AWS Solutions Architect Deployment & Scalability 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: An application experiences unpredictable traffic spikes. Which Auto Scaling policy responds fastest to sudden load increases?
- Simple scaling
- Step scaling
- Target tracking scaling (Correct answer)
- Scheduled scaling
Correct answer: Target tracking scaling
Target tracking scaling continuously adjusts capacity to maintain a specified metric (e.g., 50% CPU), reacting faster than simple or step policies.
Question 2: A company wants zero-downtime deployments on ECS Fargate. Which deployment strategy should they use?
- Recreate
- Rolling update
- Blue/green via CodeDeploy (Correct answer)
- In-place deployment
Correct answer: Blue/green via CodeDeploy
ECS blue/green deployments via CodeDeploy shift traffic from the old (blue) task set to the new (green) task set with automatic rollback on failure.
Question 3: You need to deploy a stateful application across multiple AZs with persistent storage per instance. Which service is best suited?
- ECS with Fargate
- AWS Lambda
- Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling with EBS (Correct answer)
- Elastic Beanstalk
Correct answer: Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling with EBS
EC2 Auto Scaling with EBS volumes provides per-instance persistent block storage, essential for stateful applications across multiple AZs.
Question 4: Which CloudFormation feature allows you to deploy the same template across multiple accounts and regions simultaneously?
- Nested stacks
- CloudFormation StackSets (Correct answer)
- Change sets
- Stack policies
Correct answer: CloudFormation StackSets
CloudFormation StackSets extend stack deployment across multiple AWS accounts and regions with a single operation.
Question 5: An ALB target group has instances in two AZs. One AZ has 2 instances and the other has 8. What feature ensures equal traffic distribution across AZs?
- Sticky sessions
- Cross-zone load balancing (Correct answer)
- Connection draining
- Path-based routing
Correct answer: Cross-zone load balancing
Cross-zone load balancing distributes requests evenly across all registered targets in all enabled AZs, regardless of instance count per AZ.
Question 6: A company wants to decouple application tiers so that the front end can scale independently during traffic bursts. Which service best achieves this?
- Amazon RDS Multi-AZ
- Amazon SQS (Correct answer)
- AWS Direct Connect
- Amazon CloudFront
Correct answer: Amazon SQS
Amazon SQS acts as a buffer between application tiers, allowing each tier to scale independently without blocking the other.
Question 7: Which EC2 Auto Scaling feature prevents scale-in from terminating instances that are still processing long-running jobs?
- Warm pools
- Instance protection
- Lifecycle hooks (Correct answer)
- Cooldown periods
Correct answer: Lifecycle hooks
Lifecycle hooks pause scale-in termination, allowing instances to complete in-flight work (e.g., drain a queue) before being terminated.
AWS Solutions Architect Deployment & Scalability 2
An application experiences unpredictable traffic spikes.
Which Auto Scaling policy responds fastest to sudden load increases?