Architecting on AWS Certification Architecting On AWS Certification 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A company wants to deploy a multi-tier web application with automatic scaling. Which AWS service combination provides the BEST approach for the web and application tiers?
- EC2 instances with manual scaling and RDS
- Elastic Load Balancing with Auto Scaling groups and RDS Multi-AZ (Correct answer)
- Single EC2 instance with EBS and DynamoDB
- CloudFront with Lambda@Edge and S3 only
Correct answer: Elastic Load Balancing with Auto Scaling groups and RDS Multi-AZ
ELB with Auto Scaling groups distributes traffic and scales capacity automatically, while RDS Multi-AZ provides database high availability.
Question 2: Which S3 storage class is MOST cost-effective for data that is accessed once a month and must be retrieved within minutes?
- S3 Standard
- S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval
- S3 One Zone-IA
- S3 Standard-IA (Correct answer)
Correct answer: S3 Standard-IA
S3 Standard-IA is designed for infrequently accessed data that still requires rapid retrieval, offering lower storage costs than Standard.
Question 3: A solutions architect needs to ensure that an application can tolerate an Availability Zone failure. What is the MINIMUM number of AZs the architecture should span?
- 1
- 2 (Correct answer)
- 3
- 4
Correct answer: 2
Spanning at least 2 AZs ensures the application remains available if one AZ fails, satisfying basic high availability requirements.
Question 4: Which AWS service enables you to run containerized applications without managing the underlying EC2 instances?
- Amazon ECS on EC2
- AWS Fargate (Correct answer)
- Amazon EKS with self-managed nodes
- AWS Batch
Correct answer: AWS Fargate
AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that removes the need to provision or manage EC2 instances.
Question 5: A company requires that all data stored in S3 be encrypted at rest using keys they fully control. Which option satisfies this requirement?
- SSE-S3
- SSE-KMS with AWS managed keys
- SSE-C (customer-provided keys) (Correct answer)
- Client-side encryption with AWS managed keys
Correct answer: SSE-C (customer-provided keys)
SSE-C allows customers to provide and manage their own encryption keys, giving them full control outside of AWS Key Management Service.
Question 6: What is the primary benefit of using an Amazon SQS queue between an application tier and a processing tier?
- It reduces latency to sub-millisecond
- It decouples components so each tier can scale independently (Correct answer)
- It provides strong consistency for message ordering
- It replaces the need for a database layer
Correct answer: It decouples components so each tier can scale independently
SQS decouples producers from consumers, allowing each tier to scale independently and absorb traffic spikes without dropping requests.
Question 7: A workload needs a relational database that scales read capacity automatically and is compatible with MySQL. Which AWS service is the BEST fit?
- Amazon RDS for MySQL with Read Replicas
- Amazon Aurora with Auto Scaling read replicas (Correct answer)
- Amazon Redshift
- Amazon DynamoDB
Correct answer: Amazon Aurora with Auto Scaling read replicas
Amazon Aurora Auto Scaling automatically adds or removes Aurora Replicas in response to read traffic changes while remaining MySQL-compatible.
Architecting on AWS Certification Architecting On AWS Certification 2
A company wants to deploy a multi-tier web application with automatic scaling.
Which AWS service combination provides the BEST approach for the web and application tiers?