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Certified Solutions Architect High Availability and Scalability Flashcards

7 cards from real AWS practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.

Read the first 7 Certified Solutions Architect High Availability and Scalability flashcards as text

  1. An application uses an Application Load Balancer with EC2 instances in two Availability Zones. After a recent deployment, one AZ becomes unhealthy. What does the ALB do automatically?

    Answer: Routes all traffic to the healthy AZ while the unhealthy AZ recovers

    ALB automatically detects unhealthy targets via health checks and routes traffic only to healthy targets across remaining AZs.

  2. A company wants to scale EC2 instances based on the number of messages in an SQS queue. Which Auto Scaling policy type is most appropriate?

    Answer: Target tracking scaling policy using a custom CloudWatch metric

    Target tracking scaling with a custom CloudWatch metric (e.g., ApproximateNumberOfMessages per instance) is ideal for SQS-driven scaling.

  3. Which RDS feature automatically promotes a standby replica to primary when the primary instance fails, minimizing downtime?

    Answer: Multi-AZ failover

    RDS Multi-AZ maintains a synchronous standby that is automatically promoted during a primary failure, typically within 60-120 seconds.

  4. A web application needs to handle sudden traffic spikes that last only a few minutes. Which EC2 Auto Scaling feature best handles this without over-provisioning?

    Answer: Warm pools

    Warm pools keep pre-initialized EC2 instances ready to launch quickly, reducing launch latency during sudden short spikes.

  5. An Elastic Load Balancer must distribute traffic to EC2 instances across three AZs, but one AZ has significantly fewer instances. Which feature ensures even distribution?

    Answer: Cross-zone load balancing

    Cross-zone load balancing distributes requests evenly across all registered instances in all enabled AZs, regardless of instance count per AZ.

  6. A company uses Aurora MySQL and wants zero-downtime read scaling. They already have 3 read replicas. What is the maximum number of Aurora read replicas supported per cluster?

    Answer: 15

    Amazon Aurora supports up to 15 read replicas per cluster, enabling significant read scaling beyond what standard RDS supports.

  7. Which Route 53 routing policy distributes traffic based on the geographic location of the DNS query origin, helping reduce latency for global users?

    Answer: Latency-based routing

    Latency-based routing directs users to the AWS region that provides the lowest network latency, not just the geographically closest region.