SAP-C02 Practice Test 6 — 10 Questions

Question 1

A company is running a critical application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. The application needs to process a large batch job that runs once per month and takes 2 hours. The company wants to optimize costs while ensuring the batch job has sufficient capacity. Which THREE steps should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Create a scheduled scaling policy that increases the desired capacity before the batch job starts.. Option A is correct because a scheduled scaling policy allows you to increase the desired capacity of the Auto Scaling group before the batch job starts, ensuring sufficient resources are available exactly when needed. This proactive approach avoids the latency of dynamic scaling and optimizes cost by not maintaining extra capacity outside the batch window.

Answer

Use On-Demand Instances only for the batch job to ensure availability.

Answer

Purchase Reserved Instances for the batch job capacity.

Question 2

A company is migrating a monolithic legacy application to a microservices architecture on AWS. The application currently uses a relational database with complex joins. The migration must minimize application changes. Which database strategy should be used for the new architecture?

Accepted Answer

Use a single Amazon RDS instance shared by all microservices.. Option B is correct because the requirement to minimize application changes means the microservices must continue to use the same relational database with complex joins. A single shared Amazon RDS instance preserves the existing SQL queries and join logic without requiring data decomposition or API-based data access patterns, which would necessitate significant application rewrites.

Answer

Use a separate Amazon RDS instance for each microservice.

Answer

Use Amazon Aurora with RDS Proxy in front of it.

Answer

Use Amazon DynamoDB as a shared database for all microservices.

Question 3

A company is designing a serverless event-driven architecture using AWS Lambda, Amazon SQS, and Amazon DynamoDB. The Lambda function processes messages from an SQS queue and writes to DynamoDB. The company expects unpredictable traffic spikes and must ensure that messages are not lost. Which configuration should the company use to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Use an SQS queue as a Lambda event source with reserved concurrency on the Lambda function. Option A is correct because using an SQS queue as a Lambda event source with reserved concurrency ensures that messages are not lost during traffic spikes. SQS acts as a durable buffer, and reserved concurrency prevents the Lambda function from being throttled, which would otherwise cause messages to remain in the queue or be sent to a dead-letter queue. This combination guarantees that every message is processed without loss, even under unpredictable load.

Answer

Enable DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) for the Lambda function

Answer

Provisioned Concurrency on the Lambda function

Answer

Increase the SQS queue visibility timeout and retention period

Question 4

A solutions architect is designing a new serverless application using AWS Lambda to process orders from an API Gateway endpoint and store them in DynamoDB. The architect creates the IAM role shown in the exhibit. When testing, the Lambda function fails to write to DynamoDB with an AccessDeniedException. What is the MOST likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The IAM role lacks a trust policy that allows Lambda to assume it.. The IAM role shown in the exhibit likely includes a permissions policy that grants DynamoDB write access, but it is missing a trust policy that allows the Lambda service (lambda.amazonaws.com) to assume the role. Without this trust relationship, Lambda cannot obtain temporary credentials to execute the function, resulting in an AccessDeniedException when attempting to write to DynamoDB.

Answer

The Lambda function does not have permission to create log groups.

Answer

The Lambda function is not in the same VPC as DynamoDB.

Answer

The DynamoDB table 'Orders' does not exist.

Question 5

A company is using AWS CloudFormation to deploy infrastructure. The security team requires that all Amazon S3 buckets created by CloudFormation must be encrypted at rest. What should a solutions architect do to enforce this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Add an S3 bucket policy that denies s3:PutObject without the x-amz-server-side-encryption header.. Option B is correct because an S3 bucket policy that denies s3:PutObject unless the request includes the x-amz-server-side-encryption header enforces encryption at rest for all objects uploaded to the bucket. This policy condition works regardless of how the bucket is created, including via CloudFormation, and ensures that any PutObject operation without the required encryption header is rejected, meeting the security team's requirement.

Answer

Enable default encryption on each bucket using SSE-S3.

Answer

Require that all buckets use AWS KMS managed keys for encryption.

Answer

Use a CloudFormation stack policy to prevent modification of bucket encryption settings.

Question 6

A company runs a containerized application on Amazon ECS with Fargate. The application needs to securely access an Amazon S3 bucket. The company wants to follow the principle of least privilege. What should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Define an IAM task role with S3 access policies and reference it in the ECS task definition.. Option A is correct because an IAM task role is the recommended mechanism for granting least-privilege permissions to ECS tasks using the Fargate launch type. The task role is defined in the ECS task definition and assumed by the container runtime, allowing the application to securely access the S3 bucket without embedding credentials. This approach follows AWS best practices by scoping permissions to the specific task rather than the underlying infrastructure.

Answer

Attach an IAM role to the underlying EC2 instance.

Answer

Assign an IAM role to the ECS service using the ECS service-linked role.

Answer

Store AWS credentials in the container environment variables.

Question 7

A company has an AWS Lambda function that processes messages from an Amazon SQS queue. The function is invoked with a batch size of 10. Some messages are failing repeatedly, causing the function to retry them up to the maximum retry count and then they are sent to a dead-letter queue (DLQ). The company wants to improve the resilience of the application by handling partial batch failures more efficiently. What should a solutions architect do?

Accepted Answer

Implement reportBatchItemFailures in the Lambda function and enable partial batch response for the SQS event source mapping.. Option B is correct because implementing reportBatchItemFailures in the Lambda function and enabling partial batch response for the SQS event source mapping allows the function to signal which specific messages within a batch failed. This prevents the entire batch from being retried or sent to the DLQ, and only the failed messages are retried individually, improving resilience and efficiency.

Answer

Move the messages to a DLQ immediately after the first failure.

Answer

Decrease the batch size to 1 so that each invocation processes a single message.

Answer

Increase the batch size to 100 to process more messages per invocation.

Question 8

A company uses AWS CloudFormation to deploy infrastructure. The operations team wants to automatically roll back a stack update if it fails, and receive a notification. What should be configured to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Enable rollback on failure in the CloudFormation stack and configure an SNS notification topic.. Option C is correct because CloudFormation natively supports automatic rollback on stack update failure via the 'Rollback on failure' setting. By configuring an SNS notification topic on the stack, the operations team receives alerts when a rollback occurs, meeting both requirements without additional custom logic.

Answer

Use AWS CloudTrail to monitor the UpdateStack API call and trigger a rollback via a Lambda function.

Answer

Use AWS Config rules to detect stack failure and revert changes.

Answer

Create a custom resource in the CloudFormation template that performs rollback.

Question 9

A company is running a web application on AWS using an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in front of an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances. The application experiences periodic traffic spikes that cause increased latency. The company wants to implement a solution to automatically adjust capacity in anticipation of traffic changes. What should a solutions architect do?

Accepted Answer

Configure a predictive scaling policy using historical traffic patterns.. Predictive scaling uses historical traffic patterns to forecast future demand and proactively adjust capacity before traffic spikes occur, which directly addresses the requirement to anticipate changes. This approach reduces latency by ensuring sufficient resources are available ahead of time, unlike reactive policies that only respond after utilization increases.

Answer

Configure a simple scaling policy based on CPU utilization.

Answer

Configure a scheduled scaling policy to add instances during known peak hours.

Answer

Configure a target tracking scaling policy based on average CPU utilization.

Question 10

A company is running a containerized microservices application on Amazon ECS with Fargate launch type. The application experiences increased latency during peak hours. Upon investigation, the CPU utilization of the tasks reaches 90%. The ECS service is configured with a target tracking scaling policy based on average CPU at 70%. However, scaling is not keeping up with demand. What should a solutions architect do to improve the responsiveness of the scaling?

Accepted Answer

Add a step scaling policy that adds 4 tasks when CPU exceeds 80% for 1 minute.. Option C is correct because adding a step scaling policy provides a more aggressive and immediate scaling response when CPU exceeds 80% for 1 minute, which complements the existing target tracking policy. Target tracking scaling policies are reactive and may not scale quickly enough during rapid demand spikes, whereas step scaling can add a fixed number of tasks instantly when a breach occurs, reducing latency during peak hours.

Answer

Increase the task-level CPU limit to 2048 units.

Answer

Decrease the target tracking value to 50% average CPU.

Answer

Decrease the scale-in cooldown period to 60 seconds.