Design Resilient Architectures

Question 1

Several instances you are creating have a specific data requirement. The requirement states that the data on the root device needs to persist independently from the lifetime of the instance. After considering AWS storage options, which is the simplest way to meet these requirements?

Answer 1

Store your root device data on Amazon EBS and set the DeleteOnTermination attribute to false using a block device mapping.

An Amazon EBS-backed instance can be stopped and later restarted without affecting data stored in the attached volumes. By default, the root volume for an AMI backed by Amazon EBS is deleted when the instance terminates. You can change the default behavior to ensure that the volume persists after the instance terminates. To change the default behavior, set the DeleteOnTermination attribute to false using a block device mapping.

Question 2

You are working for a large financial institution and have been tasked with creating a relational database solution to deal with a read-heavy workload. The database needs to be highly available within the Oregon region and quickly recover if an Availability Zone goes offline. Which of the following would you select to meet these requirements?

Answer 2

Create a read replica and point your read workloads to the new endpoint RDS provides.

Enable Multi-AZ support for the RDS database.

Question 3

Recently, a production instance was forced to reboot unexpectedly during business hours, causing significant customer impact. After root cause analysis, it was found that the reboot was caused by AWS due to underlying hardware maintenance that needed to be performed. You have been tasked with finding a way to automate the start and stop of the Amazon EC2 instance in case of similar future events. How would you go about creating the optimal solution for this?

Answer 3

Set up an Amazon EventBridge rule that is triggered by the AWS Health event. Target a Lambda function to parse the incoming event and reference the Amazon EC2 instance, ID included. Have the function perform a stop and start of the instance.

Question 4

____________ provides ongoing visibility into the state of your AWS resources, services, and accounts. The service provides relevant and timely information to help you manage events in progress and provides proactive notification to help you plan for scheduled activities.

Answer 4

AWS Health

AWS Health is about giving you the visibility and proactive insights you need to keep your AWS services and applications running smoothly.

Question 5

Your development team has created a gaming application that uses DynamoDB to store user statistics and provide fast game updates back to users. The team has begun testing the application but needs a consistent data set to perform tests with. The testing process alters the dataset, so the baseline data needs to be retrieved upon each new test. Which AWS service can meet this need by exporting data from DynamoDB and importing data into DynamoDB?

Answer 5

Elastic Map Reduce

You can use Amazon EMR with a customized version of Hive that includes connectivity to DynamoDB to perform operations on data stored in DynamoDB

Question 6

____________ is a cloud-based big data platform offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It’s designed to process large amounts of data quickly and cost-effectively across scalable Amazon EC2 instances.

Answer 6

Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) is a cloud-based big data platform offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It’s designed to process large amounts of data quickly and cost-effectively across scalable Amazon EC2 instances.

EMR supports several popular distributed computing frameworks including Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, and Presto. It’s used for data analysis, machine learning, web indexing, data transformations (ETL), financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics.

Question 7

A small development team with very limited AWS knowledge has begun the process of creating and deploying a new frontend application based on React within AWS. The application is simple and does not need any backend processing via traditional databases. The application does, however, require GraphQL interactions to complete the required processing of data. Which AWS service can the team use to complete this?

Answer 7

Deploy a GraphQL interface via AWS AppSync.

This offers a simplified GraphQL interface for development teams to use within AWS.

Question 8

A managed service that uses GraphQL to make it easy for applications to get exactly the data they need, allowing you to build complex queries and relationships between data.

Answer 8

AWS AppSync

AppSync simplifies application development by letting you create a flexible API to securely access, manipulate, and combine data from one or more data sources with a single network call.

Question 9

A development platform for building secure, scalable mobile and web applications. It provides a set of tools and services that enables front-end web and mobile developers to build full stack applications powered by AWS.

Answer 9

AWS Amplify

Amplify supports popular web frameworks such as JavaScript, React, Angular, Vue, Next.js as well as mobile platforms including Android, iOS, React Native, Ionic, Flutter.

AWS Amplify provides a declarative interface to work with cloud services, and it can automatically scale your applications to millions of users. Key features of AWS Amplify include authentication, APIs (including both REST and GraphQL through AppSync), storage, function (AWS Lambda), hosting, and more.

Question 10

What step can you take with your database to configure high-availability and ensure minimal downtime (under five minutes)?

Answer 10

Enable Multi-AZ failover on the database.

In the event of a planned or unplanned outage of your DB instance, Amazon RDS automatically switches to a standby replica in another Availability Zone if you have enabled Multi-AZ. The time it takes for the failover to complete depends on the database activity and other conditions at the time the primary DB instance became unavailable. Failover times are typically 60–120 seconds. However, large transactions or a lengthy recovery process can increase failover time. When the failover is complete, it can take additional time for the RDS console to reflect the new Availability Zone.

Note the above sentences. Large transactions could cause a problem in getting back up within five minutes, but this is clearly the best of the available choices to attempt to meet this requirement.

Question 11

You suspect that one of the AWS services your company is using has gone down. Which service can provide you proactive and transparent notifications about the status of your specific AWS environment?

Answer 11

AWS Personal Health Dashboard

Question 12

You want to begin monitoring the EC2 instances using CloudWatch metrics. Which metric is not readily available out of the box?

Answer 12

Memory utilization

Disk swap utilization
Disk space utilization
Page file utilization
Log collection

Question 13

What AWS services can be used to host a static website, serve content to globally dispersed users, and address latency issues, while keeping cost under control? Choose two.

Answer 13

S3

CloudFront

Question 14

A virtual network interface that you can attach to an instance in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Answer 14

Elastic Network Interface (ENI)

ENIs are used to enable network communication to Amazon EC2 instances.

Question 15

A service that collects data about requests that your application serves and helps gain insights into that data to identify issues and opportunities for optimization.

Answer 15

AWS X-Ray

AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture.

AWS Lambda integrates easily with AWS X-Ray by toggling the feature on within the function configuration

Question 16

____________ lets you choose the resources that serve your traffic based on the geographic location of your users, meaning the location that DNS queries originate from.

Answer 16

Route 53 geolocation routing

Question 17

Which AWS service will enable querying data in S3 using standard SQL commands?

Answer 17

Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you only pay for the queries you run.

Question 18

You are working as a Solutions Architect in a large healthcare organization. You have many Auto Scaling groups that you need to create. One requirement is that you need to reuse some software licenses and therefore need to use dedicated hosts on EC2 instances in your Auto Scaling groups. What step must you take to meet this requirement?

Answer 18

Use a launch template with your Auto Scaling group and select the Dedicated Host option.

Question 19

Specifically designed to be used with Auto Scaling groups, which automatically launch and manage EC2 instances for you based on defined criteria.

Answer 19

Launch Configurations

They are a bit simpler but less flexible than Launch Templates - you can’t modify a launch configuration after you’ve created it.

Question 20

Launch Templates vs Launch Configurations

Answer 20

Launch Templates, introduced later, offer more features and flexibility compared to Launch Configurations.

They are not only used with Auto Scaling but also with EC2 Fleet, Spot Fleet, and the Spot service, which help manage a mix of On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot Instances.

Question 21

Key features of Launch Templates include:

Answer 21

Versioning: You can create different versions of a launch template and choose to use any version when launching instances.

Tagging: You can tag instances and volumes at launch time.

Elastic Graphics: You can specify Elastic Graphics settings for your instances.

Network Interfaces: You can specify multiple network interfaces and IP addresses.

AMI and storage: You can specify storage volumes in addition to the root volume (the root volume is specified in the block device mapping).

Instance configuration: You can specify the instance type, key pair, security groups, and the networking configuration.

Resource permissions: You can control who has permissions to use the launch template.