AWS Solutions Architect Deployment & Scalability 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A solutions architect needs to gradually shift 10% of production traffic to a new Lambda function version for testing. Which feature enables this?
- Lambda layers
- Lambda aliases with weighted routing (Correct answer)
- Lambda reserved concurrency
- Lambda destinations
Correct answer: Lambda aliases with weighted routing
Lambda aliases support weighted routing, allowing you to split traffic percentages between two function versions for canary or linear deployments.
Question 2: Your Auto Scaling group must launch replacement instances before terminating old ones during a rolling update. Which update policy achieves this?
- AutoScalingRollingUpdate with MinInstancesInService (Correct answer)
- AutoScalingScheduledAction
- AutoScalingReplacingUpdate
- AutoScalingCreationPolicy
Correct answer: AutoScalingRollingUpdate with MinInstancesInService
AutoScalingRollingUpdate with MinInstancesInService ensures a minimum number of healthy instances remain available throughout the update.
Question 3: Which AWS service provides managed container orchestration with the least operational overhead for deploying microservices?
- Amazon EC2 with Docker
- Amazon ECS with Fargate (Correct answer)
- Amazon EKS with self-managed nodes
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk with Docker
Correct answer: Amazon ECS with Fargate
ECS with Fargate is serverless container orchestration — AWS manages the underlying infrastructure, minimizing operational overhead.
Question 4: An application on Elastic Beanstalk requires a configuration change that causes downtime. Which deployment policy minimizes user impact?
- All at once
- Rolling
- Rolling with additional batch
- Immutable (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Immutable
Immutable deployments launch a fresh set of instances with the new version; traffic is only cut over after health checks pass, eliminating downtime.
Question 5: A startup needs to scale their database read capacity dynamically based on load without changing application code. What should they implement?
- RDS Multi-AZ standby
- Aurora Auto Scaling with read replicas (Correct answer)
- RDS storage autoscaling
- DynamoDB DAX
Correct answer: Aurora Auto Scaling with read replicas
Aurora Auto Scaling automatically adds or removes Aurora Replicas based on CloudWatch metrics, scaling read capacity without application changes.
Question 6: Which deployment method for API Gateway allows you to test a new stage configuration by routing a percentage of requests to it?
- Stage variables
- Canary release deployment (Correct answer)
- Usage plans
- VPC link
Correct answer: Canary release deployment
API Gateway canary release deployments route a configurable percentage of traffic to the new stage, enabling safe incremental rollouts.
Question 7: A company runs a fleet of Spot Instances in an Auto Scaling group. What should be configured to gracefully handle Spot interruptions?
- Increase the cooldown period
- Use lifecycle hooks with an SQS drain queue
- Enable detailed monitoring
- Set capacity rebalancing and diversify instance types (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Set capacity rebalancing and diversify instance types
Capacity Rebalancing proactively replaces Spot Instances at elevated interruption risk, and diversifying instance types reduces the chance of simultaneous interruptions.
AWS Solutions Architect Deployment & Scalability 3
A solutions architect needs to gradually shift 10% of production traffic to a new Lambda function version for testing.
Which feature enables this?