AWS Associate Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate 5

Question 1

A production RDS MySQL instance is experiencing high CPU utilization. The DBA confirms that long-running read queries are the cause. Which solution offloads reads with the least downtime?

Accepted Answer

Create one or more RDS Read Replicas and direct read traffic to them

Answer

RDS Read Replicas asynchronously replicate data from the primary and can serve SELECT queries, reducing CPU load on the primary instance with no downtime to create.

Question 2

A SysOps Administrator wants to enforce that all EC2 instances must have a specific tag (Environment) before they can be launched. Which service enforces this?

Accepted Answer

IAM policy with a condition on ec2:RunInstances requiring the tag

Answer

An IAM policy with a Condition block using aws:RequestTag can deny ec2:RunInstances if the required tag is not present at launch time.

Question 3

An Elastic Load Balancer's access logs show a high number of HTTP 502 errors. What is the most common cause?

Accepted Answer

The target instances are returning invalid responses or are unhealthy

Answer

HTTP 502 (Bad Gateway) from an ALB indicates the load balancer received an invalid response from the target instance, often caused by an unhealthy or misconfigured application.

Question 4

A company uses AWS Organizations with Service Control Policies. Developers report they cannot create resources in us-west-1 even though their IAM permissions allow it. What is the cause?

Accepted Answer

An SCP applied to the account or OU restricts API calls to allowed regions only

Answer

SCPs act as guardrails and can restrict which AWS regions member accounts can use; if us-west-1 is not in the allow list, IAM permissions in that account cannot override the SCP.

Question 5

A SysOps Administrator needs to securely store and automatically rotate database credentials used by an EC2 application. Which AWS service is purpose-built for this?

Accepted Answer

AWS Secrets Manager with automatic rotation enabled

Answer

AWS Secrets Manager stores credentials, supports automatic rotation using Lambda functions, and integrates natively with RDS for seamless credential rotation.

AWS Practice Test

AWS Practice Test

AWS Associate Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate 5