AWS Solutions Architect Cloud Architecture & Design 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A company needs to run a stateful application that requires consistent, low-latency network performance between instances. Which AWS placement strategy should be used?
- Spread placement group
- Cluster placement group (Correct answer)
- Partition placement group
- Auto Scaling group with multiple AZs
Correct answer: Cluster placement group
Cluster placement groups pack instances close together in a single AZ, providing low-latency, high-throughput networking ideal for tightly coupled stateful workloads.
Question 2: An architect must design a solution where an S3 bucket in Account A can be accessed by EC2 instances in Account B. What is the recommended approach?
- Create an IAM user in Account A and share credentials with Account B
- Use a bucket policy on the S3 bucket to grant access to Account B's IAM role (Correct answer)
- Enable S3 public access and restrict by IP
- Use VPC peering between the two accounts
Correct answer: Use a bucket policy on the S3 bucket to grant access to Account B's IAM role
A resource-based bucket policy that grants access to the trusted IAM role or account in Account B is the recommended cross-account S3 access pattern.
Question 3: A workload requires processing messages exactly once, even if a producer sends duplicates. Which SQS feature addresses this requirement?
- SQS Standard Queue with dead-letter queue
- SQS FIFO Queue with content-based deduplication enabled (Correct answer)
- SQS Long Polling
- SQS Delay Queues
Correct answer: SQS FIFO Queue with content-based deduplication enabled
SQS FIFO queues with content-based deduplication use a SHA-256 hash of the message body to deduplicate messages within a 5-minute window.
Question 4: A Solutions Architect needs to ensure an application can tolerate the failure of an entire AWS Region. Which architecture best satisfies this requirement?
- Multi-AZ deployment with RDS failover
- Active-active deployment across two AWS Regions with Route 53 latency routing (Correct answer)
- CloudFront distribution with a single-region origin
- Auto Scaling group spanning multiple AZs in one region
Correct answer: Active-active deployment across two AWS Regions with Route 53 latency routing
An active-active multi-region architecture with Route 53 routing ensures traffic is served from a healthy region if an entire region fails.
Question 5: Which AWS service provides a fully managed, serverless graph database optimized for storing and traversing highly connected datasets?
- Amazon DynamoDB
- Amazon RDS Aurora
- Amazon Neptune (Correct answer)
- Amazon Redshift
Correct answer: Amazon Neptune
Amazon Neptune is a fully managed graph database service designed for use cases like social networks, knowledge graphs, and fraud detection that require traversing relationships.
Question 6: A company wants to enforce that all objects uploaded to an S3 bucket are encrypted at rest using AWS KMS. What is the correct configuration?
- Enable default encryption on the bucket with SSE-KMS
- Add a bucket policy that denies s3:PutObject requests missing the x-amz-server-side-encryption header
- Enable S3 versioning and configure lifecycle policies
- Both A and B together to enforce encryption (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Both A and B together to enforce encryption
Enabling default SSE-KMS encryption AND a bucket policy that denies unencrypted uploads together ensure all objects are KMS-encrypted regardless of client behavior.
Question 7: An application writes to an Amazon Kinesis Data Stream. Processing must start within seconds and the application needs to replay events from the past 7 days. Which consumer type is most appropriate?
- SQS Standard Queue consumer
- Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream
- Kinesis Enhanced Fan-Out consumer (Correct answer)
- Lambda with SQS event source mapping
Correct answer: Kinesis Enhanced Fan-Out consumer
Kinesis Enhanced Fan-Out provides dedicated throughput per consumer with sub-second latency, and Kinesis retains data for up to 365 days (default 24 hours, configurable to 7 days or more).
AWS Solutions Architect Cloud Architecture & Design 2
A company needs to run a stateful application that requires consistent, low-latency network performance between instances.
Which AWS placement strategy should be used?