SAP-C02 Practice Test 2 — 10 Questions

Question 1

A solutions architect is reviewing an application that writes millions of small records per hour to an Amazon DynamoDB table. The table uses a partition key of customer ID, and a few very large customers generate most of the traffic. During peak periods, the application receives ProvisionedThroughputExceededException errors even though total consumed capacity is below the provisioned amount. Which action will resolve the throttling MOST effectively?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Redesign the table to use a composite partition key that appends a random or calculated suffix to the customer ID, distributing writes across more partitions.. The throttling is caused by hot partitions, where a few high-traffic customer IDs exceed the per-partition throughput ceiling despite ample table-level capacity. Appending a random or calculated suffix to the partition key spreads each large customer's writes across many partitions, eliminating the bottleneck. Simply adding capacity, switching to on-demand, or moving to an index with the same skewed key does not redistribute the load.

Answer

Switch the table from provisioned capacity to on-demand capacity mode so DynamoDB automatically handles all traffic spikes.

Answer

Create a global secondary index on the customer ID attribute and direct all reads and writes to the index instead of the base table.

Answer

Enable DynamoDB auto scaling to increase the provisioned read and write capacity units when consumed capacity approaches the limit.

Question 2

Which THREE factors should be considered when designing a disaster recovery plan for a multi-tier application using AWS? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).. Option A is correct because RTO (maximum tolerable downtime) and RPO (maximum tolerable data loss) are the foundational business requirements that drive every DR design decision, such as whether to use pilot light, warm standby, or multi-site active-active. Option B is correct because the data replication strategy determines actual data loss and recovery behavior: synchronous replication (e.g., Aurora Global Database or Multi-AZ) gives near-zero RPO but adds latency, while asynchronous replication (e.g., S3 Cross-Region Replication, RDS read replicas) lowers latency but risks losing recent writes. Option C is correct because Amazon Route 53 failover routing with health checks is the mechanism that redirects client traffic to the standby Region during a disaster, making it essential for reducing RTO in a multi-tier application. Option D is not one of the three because deploying across multiple Availability Zones addresses high availability within a single Region, not disaster recovery across Regions, which is the scope of a DR plan. Option E is not one of the three because instance sizing affects performance and cost, not recovery time, recovery point, or failover capability, so it is irrelevant to DR design.

Answer

Deploying the application across multiple Availability Zones.

Answer

Using larger instance sizes for better performance.

Question 3

A company is migrating a web application to AWS and wants to automatically scale the application based on CPU utilization. The application runs on a set of EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Which combination of AWS services should they use?

Accepted Answer

Auto Scaling group with a simple scaling policy based on CloudWatch CPU alarm. Auto Scaling group with a simple scaling policy based on a CloudWatch CPU alarm. This directly scales EC2 instances in response to CPU utilization, providing automatic scaling. Option A is incorrect because AWS Lambda with scheduled scaling does not dynamically respond to CPU utilization; it's time-based. Option B (Amazon CloudFront) is a content delivery network, not a scaling mechanism. Option C (Elastic Beanstalk) manages environments but the underlying scaling relies on Auto Scaling groups; the question asks for the combination of services, and the core scaling service is the Auto Scaling group. Therefore, D is the correct choice.

Answer

AWS Lambda with scheduled scaling

Answer

Amazon CloudFront with origin scaling

Answer

AWS Elastic Beanstalk with environment scaling

Question 4

A company is designing a new microservices architecture on AWS. Each service must be independently deployable and scale based on demand. The company wants to minimize operational overhead for container orchestration. Which AWS service should the company use?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) with AWS Fargate. Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate is the correct choice because it provides a fully managed container orchestration service that eliminates the need to provision, configure, or scale underlying EC2 instances. Fargate runs each container in its own isolated compute environment, allowing each microservice to scale independently based on demand while minimizing operational overhead for cluster management.

Answer

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

Answer

Amazon EC2 with Auto Scaling

Answer

AWS Lambda

Question 5

Refer to the exhibit. A solutions architect is troubleshooting why EC2 instances launched in subnet-11111111 cannot access the internet. The subnet is in a VPC with an internet gateway attached. The route table for the subnet has a default route (0.0.0.0/0) pointing to the internet gateway. What is the MOST likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The subnet's auto-assign public IP setting is disabled. The most likely cause is that the subnet's auto-assign public IP setting is disabled. Even though the subnet has a default route (0.0.0.0/0) pointing to an internet gateway, EC2 instances launched in that subnet will not receive a public IP address automatically unless the subnet's 'Auto-assign public IPv4 address' setting is enabled. Without a public IP (or an Elastic IP), the instance cannot communicate with the internet through the internet gateway, as the internet gateway requires a public IP for return traffic routing.

Answer

The internet gateway is not attached to the VPC

Answer

The subnet needs a NAT gateway for internet access

Answer

The subnet's route table does not have a route to the internet gateway

Question 6

A company runs a web application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The application receives a variable workload. The company wants to scale based on a custom metric that tracks the number of active users. What is the MOST efficient way to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

Create a target tracking scaling policy using the custom metric as the target.. Target tracking scaling is the most efficient because it automatically adjusts capacity to keep a chosen metric at a target value, using CloudWatch alarms under the hood. It supports custom metrics and eliminates the need to define step boundaries or thresholds manually, which is exactly what a variable workload with a custom metric requires.

Answer

Use a scheduled scaling policy to add or remove instances based on historical usage patterns.

Answer

Use AWS Lambda to periodically evaluate the custom metric and adjust the desired capacity via API calls.

Answer

Create a step scaling policy that uses CloudWatch alarms based on the custom metric.

Question 7

A company runs a web application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. The application experiences sudden traffic spikes. What is the most effective way to ensure the application can handle the spikes without manual intervention?

Accepted Answer

Use a target tracking scaling policy based on average CPU utilization.. A target tracking scaling policy based on average CPU utilization is the most effective approach because it automatically adjusts the Auto Scaling group's desired capacity in real-time to maintain a target CPU metric (e.g., 50%). This dynamic scaling method responds directly to sudden traffic spikes without any manual intervention, ensuring the application can handle increased load while optimizing cost.

Answer

Increase the instance size to handle more load per instance.

Answer

Manually increase the desired capacity when traffic spikes.

Answer

Use scheduled scaling to add instances at expected peak times.

Question 8

A company wants to share a large dataset stored in Amazon S3 with a partner who has their own AWS account. The partner needs to access the data using their own account credentials. Which approach should the company use?

Accepted Answer

Grant the partner's AWS account access via a bucket policy.. A bucket policy can grant cross-account access to the partner's AWS account by specifying the partner's AWS account ID as the principal. This allows the partner's IAM users or roles to access the S3 bucket directly using their own credentials, without needing to share access keys or create users in the company's account. The bucket policy must explicitly allow the necessary actions (e.g., s3:GetObject) and the partner must also have an IAM policy that permits the same actions.

Answer

Use S3 cross-region replication.

Answer

Create a pre-signed URL for the partner.

Answer

Provide the partner with an IAM user in the company's account.

Question 9

A company wants to design a cost-effective solution to store infrequently accessed log files for 7 years. The logs are generated daily and must be available for retrieval within 24 hours. Which Amazon S3 storage class should be used?

Accepted Answer

S3 Glacier Deep Archive. Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive is the most cost-effective storage class for infrequently accessed data that must be retained for 7 years, with retrieval times of up to 12 hours (within the 24-hour requirement). It offers the lowest storage cost among S3 classes, making it ideal for long-term archival of log files that are rarely accessed.

Answer

S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access

Answer

S3 Intelligent-Tiering

Answer

S3 Standard

Question 10

A company is designing a new microservices-based application on AWS. They want to ensure that services can discover each other dynamically and that traffic can be load balanced across multiple Availability Zones. Which AWS service should they use for service discovery?

Accepted Answer

AWS Cloud Map. AWS Cloud Map is a cloud resource discovery service that allows microservices to dynamically register their endpoints (IP addresses, ports) and discover each other via DNS or API calls. It integrates with Amazon Route 53 auto-naming and health checks, enabling load-balanced traffic across multiple Availability Zones by returning healthy, available endpoints. This makes it the correct choice for dynamic service discovery in a microservices architecture.

Answer

AWS Service Catalog

Answer

Amazon Route 53 private hosted zones

Answer

AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store