AWS Associate Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate 1 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: You need to monitor your EC2 instances and receive alerts if CPU utilization exceeds 80% for more than 5 minutes. Which AWS service should you use to set up these alarms?
- Amazon CloudWatch (Correct answer)
- AWS CloudTrail
- Amazon Inspector
- AWS Config
Correct answer: Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch is the monitoring and observability service for AWS resources and applications. It collects metrics, logs, and events, allowing users to set up alarms based on specific thresholds, such as CPU utilization exceeding 80% for a sustained period, and trigger notifications or automated actions when those thresholds are breached.
Question 2: Which AWS service enables you to run scripts on EC2 instances at launch to configure software or perform setup tasks?
- AWS Lambda
- EC2 Auto Scaling
- EC2 User Data (Correct answer)
- AWS Systems Manager
Correct answer: EC2 User Data
EC2 User Data allows you to pass scripts or commands to an EC2 instance when it is launched. These scripts run during the instance's initial boot process, enabling automated configuration, software installation, or any other setup tasks required before the application starts, ensuring instances are ready for use immediately.
Question 3: Your company wants to improve the security of its data by ensuring it is encrypted in transit. Which feature of Amazon S3 should you enable?
- Enable Server-Side Encryption (SSE)
- Enable S3 Versioning
- Enable S3 Bucket Policies
- Enable HTTPS for data transfers (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Enable HTTPS for data transfers
HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) encrypts data exchanged between a client and Amazon S3 over the internet, protecting it from eavesdropping and tampering during transit. While Server-Side Encryption (SSE) encrypts data at rest within S3, enabling HTTPS specifically ensures that data is encrypted as it travels to and from the S3 bucket.
Question 4: An application you manage has inconsistent performance due to variable CPU usage on its EC2 instances. Which feature would allow the EC2 instances to automatically adjust their capacity to handle traffic fluctuations?
- Elastic Load Balancer
- Auto Scaling (Correct answer)
- Amazon CloudFront
- Amazon CloudWatch
Correct answer: Auto Scaling
Auto Scaling automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances in your application based on defined policies and metrics, such as CPU utilization. This ensures that your application maintains consistent performance during demand fluctuations by adding or removing instances as needed, optimizing both cost and availability.
Question 5: Which service should you use to analyze and troubleshoot configuration changes and compliance across your AWS environment?
- AWS Config (Correct answer)
- Amazon GuardDuty
- Amazon CloudTrail
- AWS Trusted Advisor
Correct answer: AWS Config
AWS Config continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations and their changes over time. It allows you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources, helping with compliance auditing, security analysis, and operational troubleshooting by providing a historical view of resource configurations.
You need to monitor your EC2 instances and receive alerts if CPU utilization exceeds 80% for more than 5 minutes.
Which AWS service should you use to set up these alarms?