CPA Cloud Infrastructure 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which load balancer type operates at the OSI Layer 7 (application layer) and can route traffic based on URL path or HTTP headers?
- Network Load Balancer
- Classic Load Balancer
- Application Load Balancer (Correct answer)
- DNS-based load balancer
Correct answer: Application Load Balancer
An Application Load Balancer (ALB) works at Layer 7, enabling content-based routing decisions such as path-based or host-based routing.
Question 2: In Infrastructure as Code (IaC), what is the key advantage of declarative configuration over imperative scripting?
- Declarative scripts run faster than imperative ones
- Declarative code describes the desired end state, letting the tool determine how to reach it (Correct answer)
- Declarative IaC supports more cloud providers
- Imperative IaC cannot be version-controlled
Correct answer: Declarative code describes the desired end state, letting the tool determine how to reach it
Declarative IaC (like Terraform) specifies what the infrastructure should look like, while the tool manages the steps needed to achieve that state.
Question 3: A company needs to connect its on-premises data center to a cloud VPC with consistent, low-latency bandwidth. Which solution is MOST appropriate?
- Site-to-site VPN over the public internet
- Dedicated Direct Connect / ExpressRoute private connection (Correct answer)
- CloudFront CDN distribution
- Peering with another VPC
Correct answer: Dedicated Direct Connect / ExpressRoute private connection
Dedicated connections like AWS Direct Connect or Azure ExpressRoute provide private, consistent bandwidth between on-premises and cloud, avoiding internet variability.
Question 4: Which IAM concept groups multiple permissions together so they can be assigned to users or services as a unit?
- Policy (Correct answer)
- Role
- Group
- Permission boundary
Correct answer: Policy
An IAM policy is a document that defines a set of permissions and can be attached to users, groups, or roles.
Question 5: What is the primary purpose of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) in cloud architecture?
- To provide managed database replication
- To cache and serve content from edge locations closer to end users (Correct answer)
- To balance load between backend application servers
- To scan uploaded files for malware
Correct answer: To cache and serve content from edge locations closer to end users
A CDN caches static and dynamic content at geographically distributed edge nodes, reducing latency by serving users from nearby locations.
Question 6: In a microservices architecture on Kubernetes, what resource defines the desired number of identical pod replicas and manages their lifecycle?
- Service
- ConfigMap
- Deployment (Correct answer)
- Namespace
Correct answer: Deployment
A Kubernetes Deployment declares the desired replica count and update strategy for a set of pods, ensuring the cluster maintains that state.
Question 7: Which cloud billing model charges only for the exact compute time consumed, with no minimum usage commitment?
- Reserved instances
- Spot/preemptible instances
- On-demand pricing (Correct answer)
- Dedicated hosts
Correct answer: On-demand pricing
On-demand pricing charges per second or per hour of actual use with no upfront commitment, offering maximum flexibility at a higher per-unit rate.
CPA Cloud Infrastructure 3
Which load balancer type operates at the OSI Layer 7 (application layer) and can route traffic based on URL path or HTTP headers?