Certified Solutions Architect High Availability and Scalability 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 Certified Solutions Architect High Availability and Scalability flashcards as text
A global application uses Route 53 with health checks and failover routing. The primary endpoint fails its health check. How does Route 53 respond to DNS queries?
Answer: Returns the secondary endpoint's IP based on the failover record
Route 53 failover routing automatically returns the secondary record when the primary record's associated health check fails.
A company needs its ECS Fargate service to scale based on CPU utilization. Which ECS Auto Scaling policy type adjusts capacity smoothly with minimal overreaction to brief spikes?
Answer: Target tracking scaling targeting 70% CPU utilization
Target tracking scaling continuously adjusts capacity to maintain a target metric (e.g., 70% CPU), smoothing out brief spikes with built-in scale-in cooldowns.
An application requires guaranteed message ordering and exactly-once processing across distributed producers and consumers. Which SQS queue type satisfies both requirements?
Answer: SQS FIFO queue with content-based deduplication
SQS FIFO queues guarantee message order within a message group and use content-based deduplication to prevent duplicate processing.
A solutions architect designs a highly available NAT solution for private subnets across three AZs. What is the recommended approach?
Answer: Deploy a NAT Gateway in each AZ and configure each private subnet's route table to its AZ's NAT Gateway
Deploying a NAT Gateway per AZ and routing each AZ's private subnets to its local NAT Gateway eliminates cross-AZ traffic and AZ single points of failure.
A company uses an ALB with WAF. They want to ensure traffic is served even if the primary region becomes unavailable, with automatic DNS failover to a secondary region. Which architecture achieves this?
Answer: Global Accelerator with endpoints in two regions and health checks enabled
AWS Global Accelerator uses anycast IPs with health checks to route traffic to healthy regional endpoints, providing automatic failover with low-latency static IPs.
Which DynamoDB feature enables a table to automatically adjust read and write throughput capacity based on actual traffic patterns without manual intervention?
Answer: DynamoDB Auto Scaling with Application Auto Scaling
DynamoDB Auto Scaling uses Application Auto Scaling to monitor consumed capacity and adjust provisioned throughput within defined min/max bounds.
A company's application experiences connection timeouts during traffic spikes because the database cannot handle connection bursts from hundreds of Lambda functions. Which service resolves this with minimal code changes?
Answer: RDS Proxy to pool and manage database connections
RDS Proxy pools and multiplexes application connections to RDS/Aurora, preventing connection exhaustion during Lambda bursts without application-level changes.