and delete the old table.

Reveal Solution Discussion 21

Question #212Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is concerned that the current security group rules for a database
tier are too permissive and may permit requests that should be restricted.
Below are the current security group permissions for the database tier:
✑ Protocol: TCP
✑ Port Range: 1433 (MS SQL)
✑ Source: ALL
Currently, the only identified resource that needs to connect to the databases is the
application tier consisting of an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances.
What changes can be made to this security group that would offer the users LEAST
privilege?

• A. Change the source to -1 to remove source IP addresses previously unseen.

• B. Change the source to the VPC CIDR block.
• C. Change the source to the application instances IDs.
• D. Change the source to the security group ID attached to the application instances.

Reveal Solution Discussion 12

Question #213Topic 1
A large media site has multiple applications in Amazon ECS. A Solutions Architect
needs to use content metadata and route traffic to specific services.
What is the MOST efficient method to perform this task?

• A. Use an AWS Classic Load Balancer with a host-based routing option to route traffic to
the correct service.
• B. Use the AWS CLI to update Amazon Route 53 hosted zone to route traffic as services
get updated.
• C. Use an AWS Application Load Balancer with host-based routing option to route traffic
to the correct service.
• D. Use Amazon CloudFront to manage and route traffic to the correct service.

Reveal Solution Discussion 19

Question #214Topic 1
A Solutions Architect must build a secure document ""storage platform that allows
clients to access data stored on Amazon S3. Documents must be readily available for
the first 15 days. After that, documents need not be readily available, and storage costs
should be reduced as much as possible.
Which of the following approaches will satisfy these requirements?

• A. Create a lifecycle rule to transition the documents from the STANDARD storage class
to the STANDARD_IA storage class after 15 days, and then to the GLACIER storage
class after an additional 15 days.
• B. Create a lifecycle rule to transition the documents from the STANDARD storage class
to the GLACIER storage class after 30 days.
• C. Create a lifecycle rule to transition documents from the STANDARD storage class to
the STANDARD_IA storage class after 30 days and then to the GLACIER storage class
after an additional 30 days.
• D. Create a lifecycle rule to transition the documents from the STANDARD storage class
to the GLACIER storage class after 15 days.

Reveal Solution Discussion 21

Question #215Topic 1
A Solutions Architect needs to configure scaling policies based on Amazon CloudWatch
metrics for an Auto Scaling group. The application running on the instances is memory
intensive.
How can the Architect meet this requirement?

• A. Enable detailed monitoring on the Amazon EC2 instances.

• B. Publish custom metrics to CloudWatch from the application.
• C. Configuration lifecycle policies for the Amazon EC2 instances.
• D. Set up high-resolution alarms for the Auto Scaling group

Reveal Solution Discussion 7

Question #216Topic 1
A customer has a service based out of Oregon, U.S. and Paris, France. The application
is storing data in an S3 bucket located in Oregon, and that data is updated frequently.
The Paris office is experiencing slow response times when retrieving objects.
What should a Solutions Architect do to resolve the slow response times for the Paris
office?

• A. Set up an S3 bucket based in Paris, and enable cross-region replication from the
Oregon bucket to the Paris bucket.
• B. Create an Application Load Balancer that load balances data retrieval between the
Oregon S3 bucket and a new Paris S3 bucket.
• C. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the bucket located in Oregon as the
origin and set the Maximum Time to Live (TTL) for cache behavior to 0.
• D. Set up an S3 bucket based in Paris, and enable a lifecycle management rule to
transition data from the Oregon bucket to the Paris bucket.

Reveal Solution Discussion 58

Question #217Topic 1
A company uses AWS Elastic Beanstalk to deploy a web application running on
c4.large instances. Users are reporting high latency and failed requests. Further
investigation reveals that the EC2 instances are running at or near 100% CPU
utilization.
What should a Solutions Architect do to address the performance issues?

• A. Use time-based scaling to scale the number of instances based on periods of high
load.
• B. Modify the scaling triggers in Elastic Beanstalk to use the CPUUtilization metric.
• C. Swap the c4.large instances with the m4.large instance type.
• D. Create an additional Auto Scaling group, and configure Amazon EBS to use both Auto
Scaling groups to increase the scaling capacity.

Reveal Solution Discussion 16

Question #218Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is working on a PCI-compliant architecture that needs to call an
external service provider's API. The external provider requires IP whitelisting to verify
the calling party.
How should the Solutions Architect provide the external party with the IP addresses for
whitelisting?

• A. Use an API Gateway in proxy mode, and provide the API Gateway's IP address to the
external service provider.
• B. Associate a public elastic network interface to a published stage/endpoint in API
Gateway, exposing the AWS Lambda function, and provide the IP address for the public
network interface to the external party to whitelist.
• C. Deploy the Lambda function in private subnets and route outbound traffic through a
NAT gateway. Provide the NAT gateway's Elastic IP address to the external service
provider.
• D. Provide the external party the allocated AWS IP address range for Lambda functions,
and send change notifications by using a subscription to the AmazonIpSpaceChanged
SNS topic.

Reveal Solution Discussion 14

Question #219Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a shared file system for a company. Multiple users will
be accessing it at any given time. Different teams will have their own directories, and
the company wants to secure files so that users can access only files owned by their
 team.
How should the Solutions Architect design this?

• A. Use Amazon EFS and control permissions by using file-level permissions.

• B. Use Amazon S3 and control permissions by using ACLs.
• C. Use Amazon EFS and control permissions by using security groups.
• D. Use AWS Storage Gateway and control permissions by using AWS Identity and
Access Management (IAM)

Reveal Solution Discussion 32

Reveal Solution Discussion 16
Question #210Topic 1
During performance testing of an application, the Amazon RDS database caused a
performance bottleneck.
What steps can be taken to improve the database performance? (Choose two.)

• A. Change the RDS database instance to multiple Availability Zones.

• B. Scale up to a larger RDS instance type.
• C. Redirect read queries to RDS read replicas.
• D. Scale out using an Auto Scaling group for RDS.
• E. Use RDS in a separate AWS Region.

Reveal Solution Discussion 16

Previous QuestionsNext Questions

Question #211Topic 1
A Solutions Architect must design an Amazon DynamoDB table to store data about
customer activities. The data is used to analyze recent customer behavior, so data that
is less than a week old is heavily accessed and older data is accessed infrequently.
Data that is more than one month old never needs to be referenced by the application,
but needs to be archived for year-end analytics.
What is the MOST cost-efficient way to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

• A. Use DynamoDB time-to-live settings to expire items after a certain time period.
• B. Provision a higher write capacity unit to minimize the number of partitions.
• C. Create separate tables for each week's data with higher throughput for the current
week.
• D. Pre-process data to consolidate multiple records to minimize write operations.
• E. Export the old table data from DynamoDB to Amazon S3 using AWS Data Pipeline,
and delete the old table.

Reveal Solution Discussion 21

Question #212Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is concerned that the current security group rules for a database
tier are too permissive and may permit requests that should be restricted.
 Below are the current security group permissions for the database tier:
✑ Protocol: TCP
✑ Port Range: 1433 (MS SQL)
✑ Source: ALL
Currently, the only identified resource that needs to connect to the databases is the
application tier consisting of an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances.
What changes can be made to this security group that would offer the users LEAST
privilege?

• A. Change the source to -1 to remove source IP addresses previously unseen.

• B. Change the source to the VPC CIDR block.
• C. Change the source to the application instances IDs.
• D. Change the source to the security group ID attached to the application instances.

Reveal Solution Discussion 12

Question #213Topic 1
A large media site has multiple applications in Amazon ECS. A Solutions Architect
needs to use content metadata and route traffic to specific services.
What is the MOST efficient method to perform this task?

• A. Use an AWS Classic Load Balancer with a host-based routing option to route traffic to
the correct service.
• B. Use the AWS CLI to update Amazon Route 53 hosted zone to route traffic as services
get updated.
• C. Use an AWS Application Load Balancer with host-based routing option to route traffic
to the correct service.
• D. Use Amazon CloudFront to manage and route traffic to the correct service.

Reveal Solution Discussion 19

Question #214Topic 1
A Solutions Architect must build a secure document ""storage platform that allows
clients to access data stored on Amazon S3. Documents must be readily available for
the first 15 days. After that, documents need not be readily available, and storage costs
should be reduced as much as possible.
Which of the following approaches will satisfy these requirements?

• A. Create a lifecycle rule to transition the documents from the STANDARD storage class
to the STANDARD_IA storage class after 15 days, and then to the GLACIER storage
class after an additional 15 days.
• B. Create a lifecycle rule to transition the documents from the STANDARD storage class
to the GLACIER storage class after 30 days.
• C. Create a lifecycle rule to transition documents from the STANDARD storage class to
the STANDARD_IA storage class after 30 days and then to the GLACIER storage class
after an additional 30 days.
• D. Create a lifecycle rule to transition the documents from the STANDARD storage class
to the GLACIER storage class after 15 days.

Reveal Solution Discussion 21

Question #215Topic 1
A Solutions Architect needs to configure scaling policies based on Amazon CloudWatch
metrics for an Auto Scaling group. The application running on the instances is memory
intensive.
How can the Architect meet this requirement?

• A. Enable detailed monitoring on the Amazon EC2 instances.

• B. Publish custom metrics to CloudWatch from the application.
• C. Configuration lifecycle policies for the Amazon EC2 instances.
• D. Set up high-resolution alarms for the Auto Scaling group

Reveal Solution Discussion 7

Question #216Topic 1
A customer has a service based out of Oregon, U.S. and Paris, France. The application
is storing data in an S3 bucket located in Oregon, and that data is updated frequently.
The Paris office is experiencing slow response times when retrieving objects.
What should a Solutions Architect do to resolve the slow response times for the Paris
office?

• A. Set up an S3 bucket based in Paris, and enable cross-region replication from the
Oregon bucket to the Paris bucket.
• B. Create an Application Load Balancer that load balances data retrieval between the
Oregon S3 bucket and a new Paris S3 bucket.
• C. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the bucket located in Oregon as the
origin and set the Maximum Time to Live (TTL) for cache behavior to 0.
• D. Set up an S3 bucket based in Paris, and enable a lifecycle management rule to
transition data from the Oregon bucket to the Paris bucket.

Reveal Solution Discussion 58

Question #217Topic 1
A company uses AWS Elastic Beanstalk to deploy a web application running on
c4.large instances. Users are reporting high latency and failed requests. Further
investigation reveals that the EC2 instances are running at or near 100% CPU
utilization.
What should a Solutions Architect do to address the performance issues?

• A. Use time-based scaling to scale the number of instances based on periods of high
load.
• B. Modify the scaling triggers in Elastic Beanstalk to use the CPUUtilization metric.
• C. Swap the c4.large instances with the m4.large instance type.
• D. Create an additional Auto Scaling group, and configure Amazon EBS to use both Auto
Scaling groups to increase the scaling capacity.

Reveal Solution Discussion 16

Question #218Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is working on a PCI-compliant architecture that needs to call an
external service provider's API. The external provider requires IP whitelisting to verify
the calling party.
How should the Solutions Architect provide the external party with the IP addresses for
whitelisting?

• A. Use an API Gateway in proxy mode, and provide the API Gateway's IP address to the
external service provider.
• B. Associate a public elastic network interface to a published stage/endpoint in API
Gateway, exposing the AWS Lambda function, and provide the IP address for the public
network interface to the external party to whitelist.
• C. Deploy the Lambda function in private subnets and route outbound traffic through a
NAT gateway. Provide the NAT gateway's Elastic IP address to the external service
provider.
• D. Provide the external party the allocated AWS IP address range for Lambda functions,
and send change notifications by using a subscription to the AmazonIpSpaceChanged
SNS topic.

Reveal Solution Discussion 14

Question #219Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a shared file system for a company. Multiple users will
be accessing it at any given time. Different teams will have their own directories, and
the company wants to secure files so that users can access only files owned by their
team.
How should the Solutions Architect design this?

• A. Use Amazon EFS and control permissions by using file-level permissions.

• B. Use Amazon S3 and control permissions by using ACLs.
• C. Use Amazon EFS and control permissions by using security groups.
• D. Use AWS Storage Gateway and control permissions by using AWS Identity and
Access Management (IAM)

Reveal Solution Discussion 32

Question #220Topic 1
A company requires operating system permission on a relational database server.
What should a Solutions Architect suggest as a configuration for a highly available
database architecture?

• A. Multiple EC2 instances in a database replication configuration that uses two Availability
Zones.
• B. A standalone Amazon EC2 instance with a selected database installed.
• C. Amazon RDS in a Multi-AZ configuration with Provisioned IOPS.
• D. Multiple EC2 instances in a replication configuration that uses two placement groups.

Question #221Topic 1
An application has a web tier that runs on EC2 instances in a public subnet. The
application tier instances run in private subnets across two Availability Zones. All traffic
is IPv4 only, and each subnet has its own custom route table.
A new feature requires that application tier instances can call an external service over
the Internet; however, they must still not be accessible to Internet traffic.
What should be done to allow the application servers to connect to the Internet,
maintain high availability, and minimize administrative overhead?

• A. Add an Amazon egress-only internet gateway to each private subnet. Alter each private
subnet's route table to include a route from 0.0.0.0/0 to the egress-only internal gateway in
the same Availability Zone.
• B. Add an Amazon NAT Gateway to each public subnet. Alter each private subnet's route
table to include a route from 0.0.0.0/0 to the NAT Gateway in the same Availability Zone.
• C. Add an Amazon NAT instance to one of the public subnets Alter each private subnet's
route table to include a route from 0.0.0.0/0 to the Internet gateway in the VPC.
• D. Add an Amazon NAT Gateway to each private subnet. Alter each private subnet's route
table to include a route from 0.0.0.0/0 to the NAT Gateway in the other Availability Zone.

Reveal Solution Discussion 9

Question #222Topic 1
An application uses an Amazon SQS queue as a transport mechanism to deliver data to
a group of EC2 instances for processing. The application owner wants to add a
mechanism to archive the incoming data without modifying application code on the EC2
instances.
How can this application be re-architected to archive the data without modifying the
processing instances?

• A. Trigger a Lambda function by using Amazon CloudWatch Events to retrieve messages

from the SQS queue and archive to Amazon S3.
• B. Use an Amazon SNS topic to fan out the data to the SQS queue in addition to a
Lambda function that records the data to an S3 bucket.
• C. Set up an Amazon Kinesis Data Stream so that multiple instances can receive data.
Add a separate EC2 instance that is configured to archive all data it receives.
• D. Write the data to an S3 bucket, and use an SQS queue for S3 event notifications to tell
the instances where to retrieve the data.
 Reveal Solution Discussion 7
Question #223Topic 1
A Solutions Architect must select the most cost-efficient architecture for a service that
responds to web requests. These web requests are small and query a
DynamoDB table. The request rate ranges from zero to several hundred each second,
without any predictable patterns.
What is the MOST cost-efficient architecture for this service?

• A. Network Load Balancer/Amazon EC2

• B. Application Load Balancer/Amazon ECS
• C. API Gateway/AWS Lambda
• D. AWS Elastic Beanstalk/AWS Lambda

Reveal Solution Discussion 19

Question #224Topic 1
A company has a web application running in a Docker container that connects to a
MySQL server in an on-premises data center. The deployment and maintenance of this
application are becoming time-consuming and slowing down new feature releases. The
company wants to migrate the application to AWS and use services that helps facilitate
infrastructure management and deployment.
Which architectures should the company consider on AWS? (Choose two.)

• A. Amazon ECS for the web application, and an Amazon RDS for MySQL for the
database.
• B. AWS Elastic Beanstalk Docker Multi-container either for the web application or
database.
• C. AWS Elastic Beanstalk Docker Single Container for the web application, and an
Amazon RDS for MySQL for the database.
• D. AWS CloudFormation with Lambda Custom Resources without VPC for the web
application, and an Amazon RDS for MySQL database.
• E. AWS CloudFormation with Lambda Custom Resources running in a VPC for the web
application, and an Amazon RDS for MySQL database.

Reveal Solution Discussion 27

Question #225Topic 1
A Solutions Architect has designed a VPC that meets all necessary security
requirements for their organization. Any applications deployed in the organization must
use this VPC design.
How can project teams deploy, manage, and delete VPCs that meet this design with the
LEAST administrative effort?

• A. Deploy an AWS CloudFormation template that defines components of the VPC.

• B. Run a script that uses the AWS Command Line Interface to deploy the VPC.
• C. Clone the existing authorized VPC for each new project.
• D. Use AWS Elastic Beanstalk to deploy both the VPC and the application.
 Reveal Solution Discussion 17
Question #226Topic 1
What conditions could cause a Multi-AZ Amazon RDS failover to occur? (Choose two.)

• A. The RDS instance is stopped manually

• B. A replica of the RDS instance is created in a different region
• C. An Availability Zone becomes unavailable
• D. Another master user is created
• E. A failure of the primary database instance

Reveal Solution Discussion 8

Question #227Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a new application that will be hosted on EC2
instances. This application has the following traffic requirements:
✑ Accept HTTP(80)/HTTPS(443) traffic from the Internet.
✑ Accept FTP(21) traffic from the finance team servers at 10.10.2.0/24.
Which of the following AWS CloudFormation snippets correctly declares inbound
security group rules that meet the requirements and prevent unauthorized access to
additional services on the instance?
A.
B.
C.
 D.

Reveal Solution Discussion 17

Question #228Topic 1
A Solutions Architect has five web servers serving requests for a domain.
Which of the following Amazon Route 53 routing policies can distribute traffic randomly
among all healthy web servers?

• A. Simple
• B. Failover
• C. Weighted
• D. Multivalue Answer

Reveal Solution Discussion 6

Question #229Topic 1
A web server will be provisioned on two Amazon EC2 instances with an Application
Load Balancer.
Which of the following configurations will allow traffic on HTTP and HTTPS when
configuring a security group to apply to each of these servers?

• A. Allow all inbound traffic, with explicit denies on non-HTTP and non-HTTPS ports.
• B. Allow incoming traffic to HTTP and HTTPS ports.
• C. Allow incoming traffic to HTTP and HTTPS ports, with explicit denies to all other ports.
• D. Deny all traffic to non-HTTP and non-HTTPS ports

Reveal Solution Discussion 4

Question #230Topic 1
A company wants to run a static website served through Amazon CloudFront.
What is an advantage of storing the website content in an S3 bucket instead of an EBS
volume?

• A. S3 buckets are replicated globally, allowing for large scalability. EBS volumes are
replicated only within a region.
• B. S3 is an origin for CloudFront. EBS volumes would need EC2 instances behind an
Elastic Load Balancing load balancer to be an origin.
• C. S3 buckets can be encrypted, allowing for secure storage of the web files. EBS
volumes cannot be encrypted.
• D. S3 buckets support object-level read throttling, preventing abuse. EBS volumes do not
provide object-level throttling.

Reveal Solution Discussion 6

Previous QuestionsNext Questions

Reveal Solution Discussion 6

Previous QuestionsNext Questions

Question #231Topic 1
A company is moving to AWS. Management has identified a set of approved AWS
services that meet all deployment requirements. The company would like to restrict
access to all other unapproved services to which employees would have access.
Which solution meets these requirements with the LEAST amount of operational
overhead?
• A. Configure the AWS Trusted Advisor service utilization compliance report. Subscribe to
Amazon SNS notifications from Trusted Advisor. Create a custom AWS Lambda function
that can automatically remediate the use of unauthorized services.
• B. Use AWS Config to evaluate the configuration settings of AWS resources. Subscribe to
Amazon SNS notifications from AWS Config. Create a custom AWS Lambda function that
can automatically remediate the use of unauthorized services.
• C. Configure AWS Organizations. Create an organizational unit (OU) and place all AWS
accounts into the OU. Apply a service control policy (SCP) to the OU that denies the use
of certain services.
• D. Create a custom AWS IAM policy. Deploy the policy to each account using AWS
CloudFormation StackSets. Include deny statements in the policy to restrict the use of
certain services. Attach the policies to all IAM users in each account.

Reveal Solution Discussion 23

Question #232Topic 1
A customer is running a critical payroll system in a production environment in one data
center and a disaster recovery (DR) environment in another. The application includes
load-balanced web servers and failover for the MySQL database. The customer's DR
process is manual and error-phone. For this reason, management has asked IT to
migrate the application to AWS and make it highly available so that IT no longer has to
manually fail over the environment.
How should a Solutions Architect migrate the system to AWS?

• A. Migrate the production and DR environments to different Availability Zones within the
same region. Let AWS manage failover between the environments.
• B. Migrate the production and DR environments to different regions. Let AWS manage
failover between the environments.
• C. Migrate the production environment to a single Availability Zone, and set up instance
recovery for Amazon EC2. Decommission the DR environment because it is no longer
needed.
• D. Migrate the production environment to span multiple Availability Zones, using Elastic
Load Balancing and Multi-AZ Amazon RDS. Decommission the DR environment because
it is no longer needed.

Reveal Solution Discussion 28

Question #233Topic 1
A company is creating a web application that will run on an Amazon EC2 instance. The
application on the instance needs access to an Amazon DynamoDB table for storage.
What should be done to meet these requirements?

• A. Create another AWS account root user with permissions to the DynamoDB table.
• B. Create an IAM role and assign the role to the EC2 instance with permissions to the
DynamoDB table.
• C. Create an identity provider and assign the identity provider to the EC2 instance with
permissions to the DynamoDB table.
• D. Create identity federation with permissions to the DynamoDB table.

Reveal Solution Discussion 3

Question #234Topic 1
A company is creating a web application that allows customers to view photos in their
web browsers. The website is hosted in us-east-1 on Amazon EC2 instances behind an
Application Load Balancer. Users will be located in many places around the world.
Which solution should provide all users with the fastest photo viewing experience?

• A. Implement an AWS Auto Scaling group for the web server instances behind the
Application Load Balancer.
• B. Enable Amazon CloudFront for the website and specify the Application Load Balancer
as the origin.
• C. Move the photos into an Amazon S3 bucket and enable static website hosting.
• D. Enable Amazon ElastiCache in the web server subnet.

Reveal Solution Discussion 15

Question #235Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a highly available web application on AWS. The data
served on the website is dynamic and is pulled from Amazon DynamoDB.
All users are geographically close to one another.
How can the Solutions Architect make the application highly available?

• A. Host the website data on Amazon S3 and set permissions to enable public read-only
access for users.
• B. Host the web server data on Amazon CloudFront and update the objects in the
Cloudfront distribution when they change.
• C. Host the application on EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones. Use an Auto
Scaling group coupled with an Application Load Balancer.
• D. Host the application on EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone. Replicate the EC2
instances to a separate region, and use an Application Load Balancer for high availability.

Reveal Solution Discussion 17

Question #236Topic 1
A company is migrating on-premises databases to AWS. The company's backend
application produces a large amount of database queries for reporting purposes, and
the company wants to offload some of those reads to Read Replica, allowing the
primary database to continue performing efficiently.
Which AWS database platforms will accomplish this? (Select TWO.)

• A. Amazon RDS for Oracle

• B. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL
• C. Amazon RDS for MariaDB
• D. Amazon DynamoDB
• E. Amazon RDS for Microsoft SQL Server
 Reveal Solution Discussion 14
Question #237Topic 1
An application launched on Amazon EC2 instances needs to publish personally
identifiable information (PII) about customers using Amazon SNS. The application is
launched in private subnets within an Amazon VPC.
Which is the MOST secure way to allow the application to access service endpoints in
the same region?

• A. Use an internet gateway.

• B. Use AWS PrivateLink.
• C. Use a NAT gateway.
• D. Use a proxy instance.

Reveal Solution Discussion 4

Question #238Topic 1
A data-processing application runs on an i3.large EC2 instance with a single 100 GB
EBS gp2 volume. The application stores temporary data in a small database
(less than 30 GB) located on the EBS root volume. The application is struggling to
process the data fast enough, and a Solutions Architect has determined that the
I/O speed of the temporary database is the bottleneck.
What is the MOST cost-efficient way to improve the database response times?

• A. Enable EBS optimization on the instance and keep the temporary files on the existing
volume.
• B. Put the temporary database on a new 50-GB EBS gp2 volume.
• C. Move the temporary database onto instance storage.
• D. Put the temporary database on a new 50-GB EBS io1 volume with a 3-K IOPS
provision.

Reveal Solution Discussion 36

Question #239Topic 1
An application stores data in an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL Multi-AZ database instance.
The ratio of read requests to write requests is about 2 to 1. Recent increases in traffic
are causing very high latency.
How can this problem be corrected?

• A. Create a similar RDS PostgreSQL instance and direct all traffic to it.
• B. Use the secondary instance of the Multiple Availability Zone for read traffic only.
• C. Create a read replica and send half of all traffic to it.
• D. Create a read replica and send all read traffic to it.

Reveal Solution Discussion 5

Question #240Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a system that will store Personally Identifiable
Information (PII) in an Amazon S3 bucket. Due to compliance and regulatory
 requirements, both the master keys and unencrypted data should never be sent to
AWS.
What Amazon S3 encryption technique should the Architect choose?

• A. Amazon S3 client-side encryption with an AWS KMS-managed customer master key

(CMK)
• B. Amazon S3 server-side encryption with an AWS KMS-managed key
• C. Amazon S3 client-side encryption with a client-side master key
• D. Amazon S3 server-side encryption with a customer-provided key

Reveal Solution Discussion 9

Previous QuestionsNext Questions

Question #241Topic 1
A Security team reviewed their company's VPC Flow Logs and found that traffic is being
directed to the internet. The application in the VPC uses Amazon EC2 instances for
compute and Amazon S3 for storage. The company's goal is to eliminate internet
access and allow the application to continue to function.
What change should be made in the VPC before updating the route table?

• A. Create a NAT gateway for Amazon S3 access

• B. Create a VPC endpoint for Amazon S3 access
• C. Create a VPC endpoint for Amazon EC2 access
• D. Create a NAT gateway for Amazon EC2 access

Reveal Solution Discussion 12

Question #242Topic 1
A company is deploying a reporting application on Amazon EC2. The application is
expected to generate 1,000 documents every hour and each document will be
800 MB. The company is concerned about strong data consistency and file locking, as
various applications hosted on other EC2 instances will process the report documents in
parallel when they become available.
What storage solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST amount of
administrative overhead?

• A. Amazon EFS
• B. Amazon S3
• C. Amazon ElastiCache
• D. Amazon EBS

Reveal Solution Discussion 8

Question #243Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is building a WordPress-based web application hosted on AWS
using Amazon EC2. This application serves as a blog for an international internet
security company. The application must be geographically redundant and scalable. It
 must separate the public Amazon EC2 web servers from the private
Amazon RDS database, it must be highly available, and it must support dynamic port
routing.
Which combination of AWS services or capabilities will meet these requirements?

• A. AWS Auto Scaling with a Classic Load Balancer, and AWS CloudTrail
• B. Amazon Route 53, Auto Scaling with an Application Load Balancer, and Amazon
CloudFront
• C. A VPC, a NAT gateway and Auto Scaling with a Network Load Balancer
• D. CloudFront, Route 53, and Auto Scaling with a Classic Load Balancer

Reveal Solution Discussion 20

Question #244Topic 1
An e-commerce application places orders in an Amazon SQS queue. When a message
is received, Amazon EC2 worker instances process the request. The EC2 instances are
in an Auto Scaling group.
How should the architecture be designed to scale up and down with the LEAST amount
of operational overhead?

• A. Use an Amazon CloudWatch alarm on the EC2 CPU to scale the Auto Scaling group
up and down.
• B. Use an EC2 Auto Scaling health check for messages processed on the EC2
instances to scale up and down.
• C. Use an Amazon CloudWatch alarm based on the number of visible messages to
scale the Auto Scaling group up or down.
• D. Use an Amazon CloudWatch alarm based on the CPU to scale the Auto Scaling
group up or down.

Reveal Solution Discussion 21

Question #245Topic 1
A customer is migrating to AWS and requires applications to access Network File
System shares without code changes. Data is critical and accessed frequently.
Which storage solution should a Solutions Architect recommend to maximize availability
and durability?

• A. Amazon EBS
• B. Amazon S3
• C. AWS Storage Gateway for files
• D. Amazon EFS

Reveal Solution Discussion 20

Question #246Topic 1
A company has many applications on Amazon EC2 instances running in Auto Scaling
groups. Company policies require that data on the attached Amazon EBS volume must
 be retained.
Which actions will meet this requirement without impacting performance?

• A. Enable Termination Protection on the Amazon EC2 instances.

• B. Disable DeleteOnTermination for the Amazon EBS volumes.
• C. Use Amazon EC2 user data to set up a synchronization job for root volume data.
• D. Change the auto scaling Health Check to point to a source on the root volume.

Reveal Solution Discussion 4

Question #247Topic 1
A company wants to expand its web services from us-east-1 into ap-southeast-1. The
company stores a large amount of static content on its website, and recently received
complaints about slow loading speeds and the website timing out.
What should be done to meet the expansion goal while also addressing the latency and
timeout issues?

• A. Store the static content in Amazon S3 and enable S3 Transfer Acceleration.

• B. Store the static content in an Amazon EBS volume in the ap-southeast-1 region and
provision larger Amazon EC2 instances for the website.
• C. Use an Amazon Route 53 simple routing policy to distribute cached content across
three regions.
• D. Use Amazon S3 to store the static content and configure an Amazon CloudFront
distribution.

Reveal Solution Discussion 6

Question #248Topic 1
An application is scanning an Amazon DynamoDB table that was created with default
settings. The application occasionally reads stale data when it queries the table.
How can this issue be corrected?

• A. Increase the provisioned read capacity of the table.

• B. Enable AutoScaling on the DynamoDB table.
• C. Update the application to use strongly consistent reads.
• D. Re-create the DynamoDB table with eventual consistency disabled.

Reveal Solution Discussion 12

Question #249Topic 1
A company is setting up a new website for online sales. The company will have a web
tier and a database tier. The web tier consists of load-balanced, auto-scaled
Amazon EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones (AZs). The database tier is an
Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployment. The EC2 instances must connect securely to the
database.
How should the resources be launched?
• A. EC2 instances: public subnet RDS database instances: public subnet Load balancer:
public subnet
• B. EC2 instances: public subnet RDS database instances: private subnet Load
balancer: private subnet
• C. EC2 instances: private subnet RDS database instances: public subnet Load
balancer: public subnet
• D. EC2 instances: private subnet RDS database instances: private subnet Load
balancer: public subnet

Reveal Solution Discussion 12

Question #250Topic 1
A customer set up an Amazon VPC with one private subnet and one public subnet with
a NAT gateway. The VPC will contain a group of Amazon EC2 instances.
All instances will configure themselves at startup by downloading a bootstrap script from
an Amazon S3 bucket with a policy that only allows access from the customer's Amazon
EC2 instances and then deploys an application through GIT. A Solutions Architect has
been asked to design a solution that provides the highest level of security regarding
network connectivity to the Amazon EC2 instances.
How should the Architect design the infrastructure?

• A. Place the Amazon EC2 instances in the public subnet, with no EIPs; route outgoing
traffic through the internet gateway.
• B. Place the Amazon EC2 instances in a public subnet, and assign EIPs; route outgoing
traffic through the NAT gateway.
• C. Place the Amazon EC2 instances in a private subnet, and assign EIPs; route
outgoing traffic through the internet gateway.
• D. Place the Amazon EC2 instances in a private subnet, with no EIPs; route outgoing
traffic through the NAT gateway

Question #251Topic 1
A company processed 10 TB of raw data to generate quarterly reports. Although it is
unlikely to be used again, the raw data needs to be preserved for compliance and
auditing purposes.
What is the MOST cost-effective way to store the data in AWS?

• A. Amazon EBS Cold HDD (sc1)

• B. Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA)
• C. Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA)
• D. Amazon Glacier

Reveal Solution Discussion 24

Question #252Topic 1
 A Solutions Architect needs to design a solution that will allow Website Developers to
deploy static web content without managing server infrastructure. All web content must
be accessed over HTTPS with a custom domain name. The solution should be scalable
as the company continues to grow.
Which of the following will provide the MOST cost-effective solution?

• A. Amazon EC2 instance with Amazon EBS

• B. AWS Lambda function with Amazon API Gateway
• C. Amazon CloudFront with an Amazon S3 bucket origin
• D. Amazon S3 with a static website

Reveal Solution Discussion 25

Question #253Topic 1
A company is running a series of national TV campaigns. These 30-second
advertisements will introduce sudden traffic peaks targeted at a Node.js application.
The company expects traffic to increase from five requests each minute to more than
5,000 requests each minute.
Which AWS service should a Solutions Architect use to ensure traffic surges can be
handled?

• A. AWS Lambda
• B. Amazon ElastiCache
• C. Size EC2 instances to handle peak load
• D. An Auto Scaling group for EC2 instances

Reveal Solution Discussion 43

Question #254Topic 1
An insurance company stores all documents related to annual policies for the duration
of the policies. The documents are created once and then stored until they are required,
typically at the end of the policy. A document must be capable of being retrieved
immediately. The company is now moving their document management to the AWS
Cloud.
Which service should a Solutions Architect recommend as a cost-effective solution that
meets the company's requirements?

• A. Amazon RDS MySQL

• B. Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access
• C. Amazon Glacier
• D. Amazon S3 Standard

Reveal Solution Discussion 18

Question #255Topic 1
How can a user track memory usage in an EC2 instance?
• A. Call Amazon CloudWatch to retrieve the memory usage metric data that exists for
the EC2 instance.
• B. Assign an IAM role to the EC2 instance with an IAM policy granting access to the
desired metric.
• C. Use an instance type that supports memory usage reporting to a metric by default.
• D. Place an agent on the EC2 instance to push memory usage to an Amazon
CloudWatch custom metric.

Reveal Solution Discussion 10

Question #256Topic 1
A Solutions Architect must design a storage solution for incoming billing reports in CSV
format. The data does not need to be scanned frequently and is discarded after 30
days.
Which service will be MOST cost-effective in meeting these requirements?

• A. Import the logs into an RDS MySQL instance.

• B. Use AWS Data Pipeline to import the logs into a DynamoDB table.
• C. Write the files to an S3 bucket and use Amazon Athena to query the data.
• D. Import the logs to an Amazon Redshift cluster

Reveal Solution Discussion 12

Question #257Topic 1
A Solutions Architect needs to deploy an HTTP/HTTPS service on Amazon EC2
instances with support for WebSockets using load balancers.
How can the Architect meet these requirements?

• A. Configure a Network Load Balancer.

• B. Configure an Application Load Balancer.
• C. Configure a Classic Load Balancer.
• D. Configure a Layer-4 Load Balancer.

Reveal Solution Discussion 4

Question #258Topic 1
A Solution Architect is designing a web application that runs on Amazon EC2 instances
behind a load balancer. All data in transit must be encrypted.
Which solutions will meet the encryption requirement? (Select TWO.)

• A. Use an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in passthrough mode, then terminate SSL
on EC2 instances.
• B. Use an Application Load Balancer (ALB) with a TCP listener, then terminate SSL on
EC2 instances.
• C. Use a Network Load Balancer (NLB) with a TCP listener, then terminate SSL on EC2
instances.
• D. Use an Application Load Balancer (ALB) with an HTTPS listener, then install SSL
certificates on the ALB and EC2 instances.
 • E. Use a Network Load Balancer (NLB) with an HTTPS listener, then install SSL
certificates on the NLB and EC2 instances.

Reveal Solution Discussion 19

Question #259Topic 1
A user is designing a new service that receives location updates from 3,600 rental cars
every hour. The cars upload their location to an Amazon S3 bucket. Each location must
be checked for distance from the original rental location.
Which services will process the updates and automatically scale?

• A. Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS

• B. Amazon Kinesis Firehouse and Amazon S3
• C. Amazon ECS and Amazon RDS
• D. Amazon S3 events and AWS Lambda

Reveal Solution Discussion 35

Question #260Topic 1
A company is writing a new service running on Amazon EC2 that must create thumbnail
images of thousands of images in a large archive. The system will write scratch data to
storage during the process.
Which storage service is best suited for this scenario?

• A. EC2 instance store

• B. Amazon EFS
• C. Amazon CloudSearch
• D. Amazon EBS Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)

Reveal Solution

Question #261Topic 1
A company's Amazon RDS MySQL DB instance may be rebooted for maintenance and
to apply patches. This database is critical and potential user disruption must be
minimized.
What should the Solution Architect do in this scenario?

• A. Set up an RDS MySQL cluster

• B. Create an RDS MySQL Read Replica.
• C. Set RDS MySQL to Multi-AZ.
• D. Create an Amazon EC2 instance MySQL cluster.

Reveal Solution Discussion 14

Question #262Topic 1
 A retail company operates an e-commerce environment that runs on Amazon EC2
instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The instances run in an
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group. Images are hosted in an Amazon S3 bucket using a
custom domain name.
During a flash sale with 10,000 simultaneous users, some images on the website are
not loading.
What should be done to resolve the performance issue?

• A. Move the images to the EC2 instances in the Auto Scaling group.
• B. Enable Transfer Acceleration for the S3 bucket.
• C. Configure an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the S3 bucket as the origin.
• D. Increase the number of minimum, desired, and maximum EC2 instances in the Auto
Scaling group.

Reveal Solution Discussion 18

Question #263Topic 1
A solutions Architect is designing a new workload where an AWS Lambda function will
access an Amazon DynamoDB table.
What is the MOST secure means of granting the Lambda function access to the
DynamoDB table?

• A. Create an identity and access management (IAM) role with the necessary permissions
to access the DynamoDB table, and assign the role to the Lambda function.
• B. Create a DynamoDB user name and password and give them to the Developer to use
in the Lambda function.
• C. Create an identity and access management (IAM) user, and create access and secret
keys for the user. Give the user the necessary permissions to access the DynamoDB
table. Have the Developer use these keys to access the resources.
• D. Create an identity and access management (IAM) role allowing access from AWS
Lambda and assign the role to the DynamoDB table.

Reveal Solution Discussion 8

Question #264Topic 1
A web application runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an ELB Application Load
Balancer. The instances run in an EC2 Auto Scaling group across multiple
Availability Zones. Every night, the Auto Scaling group doubles in size. Traffic analysis
shows that users in a particular region are requesting the same static content stored
locally on the EC2 instances.
How can a Solutions Architect reduces the need to scale and improve application
performance for the users?

• A. Re-deploy the application in a new VPC that is closer to the users making the requests.
• B. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution for the site and redirect user traffic to the
distribution.
• C. Store the contents on Amazon EFS instead of the EC2 root volume.
• D. Implement Amazon Redshift to create a repository of the content closer to the users.

Reveal Solution Discussion 6

Question #265Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing an application that will run on Amazon ECS behind an
Application Load Balancer (ALB). For security reasons, the Amazon EC2 host instances
for the ECS cluster are in a private subnet.
What should be done to ensure that the incoming traffic to the host instances is from the
ALB only?

• A. Create network ACL rules for the private subnet to allow incoming traffic on ports
32768 through 61000 from the IP address of the ALB only.
• B. Update the EC2 cluster security group to allow incoming access from the IP address of
the ALB only.
• C. Modify the security group used by the EC2 cluster to allow incoming traffic from the
security group used by the ALB only.
• D. Enable AWS WAF on the ALB and enable the ECS rule.

Reveal Solution Discussion 18

Question #266Topic 1
A company wants to improve latency by hosting images within a public Amazon S3
bucket fronted by an Amazon CloudFront distribution. The company wants to restrict
access to the S3 bucket to include the CloudFront distribution only, while also allowing
CloudFront to continue proper functionality.
What should be done after making the bucket private to restrict access with the LEAST
operational overhead?

• A. Create a CloudFront origin access identity and create a security group that allows
access from CloudFront.
• B. Create a CloudFront origin access identity and update the bucket policy to grant access
to it.
• C. Create a bucket policy restricting all access to the bucket to include CloudFront IPs
only.
• D. Enable the CloudFront option to restrict viewer access and update the bucket policy to
allow the distribution.

Reveal Solution Discussion 28

Question #267Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a new architecture that will use an Amazon EC2 Auto
Scaling group.
Which of the following factors determine the health check grace period? (Select TWO.)

• A. How frequently the Auto Scaling group scales up or down.

• B. How many Amazon CloudWatch alarms are configured for status checks.
• C. How much of the application code is embedded in the AMI.
• D. How long it takes for the Auto Scaling group to detect a failure.
• E. How long the bootstrap script takes to run.

Reveal Solution Discussion 29

Question #268Topic 1
A company plans to deploy a new application in AWS that reads and writes information
to a database. The company wants to deploy the application in two different AWS
Regions in an active-active configuration. The databases need to replicate to keep
information in sync.
What should be used to meet these requirements?

• A. Amazon Athena with Amazon S3 cross-region replication

• B. AWS Database Migration Service with change data capture
• C. Amazon DynamoDB with global tables
• D. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with a cross-region Read Replica

Reveal Solution Discussion 24

Question #269Topic 1
A company is developing a data lake solution in Amazon S3 to analyze large-scale
datasets. The solution makes infrequent SQL queries only. In addition, the company
wants to minimize infrastructure costs.
Which AWS service should be used to meet these requirements?

• A. Amazon Athena
• B. Amazon Redshift Spectrum
• C. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL
• D. Amazon Aurora

Reveal Solution Discussion 37

Question #270Topic 1
A company needs to store data for 5 years. The company will need to have immediate
and highly available access to the data at any point in time, but will not require frequent
access.
What lifecycle action should be taked to meet the requirements while reducing costs?

• A. Transition objects from Amazon S3 Standard to Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent

Access (S3 Standard-IA)
• B. Transition objects to expire after 5 years.
• C. Transition objects from Amazon S3 Standard to Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent
Access (S3 One Zone-IA)
• D. Transition objects from Amazon S3 Standard to the GLACIER storage class.

Reveal Solution Discussion 10

Previous QuestionsNext Questions
 Question #271Topic 1
A company wants to create an application that will transmit protected health information
(PHI) to thousands of service consumers in different AWS accounts. The application
servers will sit in private VPC subnets. The routing for the application must be fault
tolerant.
What should be done to meet these requirements?

• A. Create a VPC endpoint service and grant permissions to specific service consumers to
create a connection.
• B. Create a virtual private gateway connection between each pair of service provider
VPCs and service consumer VPCs.
• C. Create an internal Application Load Balancer in the service provider VPC and put
application servers behind it.
• D. Create a proxy server in the service provider VPC to route requests from service
consumers to the application servers.

Reveal Solution Discussion 16

Question #272Topic 1
A company hosts a website using Amazon API Gateway on the front end. Recently,
there has been heavy traffic on the website and the company wants to control access
by allowing authenticated traffic only.
How should the company limit access to authenticated users only? (Select TWO.)

• A. Allow users that are authenticated through Amazon Cognito.

• B. Limit traffic through API Gateway.
• C. Allow X.509 certificates to authenticate traffic.
• D. Deploy AWS KMS to identify users.
• E. Assign permissions in AWS IAM to allow users.

Reveal Solution Discussion 21

Question #273Topic 1
A company needs to use AWS resources to expand capacity for a website hosted in an
on-premises data center. The AWS resources will include load balancers,
Auto Scaling, and Amazon EC2 instances that will access an on-premises database.
Network connectivity has been established, but no traffic is going to the AWS
environment.
How should Amazon Route 53 be configured to distribute load to the AWS
environment? (Select TWO.)

• A. Set up a weighted routing policy, distributing the workload between the load balancer
and the on-premises environment.
• B. Set up an A record to point the DNS name to the IP address of the load balancer.
• C. Create multiple A records for the EC2 instances.
• D. Set up a geolocation routing policy to distribute the workload between the load
balancer and the on-premises environment.
• E. Set up a routing policy for failover using the on-premises environment as primary and
the load balancer as secondary.

Reveal Solution Discussion 29

Question #274Topic 1
Users submit requests to a service that takes several minutes to process. A Solutions
Architect needs to ensure that these requests are processed at least once, and that the
service has the ability to handle large increases in the number of requests.
How should these requirements be met?

• A. Put the requests into an Amazon SQS queue and configure Amazon EC2 instances to
poll the queue
• B. Publish the message to an Amazon SNS topic that an Amazon EC2 subscriber can
receive and process
• C. Save the requests to an Amazon DynamoDB table with a DynamoDB stream that
triggers an Amazon EC2 Spot Instance
• D. Use Amazon S3 to store the requests and configure an event notification to have
Amazon EC2 instances process the new object

Reveal Solution Discussion 14

Question #275Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing an Amazon VPC that requires access to a remote API
server using IPv6. Resources within the VPC should not be accessed directly from the
Internet.
How should this be achieved?

• A. Use a NAT gateway and deny public access using security groups
• B. Attach an egress-only internet gateway and update the routing tables
• C. Use a NAT gateway and update the routing tables
• D. Attach an internet gateway and deny public access using security groups

Reveal Solution Discussion 13

Question #276Topic 1
When designing an Amazon SQS message-processing solution, messages in the
queue must be processed before the maximum retention time has elapsed.
Which actions will meet this requirement? (Choose two.)

• A. Use AWS STS to process the messages

• B. Use Amazon EBS-optimized Amazon EC2 instances to process the messages
• C. Use Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group with scaling triggered based on
the queue length
• D. Increase the SQS queue attribute for the message retention period
• E. Convert the SQS queue to a first-in first-out (FIFO) queue
 Reveal Solution Discussion 39
Question #277Topic 1
A company deployed a three-tier web application on Amazon EBS backed Amazon EC2
instances for the web and application tiers, and Amazon RDS for the database tier. The
company is concerned about loss of data in the web and application tiers.
What is the MOST efficient way to prevent data loss?

• A. Create an Amazon EFS file system and run a shell script to copy the data
• B. Create an Amazon EBS snapshot using an Amazon CloudWatch Events rule
• C. Create an Amazon S3 snapshot policy to back up the Amazon EBS volumes
• D. Create a snapshot lifecycle policy that takes periodic snapshots of the Amazon EBS
volumes

Reveal Solution Discussion 19

Question #278Topic 1
A company is using Amazon S3 for backups from an on-premises environment.
Regulatory requirements state that data must be retained for at least 7 years. The data
is infrequently accessed for 35 days, but needs to be instantly available. After 35 days,
the data is rarely accessed.
Which combination of actions will provide the MOST cost-effective solution? (Choose
two)

• A. Change the backup so the data goes to Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3
Standard-IA) directly
• B. Create an S3 lifecycle policy that moves the data to the GLACIER storage class after 7
years
• C. Change the backup so the data goes to Amazon Glacier directly
• D. Create an S3 lifecycle policy that moves the data to Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent
Access (S3 Standard-IA) after 35 days
• E. Creates an S3 lifecycle policy that moves the data to the GLACIER storage class after
35 days

Reveal Solution Discussion 26

Question #279Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is building an online shopping application where users will be able
to browse items, add items to a cart, and purchase the items. Images of items will be
stored in Amazon S3 buckets organized by item category. When an item is no longer
available for purchase, the item image will be deleted from the
S3 bucket.
Occasionally, during testing, item images deleted from the S3 bucket are still visible to
some users.
What is a flaw in this design approach?

• A. Defining S3 buckets by item may cause partition distribution errors, which will impact
performance.
• B. Amazon S3 DELETE requests are eventually consistent, which may cause other users
to view items that have already been purchased
• C. Amazon S3 DELETE requests apply a lock to the S3 bucket during the operation,
causing other users to be blocked
• D. Using Amazon S3 for persistence exposes the application to a single point of failure

Reveal Solution Discussion 9

Question #280Topic 1
A Solution Architect is creating a serverless web application that must access mapping
data in hundreds of data files, each containing approximately 30 KB of data. The
storage required is expected to grow to hundreds of terabytes.
Which storage solution is most cost-effective, yet still meets the requirements for this
use case?

• A. Amazon EFS
• B. Amazon EBS Cold HDD (sc1)
• C. Amazon S3 Standard
• D. Amazon DynamoDB

Reveal Solution Discussion 20

Previous QuestionsNext Questions

Question #281Topic 1
An application running on AWS Lambda requires an API key to access a third-party
service. The key must be stored securely with audited access to the Lambda function
only.
What is the MOST secure way to store the key?

• A. As an object in Amazon S3
• B. As a secure string in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store
• C. Inside a file on an Amazon EBS volume attached to the Lambda function
• D. Inside a secrets file stored on Amazon EFS

Reveal Solution Discussion 5

Question #282Topic 1
An application produces monthly reports that must be immediately accessible for up to 7
days. After 7 days, the data can be archived. Compliance policies require that the
archived data be retrievable within 24 hours of a request.
What is the MOST cost-effective approach to satisfy the compliance requirement?

• A. Store the data in Amazon S3 Standard storage with a lifecycle rule to transition the
data to Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) after 7 days, then
transition to the GLACIER storage class after 30 days
• B. Store the data in Amazon S3 Standard storage with a lifecycle rule to transition the
data to Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) after 7 days
• C. Store the data in Amazon S3 Standard storage with a lifecycle rule to transition the
data to the GLACIER storage class after 30 days
• D. Store the data in Amazon S3 Standard storage with a lifecycle rule to transition the
data to the GLACIER storage class after 7 days

Reveal Solution Discussion 24

Question #283Topic 1
A company is developing a new stateless web service with low memory requirements.
The service needs to scale based on demand.
What is the MOST cost-effective solution?

• A. Deploy the application onto AWS Elastic Beanstalk

• B. Deploy the application onto AWS Lambda with access through Amazon API Gateway
• C. Deploy the application onto an Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet
• D. Deploy the application onto a container with an Amazon ECS EC2 launch type

Reveal Solution Discussion 27

Question #284Topic 1
A company has an application that generates invoices and makes the invoices available
online. Invoices are stored as PDFs in an Amazon S3 bucket. Customers typically only
view each invoice during the month it is issued. However, past invoices need to be
immediately available. There are concerns over rising storage costs as the company
gains more customers.
What is the MOST cost-effective method to store the data?

• A. Use Amazon S3 for current invoices. Set up lifecycle rules to migrate invoices to the
GLACIER storage class after 30 days.
• B. Store the invoices as text files. Use Amazon CloudFront to convert the invoices from
text to PDF when customers download invoices.
• C. Store the invoices as binaries in an Amazon RDS database instance. Retrieve them
from the database when customers request invoices.
• D. Use Amazon S3 for current invoices. Set up lifecycle rules to migrate invoices to
Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) after 30 days.

Reveal Solution Discussion 14

Question #285Topic 1
A company is running its application in a single region on Amazon EC2 with Amazon
EBS and Amazon S3 part of the storage design.
What should be done to reduce data transfer costs?

• A. Create a copy of the compute environment in another region

• B. Convert the application to run on Lambda@Edge
• C. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution with Amazon S3 as the origin
• D. Replicate Amazon S3 data to buckets in regions closer to the requester

Reveal Solution Discussion 17

Question #286Topic 1
An application server needs to be in a private subnet without access to the Internet. The
solution must retrieve and upload files to an Amazon S3 bucket.
How should a Solutions Architect design a solution to meet these requirements?

• A. Use Amazon S3 VPC endpoints

• B. Deploy a proxy server
• C. Use a NAT Gateway
• D. Use a private Amazon S3 bucket

Reveal Solution Discussion 7

Question #287Topic 1
A Solutions Architect must design a web application that will be hosted on AWS,
allowing users to purchase access to premium, shared content that is stored in an
S3 bucket. Upon payment, content will be available for download for 14 days before the
user is denied access.
Which of the following would be the LEAST complicated implementation?

• A. Use an Amazon CloudFront distribution with an origin access identity (OAI). Configure
the distribution with an Amazon S3 origin to provide access to the file through signed
URLs. Design a Lambda function to remove data that is older than 14 days.
• B. Use an S3 bucket and provide direct access to the file. Design the application to track
purchases in a DynamoDB table. Configure a Lambda function to remove data that is
older than 14 days based on a query to Amazon DynamoDB.
• C. Use an Amazon CloudFront distribution with an OAI. Configure the distribution with an
Amazon S3 origin to provide access to the file through signed URLs. Design the
application to set an expiration of 14 days for the URI.
• D. Use an Amazon CloudFront distribution with an OAI. Configure the distribution with an
Amazon S3 origin to provide access to the file through signed URLs. Design the
application to set an expiration of 60 minutes for the URL, and recreate the URL as
necessary.

Reveal Solution Discussion 15

Question #288Topic 1
A Solutions Architect plans to migrate a load balancer tier from a data center to AWS.
Several websites have multiple domains that require secure load balancing.
The Architect decides to use Elastic Load Balancing Application Load Balancers.
What is the MOST efficient method for achieving secure communication?

• A. Create a wildcard certificate and upload it to the Application Load Balancer

• B. Create an SNI certificate and upload it to the Application Load Balancer
• C. Create a secondary proxy server to terminate SSL traffic before the traffic reaches the
Application Load Balancer
• D. Let a third-party Certificate Manager manage certificates required to all domains and
upload them to the Application Load Balancer

Reveal Solution Discussion 21

Question #289Topic 1
An application stores data in an Amazon RDS MySQL DB instance. The database traffic
primarily consists of read queries, which are overwhelming the current database. A
Solutions Architect wants to scale the database.
What combination of steps will achieve the goal? (Choose two.)

• A. Add the MySQL database instances to an Auto Scaling group

• B. Migrate the MySQL database to Amazon Aurora
• C. Migrate the MySQL database to a PostgreSQL database
• D. Create read replicas in different Availability Zones
• E. Create an ELB Application Load Balancer

Reveal Solution Discussion 52

Question #290Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing an elastic application that will have between 10 and
50 Amazon EC2 concurrent instances running, dependent on load. Each instance must
mount storage that will read and write to the same 50 GB folder.
Which storage type meets the requirements?

• A. Amazon S3
• B. Amazon EFS
• C. Amazon EBS volumes
• D. Amazon EC2 instance store

Reveal Solution Discussion 11

Previous QuestionsNext Questions

Question #291Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing an application that is expected to have millions of
users. The Architect needs options to store session data.
Which option is the MOST performant?

• A. Amazon ElastiCache
• B. Amazon RDS
• C. Amazon S3
• D. Amazon EFS

Reveal Solution Discussion 15

Question #292Topic 1
 A company is launching a dynamic website, and the Operations team expects up to 10
times the traffic on the launch date. This website is hosted on Amazon EC2 instances
and traffic is distributed by Amazon Route 53. A Solutions Architect must ensure that
there is enough backend capacity to meet user demands. The
Operations team wants to scale down as quickly as possible after the launch.
What is the MOST cost-effective and fault-tolerant solution that will meet the company's
customer demands? (Choose two.)

• A. Set up an Application Load Balancer to distribute traffic to multiple EC2 instances

• B. Set up an Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones for the website, and
create scale-out and scale-in policies
• C. Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm to send an email through Amazon SNS when
EC2 instances experience higher loads
• D. Create an AWS Lambda function to monitor website load time, run it every 5 minutes,
and use the AWS SDK to create a new instance if website load time is longer than 2
seconds
• E. Use Amazon CloudFront to cache the website content during launch and set a TTL for
cache content to expire after the launch date

Reveal Solution Discussion 24

Question #293Topic 1
A customer has an application that is used by enterprise customers outside of AWS.
Some of these customers use legacy firewalls that cannot whitelist by DNS name, but
whitelist based only on IP address. The application is currently deployed in two
Availability Zones, with one EC2 instance in each that has Elastic IP addresses. The
customer wants to whitelist only two IP addresses, but the two existing EC2 instances
cannot sustain the amount of traffic.
What can a Solutions Architect do to support the customer and allow for more capacity?
(Choose two.)

• A. Create a Network Load Balancer with an interface in each subnet, and assign a static
IP address to each subnet.
• B. Create additional EC2 instances and put them on standby. Remap an Elastic IP
address to a standby instance in the event of a failure.
• C. Use Amazon Route 53 with a weighted, round-robin routing policy across the Elastic IP
addresses to resolve one at a time.
• D. Add additional EC2 instances with Elastic IP addresses, and register them with
Amazon Route 53
• E. Switch the two existing EC2 instances for an Auto Scaling group, and register them
with the Network Load Balancer.

Reveal Solution Discussion 22

Question #294Topic 1
A company is storing application data in Amazon S3 buckets across multiple AWS
regions. Company policy requires that encryption keys be generated at the company
 headquarters, but the encryption keys may be stored in AWS after generation. The
Solutions Architect plans to configure cross-region replication.
Which solution will encrypt the data whole requiring the LEAST amount of operational
overhead?

• A. Configure the applications to write to an S3 bucket using client-side encryption

• B. Configure S3 buckets to encrypt using AES-256
• C. Configure S3 object encryption using AWS CLI with Server-Side Encryption with AWS
KMS-Managed Keys (SSE-KMS)
• D. Configure S3 buckets to use Server-Side Encryption with AWS KMS-Managed Keys
(SSE-KMS) with imported key material in both regions

Reveal Solution Discussion 34

Question #295Topic 1
A Solutions Architect must design a solution that encrypts data in Amazon S3.
Corporate policy mandates encryption keys be generated and managed on premises.
Which solution should the Architect use to meet the security requirements?

• A. AWS CloudHSM
• B. SSE-KMS: Server-side encryption with AWS KMS managed keys
• C. SSE-S3: Server-side encryption with Amazon-managed master key
• D. SSE-C: Server-side encryption with customer-provided encryption keys

Reveal Solution Discussion 41

Question #296Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is considering possible options for improving the security of the
data on an Amazon EBS volume attached to an Amazon EC2 instance.
Which solution will improve the security of the data?

• A. Use AWS KMS to encrypt the EBS volume

• B. Create an IAM policy that restricts read and write access to the volume
• C. Migrate the sensitive data to an instance store volume
• D. Use Amazon single sign-on to control login access to the EC2 instance

Reveal Solution Discussion 8

Question #297Topic 1
A Solutions Architect designed a system based on Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. After
the workflow was put into production, the company noticed it performed slowly and
identified Kinesis Data Streams as the problem. One of the streams has a total of 10
Mb/s throughput.
What should the Solutions Architect recommend to improve performance?

• A. Use AWS Lambda to preprocess the data and transform the records into a simpler
format, such as CSV.
• B. Run the MergeShard command to reduce the number of shards that the consumer can
more easily process.
• C. Change the workflow to use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to gain a higher
throughput.
• D. Run the UpdateShardCount command to increase the number of shards in the stream

Reveal Solution Discussion 10

Question #298Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing an application that requires having six Amazon EC2
instances running at all times. The application will be deployed in the sa- east-1 region,
which has three Availability Zones: sa-east-1a, sa-east-1b, and sa-east-1c.
Which action will provide 100 percent fault tolerance and the LOWEST cost in the event
that one Availability Zone in the region becomes unavailable?

• A. Deploy six Amazon EC2 instances in sa-east-1a, six Amazon EC2 instances in sa-
east-1b, and six Amazon EC2 instances in sa-east-1c
• B. Deploy six Amazon EC2 instances in sa-east-1a, four Amazon EC2 instances in sa-
east-1b, and two Amazon EC2 instances in sa-east-1c
• C. Deploy three Amazon EC2 instances in sa-east-1a, three Amazon EC2 instances in sa-
east-1b, and three Amazon EC2 instances in sa-east-1c
• D. Deploy two Amazon EC2 instances in sa-east-1a, two Amazon EC2 instances in sa-
east-1b, and two Amazon EC2 instances in sa-east-1c

Reveal Solution Discussion 23

Question #299Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a three-tier web application that will allow customers
to upload pictures from a mobile application. The application will then generate a
thumbnail of the picture and return a message to the user confirming that the image was
successfully uploaded. Generation of the thumbnail may take up to 5 seconds. To
provide a sub second response time to the customers uploading the images, the
Solutions Architect wants to separate the web tier from the application tier.
Which service would allow the presentation tier to asynchronously dispatch the request
to the application tier?

• A. AWS Step Functions

• B. AWS Lambda
• C. Amazon SNS
• D. Amazon SQS

Reveal Solution Discussion 35

Question #300Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing an application in AWS. The Architect must not expose
the application or database tier over the Internet for security reasons. The application
must be low-cost and have a scalable front end. The databases and application tier
 must have only one-way Internet access to download software and patch updates.
Which solution helps to meet these requirements?

• A. Use a NAT Gateway as the front end for the application tier and to enable the private
resources to have Internet access.
• B. Use an Amazon EC2-based proxy server as the front end for the application tier, and a
NAT Gateway to allow Internet access for private resources.
• C. Use an ELB Classic Load Balancer as the front end for the application tier, and an
Amazon EC2 proxy server to allow Internet access for private resources.
• D. Use an ELB Classic Load Balancer as the front end for the application tier, and a NAT
Gateway to allow Internet access for private resources.

Reveal Solution Discussion 11

Previous QuestionsNext Questions

Question #301Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is designing a multi-tier application consisting of an Application
Load Balancer, an Amazon RDS database instance, and an Auto Scaling group on
Amazon EC2 instances. Each tier is in a separate subnet. There are some EC2
instances in the subnet that belong to another application. The RDS database instance
should accept traffic only from the EC2 instances in the Auto Scaling group.
What should be done to meet these requirements?

• A. Configure the inbound network ACLs on the database subnet to accept traffic from
the IP addresses of the EC2 instances only.
• B. Configure the inbound rules on the security group associated with the RDS database
instance. Set the source to the security group associated with instances in the Auto
Scaling group.
• C. Configure the outbound rules on the security group associated with the Auto Scaling
group. Set the destination to the security group associated with the RDS database
instance.
• D. Configure the inbound network ACLs on the database subnet to accept traffic only
from the CIDR range of the subnet used by the Auto Scaling group.

Reveal Solution Discussion 26

Question #302Topic 1
An organization uses Amazon S3 to store video content served via its website. It only
has rights to deliver this content to users within its own country and needs to restrict
access.
How can the organization ensure that these files are only accessible from within its
country?

• A. Use a custom Amazon S3 bucket policy to allow access only to users inside the
organization's country
• B. Use Amazon CloudFront and Geo Restriction to allow access only to users inside the
organization's country
• C. Use an Amazon S3 bucket ACL to allow access only to users inside the
organization's country
• D. Use file-based ACL permissions on each video file to allow access only to users
inside the organization's country

Reveal Solution Discussion 16

Question #303Topic 1
A company is storing data in an Amazon DynamoDB table and needs to take daily
backups and retain them for 6 months.
How should the Solutions Architect meet these requirements without impacting the
production workload?

• A. Use DynamoDB replication and restore the table from the replica
• B. Use AWS Data Pipeline and create a scheduled job to back up the DynamoDB table
daily
• C. Use Amazon CloudWatch Events to trigger an AWS Lambda function that makes an
on-demand backup of the table
• D. Use AWS Batch to create a scheduled backup with the default template, then back
up to Amazon S3 daily.

Reveal Solution Discussion 37

Question #304Topic 1
A client reports that they want see an audit log of any changes made to AWS resources
in their account.
What can the client do to achieve this?

• A. Set up Amazon CloudWatch monitors on services they own

• B. Enable AWS CloudTrail logs to be delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket
• C. Use Amazon CloudWatch Events to parse logs
• D. Use AWS OpsWorks to manage their resources

Reveal Solution Discussion 5

Question #305Topic 1
An application running in a private subnet accesses an Amazon DynamoDB table.
There is a security requirement that the data never leave the AWS network.
How should this requirement be met?

• A. Configure a network ACL on DynamoDB to limit traffic to the private subnet

• B. Enable DynamoDB encryption at rest using an AWS KMS key
• C. Add a NAT gateway and configure the route table on the private subnet
• D. Create a VPC endpoint for DynamoDB and configure the endpoint policy

Reveal Solution Discussion 11

 Question #306Topic 1
A three-tier application is being created to host small news articles. The application is
expected to serve millions of users. When breaking news occurs, the site must handle
very large spikes in traffic without significantly impacting database performance.
Which design meets these requirements while minimizing costs?

• A. Use Auto Scaling groups to increase the number of Amazon EC2 instances
delivering the web application
• B. Use Auto Scaling groups to increase the size of the Amazon RDS instances
delivering the database
• C. Use Amazon DynamoDB strongly consistent reads to adjust for the increase in traffic
• D. Use Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) to cache read operations to the
database

Reveal Solution Discussion 35

Question #307Topic 1
During a review of business applications, a Solutions Architect identifies a critical
application with a relational database that was built by a business user and is running
on the user's desktop. To reduce the risk of a business interruption, the Solutions
Architect wants to migrate the application to a highly available, multi- tiered solution in
AWS.
What should the Solutions Architect do to accomplish this with the LEAST amount of
disruption to the business?

• A. Create an import package of the application code for upload to AWS Lambda, and
include a function to create another Lambda function to migrate data into an Amazon
RDS database
• B. Create an image of the user's desktop, migrate it to Amazon EC2 using VM Import,
and place the EC2 instance in an Auto Scaling group
• C. Pre-stage new Amazon EC2 instances running the application code on AWS behind
an Application Load Balancer and an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB instance
• D. Use AWS DMS to migrate the backend database to an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB
instance. Migrate the application code to AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Reveal Solution Discussion 20

Question #308Topic 1
A company has thousands of files stored in an Amazon S3 bucket that has a well-
defined access pattern. The files are accessed by an application multiple times a day for
the first 30 days. Files are rarely accessed within the next 90 days. After that, the files
are never accessed again. During the first 120 days, accessing these files should never
take more than a few seconds.
Which lifecycle policy should be used for the S3 objects to minimize costs based on the
access pattern?
• A. Use Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) storage for the first 30
days. Then move the files to the GLACIER storage class for the next 90 days. Allow the
data to expire after that.
• B. Use Amazon S3 Standard storage for the first 30 days. Then move the files to
Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) for the next 90 days. Allow
the data to expire after that.
• C. Use Amazon S3 Standard storage for first 30 days. Then move the files to the
GLACIER storage class for the next 90 days. Allow the data to expire after that.
• D. Use Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) for the first 30 days.
After that, move the data to the GLACIER storage class, where is will be deleted
automatically.

Reveal Solution Discussion 13

Question #309Topic 1
A company creates business-critical 3D images every night. The images are batch-
processed every Friday and require an uninterrupted 48 hours to complete.
What is the MOST cost-effective Amazon EC2 pricing model for this scenario?

• A. On-Demand Instances
• B. Scheduled Reserved Instances
• C. Reserved Instances
• D. Spot Instances

Reveal Solution Discussion 7

Question #310Topic 1
An application generates audit logs of operational activities. Compliance requirements
mandate that the application retain the logs for 5 years.
How can these requirements be met?

• A. Save the logs in an Amazon S3 bucket and enable Multi-Factor Authentication Delete
(MFA Delete) on the bucket.
• B. Save the logs in an Amazon EFS volume and use Network File System version 4
(NFSv4) locking with the volume.
• C. Save the logs in an Amazon Glacier vault and use the Vault Lock feature.
• D. Save the logs in an Amazon EBS volume and take monthly snapshots.

Question #311Topic 1
A Solutions Architect is creating an application running in an Amazon VPC that needs to
access AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. Network security rules prohibit any
route table entry with a 0.0.0.0/0 destination.
What infrastructure addition will allow access to the AWS service while meeting the
requirements?
• A. VPC peering
• B. NAT instance
• C. NAT gateway
• D. AWS PrivateLink

Reveal Solution Discussion 13

Question #312Topic 1
A photo-sharing website running on AWS allows users to generate thumbnail images of
photos stored in Amazon S3. An Amazon DynamoDB table maintains the locations of
photos, and thumbnails are easily re-created from the originals if they are accidentally
deleted.
How should the thumbnail images be stored to ensure the LOWEST cost?

• A. Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) with cross-region replication

• B. Amazon S3
• C. Amazon Glacier
• D. Amazon S3 with cross-region replication

Reveal Solution Discussion 29

Question #313Topic 1
A company is implementing a data lake solution on Amazon S3. Its security policy
mandates that the data stored in Amazon S3 should be encrypted at rest.
Which options can achieve this? (Select TWO.)

• A. Use S3 server-side encryption with an Amazon EC2 key pair.

• B. Use S3 server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C).
• C. Use S3 bucket policies to restrict access to the data at rest.
• D. Use client-side encryption before ingesting the data to Amazon S3 using encryption
keys.
• E. Use SSL to encrypt the data while in transit to Amazon S3.

Reveal Solution Discussion 31

Topic 2 - More Questions.
Question #1Topic 2
A prediction process requires access to a trained model that is stored in an Amazon S3
bucket. The process takes a few seconds to process an image and make a prediction.
The process takes a few seconds to process an image and make a prediction. The
process is not overly resource-intensive, does not require any specialized hardware,
and takes less than 512 MB of memory to run.
What would be the MOST effective compute solution for this use case?

• A. Amazon ECS
• B. Amazon EC2 Spot instances
• C. AWS Lambda functions
• D. AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Reveal Solution Discussion 15

Question #2Topic 2
A Solutions Architect is designing the architecture for a web application that will be
hosted on AWS. Internet users will access the application using HTTP and
HTTPS.
How should the Architect design the traffic control requirements?

• A. Use a network ACL to allow outbound ports for HTTP and HTTPS. Deny other traffic for
inbound and outbound.
• B. Use a network ACL to allow inbound ports for HTTP and HTTPS. Deny other traffic for
inbound and outbound.
• C. Allow inbound ports for HTTP and HTTPS in the security group used by the web
servers.
• D. Allow outbound ports for HTTP and HTTPS in the security group used by the web
servers.

Reveal Solution Discussion 9

Question #3Topic 2
A company is launching a new static website on Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront.
The company wants to ensure that all web requests go through only
CloudFront.
How can a Solutions Architect meet this requirement?

• A. Configure the S3 bucket policy to allow only CloudFront IP addresses to read objects.
• B. Create IAM users in a group that has read access to the S3 bucket. Configure
CloudFront to pass credentials to the S3 bucket.
• C. Create a CloudFront origin access identity (OAI), then update the S3 bucket policy to
allow the OAI read access.
• D. Convert the S3 bucket to an EC2 instance, then give CloudFront access to the instance
by using security groups.

Reveal Solution Discussion 7

Question #4Topic 2
An online retailer has a series of flash sales occurring every Friday. Sales traffic will
increase during the sales only and the platform will handle the increased load.
The platform is a three-tier application. The web tier runs on Amazon EC2 instances
behind an Application Load Balancer. Amazon CloudFront is used to reduce web server
load, but many requests for dynamic content must go to the web servers.
What should be done to the web tier to reduce costs without impacting performance or
reliability?
• A. Use T-series instances
• B. Purchase scheduled Reserved Instances.
• C. Implement Amazon ElastiCache.
• D. Use Spot Instances.

Reveal Solution Discussion 7

Question #5Topic 2
A company's new web application running on Amazon EC2 across multiple Availability
Zones (AZs) will be heavily accessed during regular business hours. After business
hours, usage will be minimal.
What fleet-scaling approach should be used to size the EC2 fleet to handle the traffic
demands?

• A. Manual scaling across all AZs

• B. Provisioning for peak traffic
• C. Scheduled scaling
• D. Programmatic termination of all instances in one AZ during off-peak hours

Reveal Solution Discussion 6

Question #6Topic 2
An application provides a feature that allows users to securely download private and
personal files. The web server is currently overwhelmed with serving files for download.
A Solutions Architect must find a more effective solution to reduce web server load and
costs, and must allow users to download only their own files.
Which solution meets all requirements?

• A. Store the files securely on Amazon S3 and have the application generate an Amazon
S3 pre-signed URL for the user to download.
• B. Store the files in an encrypted Amazon EBS volume, and use a separate set of servers
to serve the downloads.
• C. Have the application encrypt the files and store them in the local Amazon EC2 Instance
Store prior to serving them up for download.
• D. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution to distribute and cache the files.

Reveal Solution Discussion 9

Question #7Topic 2
An application calls a service run by a vendor. The vendor charges based on the
number of calls. The finance department needs to know the number of calls that are
made to the service to validate the billing statements.
How can a Solutions Architect design a system to durably store the number of calls
without requiring changes to the application?

• A. Call the service through an internet gateway.

• B. Decouple the application from the service with an Amazon SQS queue.
• C. Publish a custom Amazon CloudWatch metric that counts calls to the service.
• D. Call the service through a VPC peering connection.

Reveal Solution Discussion 6

Previous QuestionsNext Questions

Question #8Topic 2
An application runs in a VPC on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load
Balancer. Traffic to the Amazon EC2 instances must be limited to traffic from the
Application Load Balancer.
Based on these requirements, the security group configuration should only allow traffic
from:

• A. the public IPs of the Application Load Balancer nodes.

• B. the IP range of the Application Load Balancer subnets.
• C. the security group attached to the Application Load Balancer.
• D. the VPC CIDR

Reveal Solution Discussion 15

Question #9Topic 2
A Solutions Architect is reviewing an application that writes data to an Amazon
DynamoDB table on a daily basis. Random table reads occur many times per second.
The company needs to allow thousands of low-latency reads and avoid any negative
impact to the rest of the application.
What should the Solutions Architect do to meet the company's goals?

• A. Use DynamoDB Accelerator to cache reads.

• B. Increase DynamoDB write capacity units.
• C. Add Amazon SQS to decouple requests.
• D. Implement Amazon Kinesis to decouple requests.

Reveal Solution Discussion 12

Question #10Topic 2
An environment has an Auto Scaling group across two Availability Zones referred to as
AZ-a and AZ-b and a default termination policy. AZ-a has four Amazon
EC2 instances, and AZ-b has three EC2 instances. None of the instances is protected
from a scale-in.
How will Auto Scaling proceed if there is a scale-in event?

• A. Auto Scaling selects an instance to terminate randomly.

• B. Auto Scaling terminates the instance with the oldest launch configuration of all
instances.
• C. Auto Scaling selects the Availability Zone with four EC2 instances and then
continues to evaluate.
• D. Auto Scaling terminates the instance with the closest next billing hour of all
instances.

Reveal Solution Discussion 5

Question #11Topic 2
A Solutions Architect is designing a new web application on Amazon EC2. The system
must make application-specific metrics, such as application security events, available to
the SysOps teams.
How should the Solutions Architect enable this in the design?

• A. Install AWS SDK on the application instances. Design the application to use the AWS
SDK to log events directly to an Amazon S3 bucket.
• B. Install the Amazon Inspector agent on the application instances. Design the
application to store events in application log files.
• C. Install the Amazon CloudWatch Logs agent on the application instances. Design the
application to store events in application log files.
• D. Install AWS SDK on the application instances. Design the application to use AWS
SDK to log sensitive events directly to AWS CloudTrail.

Reveal Solution Discussion 12

Question #12Topic 2
A Solutions Architect needs to convert potential single points of failure to a highly-
available configuration. The current architecture contains Amazon EC2 instances with
databases running in one Availability Zone. Web-tier resources have not been given
public addresses, but still require Internet access.
Which solution should the Architect use to maintain high availability?

• A. Use ELB Classic Load Balancer with the web tier. Deploy EC2 instances in two
Availability Zones and enable Multi-AZ RDS. Deploy a NAT gateway in one Availability
Zone.
• B. Use ELB Classic Load Balancer with the web tier. Deploy EC2 instances in two
Availability Zones and enable Multi-AZ RDS. Deploy NAT gateways in both Availability
Zones.
• C. Use ELB Classic Load Balancer with the database tier. Deploy Amazon EC2
instances in two Availability Zones and enable Multi-AZ RDS. Deploy NAT gateways in
both Availability Zones.
• D. Use ELB Classic Load Balancer with the database tier. Deploy Amazon EC2
instances in two Availability Zones and enable Multi-AZ RDS. Deploy a NAT gateway in
one Availability Zone.

Reveal Solution Discussion 10

Question #13Topic 2
An organization hosts 10 microservices, each in an Auto Scaling group behind
individual Classic Load Balancers. Each EC2 instance is running at optimal load.
 Which of the following actions would allow the organization to reduce costs without
impacting performance?

• A. Reduce the number of EC2 instances behind each Classic Load Balancer.
• B. Change instance types in the Auto Scaling group launch configuration.
• C. Change the maximum size but leave the desired capacity of the Auto Scaling groups.
• D. Replace the Classic Load Balancers with a single Application Load Balancer.

Reveal Solution Discussion 12

Question #14Topic 2
A Solutions Architect is designing a ride-sharing application. The application needs
consistent and single-digit millisecond latency. In addition, the application must integrate
with a highly scalable and fully managed database service to track GPS coordinates
and user data for all rides.
Which database service should the Solutions Architect use to meet these performance
requirements?

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

Reveal Solution Discussion 13

Question #15Topic 2
An application has components running in a public subnet and a private subnet. The
components within the private subnet must connect to the internet to receive updates.
How should this be accomplished without moving the components into a public subnet?

• A. Add an internet gateway to the private subnet and update the private subnet route
table.
• B. Add a NAT gateway to the public subnet and update the public subnet route table.
• C. Add an internet gateway to the VPC and update the private subnet route table.
• D. Add a NAT gateway to the public subnet and update the private subnet route table.

Reveal Solution Discussion 13

Question #16Topic 2
A Solutions Architect is designing a multicontainer-based web application. Parts of the
web application, /orders and /sale-event, must scale independently while maintaining a
single Fully Qualified Domain Name.
Which AWS services will help the Architect build this platform? (Select TWO.)

• A. Amazon ELB Application Load Balancer

• B. Amazon ELB Classic Load Balancer
• C. Amazon EC2 Container Service
 • D. Amazon DynamoDB
• E. Amazon SQS

Reveal Solution Discussion 7

Question #17Topic 2
A company will host a static website within an Amazon S3 bucket. The website will
serve millions of users globally, and the company wants to minimize data transfer costs.
What should the Solutions Architect do to ensure costs are kept to a minimum?

• A. Implement an AWS Auto Scaling group for the website to ensure it grows with use.
• B. Use cross-region replication to copy the website to an additional S3 bucket in a
different region.
• C. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution, with the S3 bucket as the origin server.
• D. Move the website to large compute-optimized Amazon EC2 instances.

Reveal Solution

Question #18Topic 2
A company has a web application that makes requests to a backend API service. The
API service is behind an Elastic Load Balancer running on Amazon EC2 instances.
Most backend API service endpoint calls finish very quickly, but one endpoint that
makes calls to create objects in an external service takes a long time to complete.
These long-running calls are causing client timeouts and increasing overall system
latency.
What should be done to minimize the system throughput impact of the slow-running
endpoint?

• A. Change the EC2 instance size to increase memory and compute capacity.
• B. Use Amazon SQS to offload the long-running requests for asynchronous processing by
seprate workers.
• C. Increase the load balancer idle timeount to allow the long-running requests to
complete.
• D. Use Amazon ElastiCache for Redis to cache responses from the external service.

Reveal Solution Discussion 19

Question #19Topic 2
A company will run different data analytics jobs on large petabyte-scale datasets, using
standard SQL and existing business intelligence tools. The data is mostly structured,
but part of the data is unstructured and resides in Amazon S3.
What technology should be used to support this use case?

• A. An Amazon Aurora database cluster with 15 replicas distributed across Availability

Zones.
• B. Amazon Redshift with Amazon Redshift Spectrum.
• C. Amazon DynamoDB with Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX).
• D. Amazon ElastiCache for Redis with cluster mode enabled.

Reveal Solution Discussion 7

Question #20Topic 2
A Solutions Architect is investigating purchasing options for a batch processing
application on Amazon EC2. The batch job downloads an image from an Amazon
S3 bucket, adds copyright information, and uploads it back to Amazon S3. It normally
takes 5 to 10 hours to process all the files uploaded each week. The application has
built-in capabilities to process files in parallel, recover from the instance failures, and
continue the processing from where it left off.
What is the MOST cost-effective purchasing option the Solutions Architect can
recommed?

• A. Standard Reserved Instances

• B. Scheduled Reserved Instances
• C. Spot Instances
• D. On-Demand Instances

Reveal Solution Discussion 13

Question #21Topic 2
A team has developed a new web application in an AWS Region that has three
Availability Zones: AZ-a, AZ-b, and AZ-c. This application must be fault tolerant and
needs at least six Amazon EC2 instances running at all times. The application must
tolerate the loss of connectivity to any single Availability Zone so that the application
can continue to run.
Which configurations will meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)

• A. AZ-a with six EC2 instances, AZ-b with six EC2 instances, and AZ-c with no EC2
instances.
• B. AZ-a with four EC2 instances, AZ-b with two EC2 instances, and AZ-c with two EC2
instances.
• C. AZ-a with two EC2 instances, AZ-b with two EC2 instances, and AZ-c with two EC2
instances.
• D. AZ-a with three EC2 instances, AZ-b with three EC2 instances, and AZ-c with no EC2
instances.
• E. AZ-a with three EC2 instances, AZ-b with three EC2 instances, and AZ-c with three
EC2 instances.

Reveal Solution Discussion 10

Question #22Topic 2
A retail company runs hourly flash sales and has a performance issue on its Amazon
RDS for PostgreSQL database. The Database Administrators have identified that the
issue with performance happens when finance and marketing employees refresh sales
 dashboards that are used for reporting real-time sales data.
What should be done to resolve the issue without impacting performance?

• A. Create a Read Replica of the RDS PostgreSQL database and point the dashboards at
the Read Replica.
• B. Move data from the RDS PostgreSQL database to Amazon Redshift nightly and point
the dashboards at Amazon Redshift.
• C. Monitor the database with Amazon CloudWatch and increase the instance size, as
necessary. Make no changes to the dashboards.
• D. Take an hourly snapshot of the RDS PostgreSQL database, and load the hourly
snapshots to another database to which the dashboards are pointed.

Reveal Solution Discussion 13

Question #23Topic 2
A Solutions Architect is designing a high-performance computing job that runs on
Amazon EC2 instances in private subnets. To allow the application to download
patches, the infrastructure must be altered to allow the instances to access external
endpoints. Any changes to the infrastructure must involve minimal ongoing systems
management effort.
What will allow the EC2 instances to access the endpoint while meeting these
requirements?

• A. NAT gateway
• B. Elastic IP address
• C. AWS Direct Connect
• D. Virtual private gateway

Reveal Solution Discussion 5

Question #24Topic 2
An application runs on Amazon EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones (AZs)
behind an Application Load Balancer. The load balancer is in public subnets; the EC2
instances are in private subnets and must not be accessible from the internet. The EC2
instances must call external services on the internet. If one AZ becomes unavailable,
the remaining EC2 instances must still be able to call the external services.
How should these requirements be met?

• A. Create a NAT gateway attached to the VPC. Add a route to the gateway to each private
subnet route table
• B. Configure an internet gateway. Add a route to the gateway to each private subnet route
table.
• C. Create a NAT instance in the private subnet of each AZ. Update the route tables for
each private subnet to direct internet-bound traffic to the NAT instance.
• D. Create a NAT gateway in each AZ. Update the route tables for each private subnet to
direct internet-bound traffic to the NAT gateway.
 Reveal Solution Discussion 6
Question #25Topic 2
A company plans to use Amazon GuardDuty to detect unexpected and potentially
malicious activity. The company wants to use Amazon CloudWatch to ensure that when
findings occur, remediation takes place automatically.
Which CloudWatch feature should be used to trigger an AWS Lambda function to
perform the remediation?

• A. Events
• B. Dashboards
• C. Metrics
• D. Alarms

Reveal Solution Discussion 9

Question #26Topic 2
A Solutions Architect must create a solution whereby user access to multiple Amazon
Aurora MySQL databases is securely managed with short-lived connection credentials.
How can the Solutions Architect meet these requirements?

• A. Create a database user to run the GRANT statement with a short-lived token.
• B. Create the user account to use the AWS-provided AWSAuthenticationPlugin with IAM.
• C. Use AWS Systems Manager to securely save the connection secrets, and use the
secrets while connecting.
• D. Use AWS KMS to securely save the connection secrets, and use the secrets while
connecting.

Reveal Solution Discussion 5

Question #27Topic 2
A customer has a legacy application with a large amount of data. The files accessed by
the application are approximately 10 GB each, but are rarely accessed.
However, when files are accessed, they are retrieved sequentially. The customer is
migrating the application to AWS and would like to use Amazon EC2 and
Amazon EBS.
What is the Least expensive EBS volume type for this use case?

• A. Cold HDD (sc1)

• B. Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1)
• C. General Purpose SSD (gp2)
• D. Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)

Reveal Solution Discussion 8

Previous QuestionsNext Questions
 Question #28Topic 2
A company is migrating an on-premises application to AWS. The application currently
uses their corporate message broker, passing messages between layers by using the
MQTT protocol. Because of time and budget constraints, the company cannot rewrite
the application and cannot manage a new message broker on the
EC2 instances.
Which service should a Solutions Architect use to allow the customer to migrate the
application to AWS?

• A. Amazon SNS
• B. Amazon SQS
• C. Amazon MQ
• D. Amazon SWF

Reveal Solution Discussion 9

Question #29Topic 2
A customer is deploying a production portal application on AWS. The database tier has
structured data. The company requires a solution that is easily manageable and highly
available.
How can these requirements be met?

• A. Deploy the database on multiple Amazon EC2 instances backed by Amazon EBS
across multiple Availability Zones.
• B. Use Amazon RDS with a multiple Availability Zone option.
• C. Use RDS with a single Available Zone option and schedule periodic database
snapshots.
• D. Use Amazon DynamoDB.

Reveal Solution Discussion 5

Question #30Topic 2
A Solutions Architect is designing a disaster recovery (DR) environment in a separate
AWS region from an application's primary workload. The application uses a multi-tier
architecture, and only the RDS instance will have frequent changes. The application
installation process takes 60 minutes on average. The disaster recovery plan must have
an RPO of less than 90 minutes and an RTO of less than 30 minutes.
Which of the following would enable the Solutions Architect to meet these
requirements? (Choose two.)

• A. An Aurora instance as the primary database with a read replica in the DR region.
• B. Inter-region VPC peering between the primary workload VPC and the DR VPC
• C. A cross-region Amazon EC2 Amazon Machine Image (AMI) copy
• D. Amazon S3 cross-region replication of application-tier installers
• E. Amazon CloudWatch Events in the primary region that trigger the failover to the DR
region
 Reveal Solution Discussion 8
Question #31Topic 2
A website keeps a record of user actions using a globally unique identifier (GIUD)
retrieved from Amazon Aurora in place of the user name within the audit record.
Security protocols state that the GUID content must not leave the company's Amazon
VPC.
As the web traffic has increased, the number of web servers and Aurora read replicas
has also increased to keep up with the user record reads for the GUID.
What should be done to reduce the number of read replicas required while improving
performance?

• A. Keep the user name and GUID in memory on the web server instance so that the
association can be remade on demand. Remove the record after 30 minutes.
• B. Deploy a Amazon ElastiCache for Redis server into the infrastructure and store the
user name and GUID there. Retrieve GUID from ElastiCache when required.
• C. Encrypt the GUID using Base64 and store it in the user's session cookie. Decrypt the
GUID when an audit record is needed.
• D. Change the GUID to an MD5 hash of the user name, so that the value can be
calculated on demand without referring to the database.

Reveal Solution Discussion 12

Question #32Topic 2
Application servers currently deployed in a private subnet require the ability to integrate
with a third-party service accessible through the Internet.
Which changes are required to provide outbound Internet connectivity in the VPC
without providing inbound Internet connectivity to the application servers?

• A. Create a NAT Gateway without attaching an Internet Gateway to the VPC.

• B. Create a NAT Gateway and attach an Internet Gateway to the VPC.
• C. Attach an Internet Gateway to the VPC without creating a NAT Gateway.
• D. Attach an Internet Gateway to the VPC and create a NAT Gateway.

Reveal Solution Discussion 39

Question #33Topic 2
A Solutions Architect is creating a multi-tiered architecture for an application that
includes a public-facing web tier. Security requirements state that the Amazon
EC2 instances running in the application tier must not be accessible directly from the
internet.
What should be done to accomplish this?

• A. Create a multi-VPC peering mesh with network access rules limiting communications
to specific ports. Implement an internet gateway on each VPC for external connectivity.
• B. Place all instances in a single Amazon VPC with AWS WAF as the web front-end
communication conduit. Configure a NAT gateway for external communications.
• C. Use VPC peering to peer with on-premises hardware. Direct enterprise traffic through
the VPC peer connection to the instances hosted in the private VPC.
• D. Deploy the web and application instances in a private subnet. Provision an
Application Load Balancer in the public subnet. Install an internet gateway and use
security groups to control communications between the layers.