AWS Solutions Architect Cloud Architecture & Design 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A company needs to migrate a 50 TB on-premises Oracle database to AWS with minimal downtime. Which combination of services best supports this?
- AWS Snowball Edge + AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) (Correct answer)
- AWS Direct Connect + manual database export/import
- AWS DataSync + Amazon RDS
- AWS Transfer Family + Amazon Aurora
Correct answer: AWS Snowball Edge + AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)
Snowball Edge transfers the bulk data offline, and DMS handles ongoing change data capture replication to minimize cutover downtime.
Question 2: Which AWS Well-Architected pillar focuses on avoiding unnecessary costs and ensuring systems deliver business value at the lowest price point?
- Operational Excellence
- Security
- Reliability
- Cost Optimization (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Cost Optimization
The Cost Optimization pillar covers understanding and controlling where money is being spent, selecting the right pricing model, and eliminating waste.
Question 3: An architect needs to deliver static assets globally with the lowest possible latency and must protect against DDoS attacks at no extra cost. Which solution is best?
- Amazon S3 with cross-region replication
- Amazon CloudFront with AWS Shield Standard (Correct answer)
- AWS Global Accelerator with EC2 origins
- Elastic Load Balancing across multiple regions
Correct answer: Amazon CloudFront with AWS Shield Standard
CloudFront caches content at edge locations worldwide, and AWS Shield Standard is automatically included with CloudFront at no additional cost, mitigating common DDoS attacks.
Question 4: A Lambda function must securely retrieve a database password that is automatically rotated every 30 days. What is the recommended approach?
- Store the password in an environment variable encrypted with KMS
- Hardcode the password in the function code and redeploy on rotation
- Retrieve the password at runtime from AWS Secrets Manager (Correct answer)
- Store the password in an SSM Parameter Store SecureString parameter and cache it
Correct answer: Retrieve the password at runtime from AWS Secrets Manager
AWS Secrets Manager supports automatic rotation and provides a managed API for retrieving secrets at runtime, making it the best fit for rotating database credentials.
Question 5: A company has a legacy application that can only scale vertically. Which EC2 feature allows changing the instance type with the least disruption?
- EC2 Auto Scaling with instance refresh
- EC2 instance type change via Stop-Modify-Start (Correct answer)
- EC2 Elastic Network Adapter upgrade
- AMI replacement with CloudFormation stack update
Correct answer: EC2 instance type change via Stop-Modify-Start
Stopping an EC2 instance, modifying its instance type in the console or CLI, and restarting it is the direct way to vertically scale a single instance.
Question 6: Which Amazon S3 storage class is most cost-effective for data that is accessed infrequently but must be retrieved within milliseconds when needed?
- S3 Standard
- S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) (Correct answer)
- S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval
- S3 One Zone-IA
Correct answer: S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA)
S3 Standard-IA offers lower storage costs than S3 Standard with millisecond retrieval, designed for data accessed less than once a month.
Question 7: An application uses an Application Load Balancer (ALB) and needs to route requests to different target groups based on the URL path. Which ALB feature enables this?
- Host-based routing
- Path-based routing rules (Correct answer)
- Weighted target group routing
- Listener port routing
Correct answer: Path-based routing rules
ALB path-based routing rules allow you to forward requests matching specific URL path patterns (e.g., /api/* vs /images/*) to different target groups.
AWS Solutions Architect Cloud Architecture & Design 3
A company needs to migrate a 50 TB on-premises Oracle database to AWS with minimal downtime.
Which combination of services best supports this?