Solutions Architect - Professional: Deck 02

Question 1

A company recently deployed an application on AWS. The application uses Amazon DynamoDB. The company measured the application load and configured the RCUs and WCUs on the DynamoDB table to match the expected peak load. The peak load occurs once a week for a 4-hour period and is double the average load. The application load is close to the average load for the rest of the week. The access pattern includes many more writes to the table than reads of the table.

A solutions architect needs to implement a solution to minimize the cost of the table.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer 1

D. Configure DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) in front of the table. Configure on-demand capacity mode for the table.

Question 2

A solutions architect needs to advise a company on how to migrate its on-premises data processing application to the AWS Cloud. Currently, users upload input files through a web portal. The web server then stores the uploaded files on NAS and messages the processing server over a message queue. Each media file can take up to 1 hour to process. The company has determined that the number of media files awaiting processing is significantly higher during business hours, with the number of files rapidly declining after business hours.

What is the MOST cost-effective migration recommendation?

Answer 2

D. Create a queue using Amazon SQS. Configure the existing web server to publish to the new queue. Use Amazon EC2 instances in an EC2 Auto Scaling group to pull requests from the queue and process the files. Scale the EC2 instances based on the SQS queue length. Store the processed files in an Amazon S3 bucket.

Question 3

A company is using Amazon OpenSearch Service to analyze data. The company loads data into an OpenSearch Service cluster with 10 data nodes from an Amazon S3 bucket that uses S3 Standard storage. The data resides in the cluster for 1 month for read-only analysis. After 1 month, the company deletes the index that contains the data from the cluster. For compliance purposes, the company must retain a copy of all input data.

The company is concerned about ongoing costs and asks a solutions architect to recommend a new solution.

Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Answer 3

B. Reduce the number of data nodes in the cluster to 2 Add UltraWarm nodes to handle the expected capacity. Configure the indexes to transition to UltraWarm when OpenSearch Service ingests the data. Transition the input data to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after 1 month by using an S3 Lifecycle policy.

Question 4

A company has 10 accounts that are part of an organization in AWS Organizations. AWS Config is configured in each account. All accounts belong to either the Prod OU or the NonProd OU.

The company has set up an Amazon EventBridge rule in each AWS account to notify an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic when an Amazon EC2 security group inbound rule is created with 0.0.0.0/0 as the source. The company’s security team is subscribed to the SNS topic.

For all accounts in the NonProd OU, the security team needs to remove the ability to create a security group inbound rule that includes 0.0.0.0/0 as the source.

Which solution will meet this requirement with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer 4

C. Configure an SCP to allow the ec2:AuthorizeSecurityGroupIngress action when the value of the aws:SourceIp condition key is not 0.0.0.0/0. Apply the SCP to the NonProd OU.

Question 5

A company hosts a Git repository in an on-premises data center. The company uses webhooks to invoke functionality that runs in the AWS Cloud. The company hosts the webhook logic on a set of Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group that the company set as a target for an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The Git server calls the ALB for the configured webhooks. The company wants to move the solution to a serverless architecture.

Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer 5

C. Deploy the webhook logic to AWS App Runner. Create an ALB, and set App Runner as the target. Update the Git servers to call the ALB endpoint.

Question 6

A company is planning to migrate 1,000 on-premises servers to AWS. The servers run on several VMware clusters in the company’s data center. As part of the migration plan, the company wants to gather server metrics such as CPU details, RAM usage, operating system information, and running processes. The company then wants to query and analyze the data.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer 6

C. Create a script to automatically gather the server information from the on-premises hosts. Use the AWS CLI to run the put-resource-attributes command to store the detailed server data in AWS Migration Hub. Query the data directly in the Migration Hub console.

Question 7

A company is building a serverless application that runs on an AWS Lambda function that is attached to a VPC. The company needs to integrate the application with a new service from an external provider. The external provider supports only requests that come from public IPv4 addresses that are in an allow list.

The company must provide a single public IP address to the external provider before the application can start using the new service.

Which solution will give the application the ability to access the new service?

Answer 7

C. Deploy an internet gateway. Associate an Elastic IP address with the internet gateway. Configure the Lambda function to use the internet gateway.

Question 8

A solutions architect has developed a web application that uses an Amazon API Gateway Regional endpoint and an AWS Lambda function. The consumers of the web application are all close to the AWS Region where the application will be deployed. The Lambda function only queries an Amazon Aurora MySQL database. The solutions architect has configured the database to have three read replicas.

During testing, the application does not meet performance requirements. Under high load, the application opens a large number of database connections. The solutions architect must improve the application’s performance.

Which actions should the solutions architect take to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

Answer 8

B. Use RDS Proxy to set up a connection pool to the reader endpoint of the Aurora database.

D. Move the code for opening the database connection in the Lambda function outside of the event handler.

Question 9

A company is planning to host a web application on AWS and wants to load balance the traffic across a group of Amazon EC2 instances. One of the security requirements is to enable end-to-end encryption in transit between the client and the web server.

Which solution will meet this requirement?

Answer 9

C. Place the EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) Provision an SSL certificate using AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), and associate the SSL certificate with the ALB. Provision a third-party SSL certificate and install it on each EC2 instance. Configure the ALB to listen on port 443 and to forward traffic to port 443 on the instances.

Question 10

A company wants to migrate its data analytics environment from on premises to AWS. The environment consists of two simple Node.js applications. One of the applications collects sensor data and loads it into a MySQL database. The other application aggregates the data into reports. When the aggregation jobs run, some of the load jobs fail to run correctly.

The company must resolve the data loading issue. The company also needs the migration to occur without interruptions or changes for the company’s customers.

What should a solutions architect do to meet these requirements?

Answer 10

C. Set up an Amazon Aurora MySQL database. Use AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) to perform continuous data replication from the on-premises database to Aurora. Create an Aurora Replica for the Aurora MySQL database, and move the aggregation jobs to run against the Aurora Replica. Set up collection endpoints as AWS Lambda functions behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB), and use Amazon RDS Proxy to write to the Aurora MySQL database. When the databases are synced, point the collector DNS record to the ALB. Disable the AWS DMS sync task after the cutover from on premises to AWS.

Question 11

A health insurance company stores personally identifiable information (PII) in an Amazon S3 bucket. The company uses server-side encryption with S3 managed encryption keys (SSE-S3) to encrypt the objects. According to a new requirement, all current and future objects in the S3 bucket must be encrypted by keys that the company’s security team manages. The S3 bucket does not have versioning enabled.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer 11

D. In the S3 bucket properties, change the default encryption to AES-256 with a customer managed key. Attach a policy to deny unencrypted PutObject requests to any entities that access the S3 bucket. Use the AWS CLI to re-upload all objects in the S3 bucket.

Question 12

A company is running a web application in the AWS Cloud. The application consists of dynamic content that is created on a set of Amazon EC2 instances. The EC2 instances run in an Auto Scaling group that is configured as a target group for an Application Load Balancer (ALB).

The company is using an Amazon CloudFront distribution to distribute the application globally. The CloudFront distribution uses the ALB as an origin. The company uses Amazon Route 53 for DNS and has created an A record of www.example.com for the CloudFront distribution.

A solutions architect must configure the application so that it is highly available and fault tolerant.

Which solution meets these requirements?

Answer 12

B. Provision an ALB, an Auto Scaling group, and EC2 instances in a different AWS Region. Update the CloudFront distribution, and create a second origin for the new ALCreate an origin group for the two origins. Configure one origin as primary and one origin as secondary.

Question 13

A company has an organization in AWS Organizations that has a large number of AWS accounts. One of the AWS accounts is designated as a transit account and has a transit gateway that is shared with all of the other AWS accounts. AWS Site-to-Site VPN connections are configured between all of the company’s global offices and the transit account. The company has AWS Config enabled on all of its accounts.

The company’s networking team needs to centrally manage a list of internal IP address ranges that belong to the global offices. Developers will reference this list to gain access to their applications securely.

Which solution meets these requirements with the LEAST amount of operational overhead?

Answer 13

C. In the transit account, create a VPC prefix list with all of the internal IP address ranges. Use AWS Resource Access Manager to share the prefix list with all of the other accounts. Use the shared prefix list to configure security group rules in the other accounts.

Question 14

A company runs a new application as a static website in Amazon S3. The company has deployed the application to a production AWS account and uses Amazon CloudFront to deliver the website. The website calls an Amazon API Gateway REST API. An AWS Lambda function backs each API method.

The company wants to create a CSV report every 2 weeks to show each API Lambda function’s recommended configured memory, recommended cost, and the price difference between current configurations and the recommendations. The company will store the reports in an S3 bucket.

Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST development time?

Answer 14

B. Opt in to AWS Compute Optimizer. Create a Lambda function that calls the ExportLambdaFunctionRecommendations operation. Export the .csv file to an S3 bucket. Create an Amazon EventBridge rule to schedule the Lambda function to run every 2 weeks.

Question 15

A company’s factory and automation applications are running in a single VPC. More than 20 applications run on a combination of Amazon EC2, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), and Amazon RDS.

The company has software engineers spread across three teams. One of the three teams owns each application, and each time is responsible for the cost and performance of all of its applications. Team resources have tags that represent their application and team. The teams use IAM access for daily activities.

The company needs to determine which costs on the monthly AWS bill are attributable to each application or team. The company also must be able to create reports to compare costs from the last 12 months and to help forecast costs for the next 12 months. A solutions architect must recommend an AWS Billing and Cost Management solution that provides these cost reports.

Which combination of actions will meet these requirements? (Choose three.)

Answer 15

A. Activate the user-define cost allocation tags that represent the application and the team.

C. Create a cost category for each application in Billing and Cost Management.

F. Enable Cost Explorer.

Question 16

An AWS customer has a web application that runs on premises. The web application fetches data from a third-party API that is behind a firewall. The third party accepts only one public CIDR block in each client’s allow list.

The customer wants to migrate their web application to the AWS Cloud. The application will be hosted on a set of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in a VPC. The ALB is located in public subnets. The EC2 instances are located in private subnets. NAT gateways provide internet access to the private subnets.

How should a solutions architect ensure that the web application can continue to call the third-party API after the migration?

Answer 16

B. Register a block of customer-owned public IP addresses in the AWS account. Create Elastic IP addresses from the address block and assign them to the NAT gateways in the VPC.

Question 17

A company with several AWS accounts is using AWS Organizations and service control policies (SCPs). An administrator created the following SCP and has attached it to an organizational unit (OU) that contains AWS account 1111-1111-1111:

{
“Version”: “2012-10-17”,
“Statement”: [
{
“sid”: “AllowsAllActions”,
“Effect”: “Allow”,
“Action”: “”,
“Resource”: “”
},
{
“Sid”: “DenycloudTrail”, “Effect”: “Deny”,
“Action”: “cloudtrail:”,
“Resource”: “”
}
]
}

Developers working in account 1111-1111-1111 complain that they cannot create Amazon S3 buckets. How should the administrator address this problem?

Answer 17

C. Instruct the developers to add Amazon S3 permissions to their IAM entities.

Question 18

A company has a monolithic application that is critical to the company’s business. The company hosts the application on an Amazon EC2 instance that runs Amazon Linux 2. The company’s application team receives a directive from the legal department to back up the data from the instance’s encrypted Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume to an Amazon S3 bucket. The application team does not have the administrative SSH key pair for the instance. The application must continue to serve the users.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer 18

A. Attach a role to the instance with permission to write to Amazon S3. Use the AWS Systems Manager Session Manager option to gain access to the instance and run commands to copy data into Amazon S3.

Question 19

A solutions architect needs to copy data from an Amazon S3 bucket m an AWS account to a new S3 bucket in a new AWS account. The solutions architect must implement a solution that uses the AWS CLI.

Which combination of steps will successfully copy the data? (Choose three.)

Answer 19

A. Create a bucket policy to allow the source bucket to list its contents and to put objects and set object ACLs in the destination bucket. Attach the bucket policy to the destination bucket.

D. Create an IAM policy in the destination account. Configure the policy to allow a user in the destination account to list contents and get objects in the source bucket, and to list contents, put objects, and set objectACLs in the destination bucket. Attach the policy to the user.

F. Run the aws s3 sync command as a user in the destination account. Specify the source and destination buckets to copy the data.

Question 20

A company built an application based on AWS Lambda deployed in an AWS CloudFormation stack. The last production release of the web application introduced an issue that resulted in an outage lasting several minutes. A solutions architect must adjust the deployment process to support a canary release.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer 20

A. Create an alias for every new deployed version of the Lambda function. Use the AWS CLI update-alias command with the routing-config parameter to distribute the load.

Question 21

A finance company hosts a data lake in Amazon S3. The company receives financial data records over SFTP each night from several third parties. The company runs its own SFTP server on an Amazon EC2 instance in a public subnet of a VPC. After the files are uploaded, they are moved to the data lake by a cron job that runs on the same instance. The SFTP server is reachable on DNS sftp.example.com through the use of Amazon Route 53.

What should a solutions architect do to improve the reliability and scalability of the SFTP solution?

Answer 21

B. Migrate the SFTP server to AWS Transfer for SFTP. Update the DNS record sftp.example.com in Route 53 to point to the server endpoint hostname.

Question 22

A company wants to migrate an application to Amazon EC2 from VMware Infrastructure that runs in an on-premises data center. A solutions architect must preserve the software and configuration settings during the migration.

What should the solutions architect do to meet these requirements?

Answer 22

D. Create a managed-instance activation for a hybrid environment in AWS Systems Manager. Download and install Systems Manager Agent on the on-premises VM. Register the VM with Systems Manager to be a managed instance. Use AWS Backup to create a snapshot of the VM and create an AMI. Launch an EC2 instance that is based on the AMI.

Question 23

A video processing company has an application that downloads images from an Amazon S3 bucket, processes the images, stores a transformed image in a second S3 bucket, and updates metadata about the image in an Amazon DynamoDB table. The application is written in Node.js and runs by using an AWS Lambda function. The Lambda function is invoked when a new image is uploaded to Amazon S3.

The application ran without incident for a while. However, the size of the images has grown significantly. The Lambda function is now failing frequently with timeout errors. The function timeout is set to its maximum value. A solutions architect needs to refactor the application’s architecture to prevent invocation failures. The company does not want to manage the underlying infrastructure.

Which combination of steps should the solutions architect take to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

Answer 23

D. Create a new Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) task definition with a compatibility type of Amazon EC2. Configure the task definition to use the new image in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR). Adjust the Lambda function to invoke an ECS task by using the ECS task definition when a new file arrives in Amazon S3.

E. Modify the application to store images on Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) and to store metadata on an Amazon RDS DB instance. Adjust the Lambda function to mount the EFS file share.

Question 24

A company has an organization in AWS Organizations. The company is using AWS Control Tower to deploy a landing zone for the organization. The company wants to implement governance and policy enforcement. The company must implement a policy that will detect Amazon RDS DB instances that are not encrypted at rest in the company’s production OU.

Which solution will meet this requirement?

Answer 24

B. Enable the appropriate guardrail from the list of strongly recommended guardrails in AWS Control Tower. Apply the guardrail to the production OU.

Question 25

A startup company hosts a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances in private subnets using the latest Amazon Linux 2 AMI. The company’s engineers rely heavily on SSH access to the instances for troubleshooting.

The company’s existing architecture includes the following:

• A VPC with private and public subnets, and a NAT gateway.
• Site-to-Site VPN for connectivity with the on-premises environment.
• EC2 security groups with direct SSH access from the on-premises environment.

The company needs to increase security controls around SSH access and provide auditing of commands run by the engineers.

Which strategy should a solutions architect use?

Answer 25

D. Create an IAM role with the AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore managed policy attached. Attach the IAM role to all the EC2 instances. Remove all security group rules attached to the EC2 instances that allow inbound TCP on port 22. Have the engineers install the AWS Systems Manager Session Manager plugin for their devices and remotely access the instances by using the start-session API call from Systems Manager.

Question 26

A company that uses AWS Organizations allows developers to experiment on AWS. As part of the landing zone that the company has deployed, developers use their company email address to request an account. The company wants to ensure that developers are not launching costly services or running services unnecessarily. The company must give developers a fixed monthly budget to limit their AWS costs.

Which combination of steps will meet these requirements? (Choose three.)

Answer 26

B. Use AWS Budgets to create a fixed monthly budget for each developer’s account as part of the account creation process.

D. Create an IAM policy to deny access to costly services and components. Apply the IAM policy to the developer accounts.

F. Create an AWS Budgets alert action to send an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notification when the budgeted amount is reached. Invoke an AWS Lambda function to terminate all services.

Question 27

A company has applications in an AWS account that is named Source. The account is in an organization in AWS Organizations. One of the applications uses AWS Lambda functions and stores inventory data in an Amazon Aurora database. The application deploys the Lambda functions by using a deployment package. The company has configured automated backups for Aurora.

The company wants to migrate the Lambda functions and the Aurora database to a new AWS account that is named Target. The application processes critical data, so the company must minimize downtime.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer 27

C. Use AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) to share the Lambda functions and the Aurora DB cluster with the Target account. Grant the Target account permission to clone the Aurora DB cluster.

Question 28

A company runs a Python script on an Amazon EC2 instance to process data. The script runs every 10 minutes. The script ingests files from an Amazon S3 bucket and processes the files. On average, the script takes approximately 5 minutes to process each file The script will not reprocess a file that the script has already processed.

The company reviewed Amazon CloudWatch metrics and noticed that the EC2 instance is idle for approximately 40% of the time because of the file processing speed. The company wants to make the workload highly available and scalable. The company also wants to reduce long-term management overhead.

Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Answer 28

D. Migrate the data processing script to a container image that runs on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) on AWS Fargate. Create an AWS Lambda function that calls the Fargate RunTaskAPI operation when the container processes the file. Use an S3 event notification to invoke the Lambda function.

Question 29

A financial services company in North America plans to release a new online web application to its customers on AWS. The company will launch the application in the us-east-1 Region on Amazon EC2 instances. The application must be highly available and must dynamically scale to meet user traffic. The company also wants to implement a disaster recovery environment for the application in the us-west-1 Region by using active-passive failover.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer 29

C. Create a VPC in us-east-1 and a VPC in us-west-1. In the us-east-1 VPC, create an Application Load Balancer (ALB) that extends across multiple Availability Zones in that VPC. Create an Auto Scaling group that deploys the EC2 instances across the multiple Availability Zones in the us-east-1 VPC. Place the Auto Scaling group behind the ALB. Set up the same configuration in the us-west-1 VPC. Create an Amazon Route 53 hosted zone. Create separate records for each ALB. Enable health checks and configure a failover routing policy for each record.

Question 30

A company has an environment that has a single AWS account. A solutions architect is reviewing the environment to recommend what the company could improve specifically in terms of access to the AWS Management Console. The company’s IT support workers currently access the console for administrative tasks, authenticating with named IAM users that have been mapped to their job role.

The IT support workers no longer want to maintain both their Active Directory and IAM user accounts. They want to be able to access the console by using their existing Active Directory credentials. The solutions architect is using AWS IAM Identity Center (AWS Single Sign-On) to implement this functionality.

Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Answer 30

D. Create an organization in AWS Organizations. Turn on all features for the organization. Create and configure an AD Connector to connect to the company’s on-premises Active Directory. Configure IAM Identity Center and set the AD Connector as the identity source. Create permission sets and map them to the existing groups within the company’s Active Directory.