Architecting on AWS Certification Amazon Web Services 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A company is designing a data lake on AWS. Which service provides a serverless, interactive query service to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL?
- Amazon Redshift
- Amazon Athena (Correct answer)
- AWS Glue
- Amazon EMR
Correct answer: Amazon Athena
Amazon Athena is a serverless query service that lets you analyze data in S3 using standard SQL without provisioning infrastructure.
Question 2: Which EC2 purchasing option provides the largest discount (up to 90%) compared to On-Demand pricing for fault-tolerant, flexible workloads?
- Reserved Instances
- Dedicated Hosts
- Spot Instances (Correct answer)
- Savings Plans
Correct answer: Spot Instances
Spot Instances offer up to 90% discount over On-Demand but can be interrupted with a two-minute warning when capacity is reclaimed.
Question 3: An application needs to route traffic to different backend services based on the URL path (e.g., /api vs /images). Which load balancer type supports this?
- Classic Load Balancer
- Network Load Balancer
- Application Load Balancer (Correct answer)
- Gateway Load Balancer
Correct answer: Application Load Balancer
Application Load Balancers support content-based routing including path-based routing rules to different target groups.
Question 4: Which AWS service enables you to centrally manage and enforce compliance rules across multiple AWS accounts by evaluating resource configurations?
- AWS CloudTrail
- AWS Config (Correct answer)
- AWS Trusted Advisor
- Amazon Inspector
Correct answer: AWS Config
AWS Config continuously monitors and records resource configurations and evaluates them against desired compliance rules.
Question 5: A solutions architect needs to replicate data asynchronously to a secondary AWS Region for disaster recovery with minimal configuration. Which S3 feature achieves this?
- S3 Versioning
- S3 Cross-Region Replication (Correct answer)
- S3 Transfer Acceleration
- S3 Lifecycle Policies
Correct answer: S3 Cross-Region Replication
S3 Cross-Region Replication automatically and asynchronously copies objects from a source bucket to a destination bucket in another Region.
Question 6: Which AWS database service is best suited for a social network application requiring flexible schema, horizontal scaling, and single-digit millisecond latency at any scale?
- Amazon RDS for MySQL
- Amazon Aurora
- Amazon DynamoDB (Correct answer)
- Amazon Neptune
Correct answer: Amazon DynamoDB
DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database that delivers consistent single-digit millisecond performance and scales horizontally to any workload.
Question 7: What mechanism does AWS use to protect against accidental deletion of objects in S3 when versioning is enabled?
- Applying a Glacier transition
- Inserting a delete marker instead of removing the object (Correct answer)
- Moving the object to the Recycle Bin
- Archiving to S3 One Zone-IA
Correct answer: Inserting a delete marker instead of removing the object
When versioning is enabled, a DELETE request places a delete marker on the object, preserving all previous versions.
Architecting on AWS Certification Amazon Web Services 3
A company is designing a data lake on AWS.
Which service provides a serverless, interactive query service to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL?