Cloud Engineer Technology & Digital Applications 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A cloud engineer needs to process streaming IoT sensor data with sub-second latency. Which managed service is best suited for this use case on AWS?
- Amazon SQS
- Amazon Kinesis Data Streams (Correct answer)
- Amazon S3
- AWS Batch
Correct answer: Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is purpose-built for real-time streaming data ingestion and processing with millisecond latency.
Question 2: Which cloud networking concept allows private connectivity between a VPC and on-premises infrastructure without traversing the public internet?
- VPC Peering
- AWS Direct Connect (Correct answer)
- Internet Gateway
- NAT Gateway
Correct answer: AWS Direct Connect
AWS Direct Connect establishes a dedicated private network connection from on-premises to AWS, bypassing the public internet.
Question 3: A team deploys a containerized microservice and wants Kubernetes to automatically add more pod replicas when CPU usage exceeds 70%. Which object should they configure?
- ReplicaSet
- DaemonSet
- HorizontalPodAutoscaler (Correct answer)
- StatefulSet
Correct answer: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
HorizontalPodAutoscaler automatically scales the number of pod replicas based on observed CPU or custom metrics.
Question 4: In a multi-cloud strategy, what is the PRIMARY purpose of using an abstraction layer like Terraform?
- To accelerate container image builds
- To provide a single IaC language that works across multiple cloud providers (Correct answer)
- To manage DNS records globally
- To enforce network security policies
Correct answer: To provide a single IaC language that works across multiple cloud providers
Terraform's provider model lets engineers define infrastructure using a single HCL language across AWS, GCP, Azure, and other providers.
Question 5: A cloud engineer observes that an application's database queries are slow due to repeated identical lookups. Which solution addresses this with the least refactoring?
- Vertical scaling of the database instance
- Adding a caching layer with Redis or Memcached (Correct answer)
- Migrating to a NoSQL database
- Enabling Multi-AZ deployment
Correct answer: Adding a caching layer with Redis or Memcached
An in-memory cache like Redis stores frequently queried results, dramatically reducing repeated database round-trips without changing application logic.
Question 6: Which cloud storage class is most cost-effective for data that must be retained for 7 years for compliance but is almost never accessed?
- Standard
- Standard-Infrequent Access
- Glacier Deep Archive (Correct answer)
- One Zone-IA
Correct answer: Glacier Deep Archive
Glacier Deep Archive offers the lowest storage cost on AWS and is designed for long-term archival data with retrieval times of 12 hours or more.
Question 7: A serverless function needs read/write access to an S3 bucket. What is the most secure way to grant this permission?
- Store AWS access keys in the function's environment variables
- Attach an IAM role with a least-privilege policy to the function (Correct answer)
- Use the root account credentials
- Enable public access on the S3 bucket
Correct answer: Attach an IAM role with a least-privilege policy to the function
Attaching an IAM role with a scoped policy follows the principle of least privilege and avoids storing long-lived credentials in code or environment variables.
Cloud Engineer Technology & Digital Applications 2
A cloud engineer needs to process streaming IoT sensor data with sub-second latency.
Which managed service is best suited for this use case on AWS?