SAP-C02 Practice Test 50 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company is designing a new web application that will serve static content (HTML, CSS, JS, images) to users globally. The application must have low latency and high availability. Content changes infrequently, but when updated, the changes must be reflected immediately. Which solution should the architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Store content in an S3 bucket and use Amazon CloudFront with S3 as origin. Option B is correct because CloudFront can serve static content from an S3 bucket with low latency, and invalidations can be used to immediately update content. Option A is wrong because S3 alone does not provide global low latency. Option C is wrong because CloudFront with an ALB adds unnecessary complexity and cost for static content. Option D is wrong because ElastiCache is not designed for serving static files.

Answer

Store content on an EC2 instance behind an Application Load Balancer and use CloudFront

Answer

Store content in Amazon ElastiCache for Redis and use CloudFront

Answer

Store content in an S3 bucket and use S3 Transfer Acceleration

Question 2

A company is designing a multi-tier web application on AWS. The web tier must automatically scale based on CPU utilization, and the application tier must process messages from an SQS queue. The application tier instances are frequently terminated and replaced due to scaling events. Where should the application logs be stored to ensure they are retained regardless of instance lifecycle?

Accepted Answer

Configure the CloudWatch Logs agent on each instance to stream logs to CloudWatch Logs.. Option C is correct because CloudWatch Logs agent can stream logs to CloudWatch Logs, which persists logs independently of instance lifecycle. Option A is wrong because instance store data is ephemeral. Option B is wrong because S3 mounted via NFS is complex and not designed for real-time log streaming. Option D is wrong because EBS snapshots are not for continuous log collection.

Answer

Store logs on an EBS volume and take regular snapshots.

Answer

Write logs to the instance store volume of each EC2 instance.

Answer

Write logs to an Amazon S3 bucket mounted on each instance using NFS.

Question 3

A company is designing a new microservices architecture using Amazon ECS with the Fargate launch type. The services need to communicate securely within a VPC. The company requires that inter-service communication is encrypted and that the services can discover each other using DNS names. Which THREE steps should the company take to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Enable AWS Cloud Map for service discovery.. Option A is correct because Service Discovery enables DNS-based service discovery. Option B is correct because ECS tasks can use service discovery names via DNS. Option D is correct because VPC endpoints for ECR and other services are needed for Fargate to pull images. Option C is wrong because VPC Peering is not needed; services are in the same VPC. Option E is wrong because an Application Load Balancer is not required for inter-service communication; service discovery and direct communication suffice.

Answer

Deploy an Application Load Balancer in front of each service for inter-service communication.

Answer

Create a VPC peering connection between the services' subnets.

Question 4

A company is designing a new application that requires a relational database. The application has variable traffic, with high spikes during business hours and low traffic at night. The company wants to minimize costs while ensuring the database can handle the spikes. Which solution should the architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon RDS with Multi-AZ and read replicas, or Amazon Aurora Serverless. Option B is correct because RDS with Multi-AZ and read replicas provides high availability and read scaling, while Aurora Serverless automatically scales compute capacity. Option A is wrong because a single RDS instance is not highly available. Option C is wrong because DynamoDB is NoSQL, not relational. Option D is wrong because RDS with a Single-AZ instance is not highly available and does not handle spikes.

Answer

Use Amazon RDS with a Single-AZ instance and automatic scaling

Answer

Use Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity

Answer

Use Amazon RDS with a Single-AZ instance and a large instance size

Question 5

A company is designing a serverless data processing pipeline. An AWS Lambda function processes records from an Amazon Kinesis Data Stream. The function runs for an average of 30 seconds per record, and the stream has 10 shards. The company expects a sustained load of 5,000 records per second. What is the primary consideration to ensure the Lambda function can scale to handle the load?

Accepted Answer

Ensure that the Lambda function processes each batch within the Kinesis stream's iterator age.. Option B is correct because each Lambda function instance processes one shard at a time, so the number of concurrent executions equals the number of shards (10). The function must be able to process records within the Kinesis iterator age to avoid throttling. Option A is wrong because Lambda can handle the concurrency; the limit is per shard. Option C is wrong because reserved concurrency could limit scaling. Option D is wrong because Lambda scales within the account limits, but the shard count is the bottleneck.

Answer

Request a service quota increase for Lambda concurrent executions.

Answer

Set a reserved concurrency of 500 for the Lambda function.

Answer

Increase the Lambda function timeout to more than 30 seconds.

Question 6

A company is designing a serverless data processing pipeline that uses AWS Lambda to process messages from Amazon SQS. Each message requires 5 minutes of processing time. The company expects a steady state of 1,000 messages per second. What is the MOST scalable and cost-effective design?

Accepted Answer

Deploy an Amazon ECS service with Fargate that polls the SQS queue. Use an SQS queue with long polling and auto scaling based on queue depth.. Option B is correct because Lambda has a 15-minute timeout and can scale concurrency, but to handle 1,000 msg/s with 5 min processing, you need enough concurrency. However, Lambda concurrency per account has limits; the better approach is to use a Lambda function that reads from SQS in batches and processes each message, but the function timeout must be at least 5 min per invocation. Option A is wrong because Lambda can't run for 5 minutes (timeout is 15 min, so it's possible, but the question implies 5 min per message, so batch size of 1 is fine). Actually, Lambda max execution is 15 min, so 5 min is fine. The main issue is that Lambda concurrency default is 1,000, and with 1,000 msg/s, each message takes 5 min, you'd need 300,000 concurrent executions, which exceeds default limits. So the best design is to use an Amazon ECS service with auto scaling. Option B is correct.

Answer

Use an SQS queue and a Lambda function that processes messages in batches. Set the Lambda function timeout to 15 minutes and use reserved concurrency.

Answer

Use an Amazon MQ broker with ActiveMQ and configure a Lambda function to consume messages from a queue.

Answer

Configure an SQS queue with a Lambda trigger. Set the Lambda function timeout to 5 minutes and the batch size to 1.

Question 7

A company is designing a new application that will be deployed on EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones. The application must be highly available and must automatically recover from instance failures. Which solution should the architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Use an Auto Scaling group with a minimum of two instances across two Availability Zones. Option C is correct because an Auto Scaling group with a minimum of two instances across multiple AZs ensures high availability and automatic recovery. Option A is wrong because a single instance with a standby instance is not automatic. Option B is wrong because Elastic Beanstalk with a single instance is not highly available. Option D is wrong because CloudFormation does not manage recovery.

Answer

Use a single EC2 instance in one AZ and a standby instance in another AZ

Answer

Use AWS Elastic Beanstalk with a single instance environment

Answer

Use AWS CloudFormation to launch a single instance in each AZ

Question 8

A company is designing a global application that requires a highly available and low-latency API. The API will be consumed by clients across the world. The backend consists of an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in front of an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances in a single AWS Region. The company wants to improve performance for global users. Which solution meets these requirements with minimal operational overhead?

Accepted Answer

Create an AWS Global Accelerator accelerator with the ALB as an endpoint.. Option D is correct because AWS Global Accelerator uses the AWS global network to route traffic to the optimal endpoint, providing low latency and high availability. Option A is wrong because Lambda@Edge is for content transformation, not API proxying. Option B is wrong because CloudFront can cache API responses but is not ideal for dynamic APIs that require low latency; Global Accelerator is better for non-cacheable traffic. Option C is wrong because active-passive setup with Route 53 failover does not optimize latency for global users.

Answer

Deploy the application in multiple Regions and use Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing with active-passive failover.

Answer

Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution with Lambda@Edge to proxy requests to the ALB.

Answer

Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the ALB as the origin.

Question 9

A company is designing a highly available application on AWS that uses an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in front of an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances. The application requires that the client's IP address be preserved in the application logs. The company also needs to perform SSL termination at the load balancer. How should the company configure the ALB to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Use HTTPS listener on port 443, provide the SSL certificate, and forward to instances on port 80. Enable X-Forwarded-For header.. Option C is correct because ALB with SSL termination and X-Forwarded-For header preserves the client IP. Option A terminates SSL on instances, which adds overhead. Option B is for Network Load Balancer, which does not support HTTP features. Option D is wrong because ALB can be internet-facing.

Answer

Use TCP listener on port 443 and forward to instances on port 80. Enable proxy protocol v2.

Answer

Use TCP listener on port 443 and forward to instances on port 443. Install SSL certificate on instances.

Answer

Use HTTPS listener on port 443, provide the SSL certificate, and forward to instances on port 443. Disable proxy protocol.

Question 10

A company wants to decouple a microservices architecture where one service (producer) sends events to another service (consumer). The producer can generate bursts of events, and the consumer processes them in batches. The solution must be serverless and handle potential consumer failures without losing events. Which AWS service should be used as the message broker?

Accepted Answer

Amazon SQS. Option A is correct because Amazon SQS is a serverless message queue that can buffer bursts and retain messages until the consumer processes them, with dead-letter queues for failures. Option B is wrong because Amazon SNS pushes messages to subscribers and does not support polling or batch processing. Option C is wrong because Kinesis Data Streams is for real-time streaming, not simple decoupling with batch processing. Option D is wrong because EventBridge is for event routing, not a message queue.

Answer

Amazon SNS

Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

Answer

Amazon EventBridge

Question 11

A company is designing a new application that will run on Amazon EC2 instances. The application writes logs to local disk, and the logs must be aggregated centrally for analysis. The company wants a solution that requires minimal configuration and can handle high log volume. Which TWO AWS services should the company use?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Option A is correct because CloudWatch Logs can collect logs from EC2 instances via the CloudWatch agent. Option C is correct because CloudWatch Logs Insights allows querying and analyzing logs. Option B is wrong because S3 is for log storage, not analysis. Option D is wrong because Kinesis Data Firehose is for streaming data, not for EC2 log collection. Option E is wrong because Lambda is not used for log analysis.

Answer

Amazon S3

Answer

AWS Lambda

Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

Question 12

A company is designing a data lake on Amazon S3. Data is ingested from multiple sources and stored as Parquet files partitioned by date. The company needs to ensure that only authorized users can access the data, and that the data is encrypted at rest. Which TWO actions should the company take to meet these requirements? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Enable default encryption with SSE-KMS on the S3 bucket.. Options B and D are correct. B: S3 bucket policy with IAM conditions restricts access. D: SSE-KMS provides encryption with key management. Option A is too broad. Option C does not control access. Option E is not a primary encryption method for at-rest.

Answer

Use client-side encryption before uploading to S3.

Answer

Enable S3 server access logging.

Answer

Use a bucket ACL to grant access to the data lake.

Question 13

A company is designing a new solution to process a continuous stream of events from multiple sources. The events must be processed in real-time with exactly-once processing semantics. The solution should be able to handle replayed events without duplication. Which AWS service should be used for the event processing?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink. Option A is correct because Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink provides exactly-once processing semantics. Option B is wrong because Lambda functions are at-least-once. Option C is wrong because Kinesis Data Firehose is for loading data, not processing. Option D is wrong because SQS is at-least-once.

Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

Answer

AWS Lambda with Kinesis trigger

Answer

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) with Lambda

Question 14

A company is migrating a monolithic application to a microservices architecture on AWS. They want to decouple the services and ensure that messages between services are processed asynchronously and durably. Which AWS service should they use for this purpose?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). Option A is correct because Amazon SQS provides a fully managed message queue for asynchronous communication between microservices. Option B is incorrect because Amazon SNS is a pub/sub service, not a queue. Option C is incorrect because Amazon Kinesis is for real-time streaming. Option D is incorrect because AWS Step Functions is for orchestrating workflows.

Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

Answer

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

Answer

AWS Step Functions

Question 15

A company is building a serverless application using AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon DynamoDB. They need to ensure that the application can handle sudden spikes in traffic without throttling. Which design should they implement?

Accepted Answer

Enable DynamoDB auto scaling and configure Lambda function reserved concurrency.. Option A is correct because enabling DynamoDB auto scaling and Lambda concurrency limits allows handling spikes while preventing throttling. Option B (provisioned concurrency) helps with cold starts but not throttling. Option C (reserved concurrency) prevents other functions from using concurrency but doesn't handle spikes. Option D (DAX) is a caching layer, not for scaling.

Answer

Use Lambda provisioned concurrency and an API Gateway usage plan.

Answer

Configure Lambda function reserved concurrency and an API Gateway cache.

Answer

Use DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) and Lambda function reserved concurrency.