Solutions Architect Cloud Architecture & Design 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 Solutions Architect Cloud Architecture & Design flashcards as text
A company uses AWS Organizations and wants to consolidate billing while applying governance policies. What are the two primary benefits of AWS Organizations? (Select the BEST single answer that covers both)
Answer: Consolidated billing across accounts and policy-based management via SCPs
AWS Organizations provides consolidated billing (single payment method, volume discounts) and SCPs for centralized policy governance across all member accounts.
An application on EC2 must call the AWS S3 API. What is the most secure way to provide credentials to the EC2 instance?
Answer: Attach an IAM instance profile (role) to the EC2 instance
IAM instance profiles provide automatically rotating temporary credentials via the instance metadata service, eliminating the need to manage static long-term access keys.
A company needs sub-millisecond read latency for a DynamoDB table serving millions of requests per second. Which feature should be enabled?
Answer: DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)
DAX is an in-memory caching layer for DynamoDB that delivers microsecond response times for read-heavy workloads without application code changes.
An architect is designing a solution to allow on-premises users to access an internal AWS-hosted application using a private DNS name. Which service combination achieves this?
Answer: AWS Direct Connect or VPN + Route 53 Resolver Inbound Endpoint
Route 53 Resolver Inbound Endpoints allow on-premises DNS resolvers to forward queries into AWS over Direct Connect or VPN, resolving private hosted zone records.
A startup wants to decouple a web front end from a video processing back end. The front end submits jobs and needs a response URL within 30 seconds. Which architecture achieves this asynchronously?
Answer: Front end writes to SQS, worker polls and writes result to S3, front end polls a status API
Decoupling via SQS allows the front end to submit work immediately, while the back end processes asynchronously and the front end polls a lightweight status API for the result URL.
Which AWS service should an architect use to orchestrate a multi-step workflow that includes Lambda functions, ECS tasks, and human approval steps with built-in error handling and retry logic?
Answer: AWS Step Functions
AWS Step Functions provides visual workflow orchestration with built-in error handling, retries, parallel execution, and support for human approval tasks via .waitForTaskToken.
A company's RDS MySQL instance is experiencing read bottlenecks. Application writes must go to the primary instance. What is the most scalable solution?
Answer: Add one or more RDS Read Replicas and direct read traffic to them
RDS Read Replicas asynchronously replicate data from the primary instance and can serve SELECT queries, horizontally scaling read throughput without changing write behavior.