Architecting on AWS Certification Equipment Maintenance & Calibration 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: An architect wants to calibrate Auto Scaling to maintain exactly 60% average CPU utilization across a fleet. Which scaling policy type is most appropriate?
- Simple scaling policy
- Step scaling policy
- Target tracking scaling policy (Correct answer)
- Scheduled scaling policy
Correct answer: Target tracking scaling policy
Target tracking scaling policies automatically adjust capacity to keep a chosen CloudWatch metric at a specified target value, such as 60% average CPU.
Question 2: A company needs to ensure RDS Multi-AZ failover completes within 60 seconds during maintenance events. Which action most directly reduces failover time?
- Enable Enhanced Monitoring
- Enable RDS Proxy to absorb connection storms (Correct answer)
- Increase instance storage IOPS
- Switch to a provisioned IOPS SSD storage type
Correct answer: Enable RDS Proxy to absorb connection storms
RDS Proxy maintains a warm connection pool and absorbs the reconnection spike during failover, making the failover effectively transparent to applications.
Question 3: During scheduled maintenance, a DynamoDB table's provisioned throughput must be temporarily increased and then returned to baseline. What is the most operationally efficient way to automate this?
- Lambda function triggered by EventBridge Scheduler (Correct answer)
- Manual AWS Console adjustment
- AWS Config rule with remediation
- DynamoDB Streams-triggered Lambda
Correct answer: Lambda function triggered by EventBridge Scheduler
An EventBridge Scheduler rule can trigger a Lambda function on a cron schedule to update DynamoDB provisioned capacity before and after the maintenance window.
Question 4: An operations team must track software inventory — installed packages, OS version, and running services — across 1,000 EC2 instances. Which AWS service collects this data without requiring custom scripts?
- AWS Config
- AWS Systems Manager Inventory (Correct answer)
- Amazon Inspector
- AWS CloudTrail
Correct answer: AWS Systems Manager Inventory
SSM Inventory collects metadata about installed applications, network configurations, and running services from managed instances and stores results in S3 or Systems Manager.
Question 5: A solutions architect must ensure that EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group are replaced with the latest approved AMI on a weekly cadence. Which approach achieves this with the least operational overhead?
- Manually terminate instances each week
- Use EC2 Image Builder pipeline with a launch template update and instance refresh (Correct answer)
- Write a Lambda function to terminate instances nightly
- Enable SSM Patch Manager only
Correct answer: Use EC2 Image Builder pipeline with a launch template update and instance refresh
EC2 Image Builder builds and distributes the new AMI; updating the launch template and triggering an Auto Scaling instance refresh replaces instances in a controlled, rolling manner.
Question 6: A team needs to validate that critical Lambda functions respond within SLA thresholds after each deployment. Which AWS-native feature continuously invokes a function on a schedule to test availability?
- CloudWatch Synthetics Canaries (Correct answer)
- Lambda Provisioned Concurrency
- AWS X-Ray active tracing
- CloudWatch Alarms on Duration metric
Correct answer: CloudWatch Synthetics Canaries
CloudWatch Synthetics Canaries run scheduled, scripted checks against endpoints or functions, alerting when responses deviate from expected behavior.
Question 7: An architect is designing a process to keep EC2 Systems Manager (SSM) agents up to date automatically across an entire fleet. What is the recommended approach?
- Bake the latest SSM agent into each new AMI manually
- Use SSM State Manager association with the AWS-UpdateSSMAgent document (Correct answer)
- Use SSM Patch Manager with a custom patch baseline
- Update agents via AWS CodeDeploy
Correct answer: Use SSM State Manager association with the AWS-UpdateSSMAgent document
An SSM State Manager association using the AWS-UpdateSSMAgent document runs on a defined schedule to keep SSM agents current across all managed instances.
Architecting on AWS Certification Equipment Maintenance & Calibration 3
An architect wants to calibrate Auto Scaling to maintain exactly 60% average CPU utilization across a fleet.
Which scaling policy type is most appropriate?