Architecting on AWS Certification Welding Procedures & Techniques 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A company needs its web application to survive the failure of an entire AWS Availability Zone. Which architecture achieves this?
- Deploy all EC2 instances in a single AZ with Auto Scaling
- Distribute EC2 instances across multiple AZs behind an ALB (Correct answer)
- Use a single large EC2 instance with enhanced networking
- Enable detailed CloudWatch monitoring on all instances
Correct answer: Distribute EC2 instances across multiple AZs behind an ALB
Distributing instances across multiple AZs behind an ALB ensures traffic is routed to healthy AZs if one fails.
Question 2: Which AWS service provides a managed NoSQL database with built-in multi-AZ replication and single-digit millisecond latency?
- Amazon RDS
- Amazon Redshift
- Amazon DynamoDB (Correct answer)
- Amazon ElastiCache
Correct answer: Amazon DynamoDB
DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL service with automatic multi-AZ replication and consistent low latency.
Question 3: A solutions architect wants to decouple a producer microservice from a consumer microservice to handle burst traffic. What is the best approach?
- Use direct HTTP calls between services
- Place an Amazon SQS queue between the producer and consumer (Correct answer)
- Increase the producer's EC2 instance size
- Enable sticky sessions on the load balancer
Correct answer: Place an Amazon SQS queue between the producer and consumer
SQS buffers messages so the consumer can process at its own pace, decoupling the two services.
Question 4: An architect must ensure that data stored in Amazon S3 is encrypted at rest using customer-managed keys. Which option satisfies this requirement?
- S3-Managed Keys (SSE-S3)
- AWS KMS Customer Managed Keys (SSE-KMS) (Correct answer)
- Client-side encryption with a random password
- Enable S3 Versioning on the bucket
Correct answer: AWS KMS Customer Managed Keys (SSE-KMS)
SSE-KMS uses CMKs in AWS KMS, giving the customer full control over key management and auditing.
Question 5: Which AWS storage class is most cost-effective for data that is accessed once a quarter and must be retrieved within minutes?
- S3 Standard
- S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval
- S3 Standard-IA (Correct answer)
- S3 Glacier Deep Archive
Correct answer: S3 Standard-IA
S3 Standard-IA is designed for infrequently accessed data that still needs millisecond retrieval.
Question 6: A company wants to replicate an RDS MySQL database to a different AWS Region for disaster recovery. Which feature should they use?
- RDS Multi-AZ deployment
- RDS Cross-Region Read Replica (Correct answer)
- AWS Database Migration Service
- Amazon Aurora Global Database
Correct answer: RDS Cross-Region Read Replica
RDS Cross-Region Read Replicas asynchronously copy data to another region, enabling DR failover.
Question 7: What is the purpose of an AWS Transit Gateway?
- To connect an on-premises network to a single VPC
- To act as a central hub connecting multiple VPCs and on-premises networks (Correct answer)
- To provide a dedicated connection to AWS from a data center
- To route traffic between public and private subnets
Correct answer: To act as a central hub connecting multiple VPCs and on-premises networks
Transit Gateway is a scalable network hub that simplifies connectivity between many VPCs and on-premises locations.
Architecting on AWS Certification Welding Procedures & Techniques 2
A company needs its web application to survive the failure of an entire AWS Availability Zone.
Which architecture achieves this?