CLF-C02 Cloud Architecture & Deployment Principles 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A company is migrating from a single large server to the cloud and wants to handle growing traffic. Which scaling strategy adds more instances rather than upgrading existing ones?
- Vertical scaling (scaling up)
- Horizontal scaling (scaling out) (Correct answer)
- Diagonal scaling
- Manual capacity planning
Correct answer: Horizontal scaling (scaling out)
Horizontal scaling adds more instances to distribute load, while vertical scaling increases the size/power of existing instances.
Question 2: Which AWS architecture concept uses separate sets of servers to host blue (current) and green (new) versions of an application to enable zero-downtime deployments?
- Rolling deployment
- Blue/green deployment (Correct answer)
- Canary deployment
- In-place deployment
Correct answer: Blue/green deployment
Blue/green deployment maintains two identical environments and shifts traffic from blue (current) to green (new) for zero-downtime releases.
Question 3: What is the primary purpose of an Amazon SQS queue in a cloud architecture?
- Storing relational data
- Decoupling application components by buffering messages (Correct answer)
- Providing DNS resolution
- Caching database queries
Correct answer: Decoupling application components by buffering messages
Amazon SQS decouples application components by acting as a message buffer, allowing producers and consumers to operate independently.
Question 4: According to cloud architecture best practices, which approach should be used to handle planned or unplanned downtime of a database?
- Take manual snapshots daily
- Use Multi-AZ deployment for automatic failover (Correct answer)
- Increase the database instance size
- Disable automated backups to improve performance
Correct answer: Use Multi-AZ deployment for automatic failover
Multi-AZ deployments automatically maintain a standby replica in another AZ and failover within minutes if the primary instance fails.
Question 5: A company wants to follow the AWS Well-Architected Framework principle of 'implement observability.' Which combination of services best supports this?
- Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier
- Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail (Correct answer)
- Amazon EC2 and AWS Lambda
- Amazon VPC and AWS Direct Connect
Correct answer: Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail
CloudWatch provides metrics and logging while CloudTrail records API calls, together providing comprehensive observability into system health and activity.
Question 6: Which cloud deployment benefit allows a company to stop paying for resources during non-business hours and restart them the next day?
- High availability
- Fault tolerance
- Pay-as-you-go pricing (Correct answer)
- Global reach
Correct answer: Pay-as-you-go pricing
Pay-as-you-go pricing means you only pay for resources while they are running, so stopping instances during off-hours directly reduces costs.
Question 7: An application serves users globally and requires low latency. Which architectural approach best addresses this requirement?
- Deploy everything in a single Region closest to the company headquarters
- Use Amazon CloudFront CDN and multi-Region deployments (Correct answer)
- Increase EC2 instance sizes
- Enable detailed CloudWatch monitoring
Correct answer: Use Amazon CloudFront CDN and multi-Region deployments
CloudFront caches content at edge locations worldwide and multi-Region deployments route users to the nearest infrastructure, minimizing latency.
CLF-C02 Cloud Architecture & Deployment Principles 4
A company is migrating from a single large server to the cloud and wants to handle growing traffic.
Which scaling strategy adds more instances rather than upgrading existing ones?