Architecting on AWS Certification High Availability & Fault Tolerance Flashcards
6 cards from real Architecting on AWS Certification practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
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Which AWS architectural principle recommends designing systems assuming that components will fail?
Answer: Design for failure
AWS Well-Architected Framework's reliability pillar advises designing systems to expect and automatically recover from component failures.
An application uses DynamoDB and must remain available if an Availability Zone fails. Which DynamoDB feature handles this automatically?
Answer: DynamoDB built-in multi-AZ replication
DynamoDB automatically replicates data across three Availability Zones in a Region, providing built-in high availability with no additional configuration.
Which AWS service can be used to implement a dead-letter queue to capture messages that repeatedly fail processing in an SQS-based architecture?
Answer: Amazon SQS itself
SQS supports dead-letter queues, which are separate SQS queues where messages that exceed the maxReceiveCount are automatically moved for later inspection.
An architect must ensure an EC2-based application recovers automatically after an instance failure with the least operational effort. What is the best approach?
Answer: Place the instance in an Auto Scaling group with min=1
An Auto Scaling group with minimum capacity of 1 automatically launches a replacement instance if the existing one terminates or fails a health check.
Which ELB listener rule action allows an Application Load Balancer to return a static error page when the backend targets are all unhealthy?
Answer: Fixed-response action
The ALB fixed-response action returns a custom HTTP response (status code + body) directly from the load balancer without routing to any target.
What is the purpose of an Amazon Aurora cluster's reader endpoint?
Answer: It load-balances read traffic across all Aurora replicas
The Aurora reader endpoint automatically distributes read connections across all available Aurora Replicas, reducing load on the primary writer instance.