Cloud Engineer Technology & Digital Applications 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A cloud engineer needs to query data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL without loading it into a database. Which AWS service enables this?
- Amazon RDS
- Amazon Athena (Correct answer)
- Amazon Redshift
- AWS Glue
Correct answer: Amazon Athena
Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that lets you run SQL queries directly against data in S3.
Question 2: In cloud security, what does the shared responsibility model state about OS-level patching for an EC2 instance?
- AWS patches the OS automatically as part of managed service
- The customer is responsible for patching the OS on EC2 instances (Correct answer)
- Patching is handled by the cloud provider's SLA
- OS patching is unnecessary in cloud environments
Correct answer: The customer is responsible for patching the OS on EC2 instances
For EC2, AWS manages the underlying hypervisor, but the customer is responsible for patching and maintaining the guest OS.
Question 3: A microservices application experiences cascading failures when one downstream service is slow. Which resilience pattern prevents this?
- Retry with exponential backoff only
- Circuit Breaker pattern (Correct answer)
- Database connection pooling
- Blue/Green deployment
Correct answer: Circuit Breaker pattern
The Circuit Breaker pattern stops sending requests to a failing service after a threshold, allowing it to recover and preventing cascading failures.
Question 4: Which type of cloud load balancer operates at Layer 7 and can route traffic based on URL path or HTTP headers?
- Network Load Balancer (NLB)
- Application Load Balancer (ALB) (Correct answer)
- Classic Load Balancer
- Gateway Load Balancer
Correct answer: Application Load Balancer (ALB)
Application Load Balancers operate at Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS) and support content-based routing using host headers, URL paths, and query strings.
Question 5: A team wants to enforce that all S3 buckets in their AWS account never allow public access, regardless of bucket policy. Which AWS feature achieves this at the account level?
- S3 bucket ACL
- S3 Block Public Access (account-level) (Correct answer)
- AWS Shield
- S3 Object Lock
Correct answer: S3 Block Public Access (account-level)
S3 Block Public Access settings applied at the account level override any bucket-level policies or ACLs that would grant public access.
Question 6: What is the primary benefit of using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) over manual cloud console provisioning?
- IaC eliminates the need for cloud cost optimization
- IaC enables version-controlled, repeatable, and auditable infrastructure deployments (Correct answer)
- IaC automatically selects the cheapest instance types
- IaC removes the need for IAM permissions
Correct answer: IaC enables version-controlled, repeatable, and auditable infrastructure deployments
IaC stores infrastructure definitions in version control, enabling consistent, repeatable deployments and a full audit trail of changes.
Question 7: A cloud engineer configures an API Gateway with a throttling limit of 1,000 requests per second. A spike sends 5,000 requests per second. What happens to the excess requests?
- They are queued indefinitely until processed
- They receive a 429 Too Many Requests response (Correct answer)
- They are automatically routed to a backup region
- They bypass the limit and are passed to the backend
Correct answer: They receive a 429 Too Many Requests response
API Gateway returns HTTP 429 Too Many Requests to clients that exceed the configured throttle limit, protecting backend services from overload.
Cloud Engineer Technology & Digital Applications 4
A cloud engineer needs to query data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL without loading it into a database.
Which AWS service enables this?