SAP-C02 Practice Test 8 — 10 Questions

Question 1

A company is designing a new data lake on AWS. The data lake will store petabytes of data from various sources, including IoT devices, application logs, and streaming data. The data must be stored cost-effectively, and access patterns vary from frequently accessed recent data to rarely accessed historical data. The company also needs to run SQL queries on the data. Which solution should the architect recommend?

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

Accepted Answer

Store data in S3 with lifecycle policies to transition between storage classes, and use Amazon Athena for queries. Amazon S3 lifecycle policies allow automatic transition of objects between storage classes (e.g., S3 Standard to S3 Standard-IA to S3 Glacier Deep Archive) based on age, optimizing cost for varying access patterns. Amazon Athena enables serverless SQL querying directly on data stored in S3, making it ideal for a petabyte-scale data lake without managing infrastructure.

Answer

Store data in S3 with lifecycle policies to transition to Glacier, and use S3 Select for queries

Answer

Store data in Amazon EMR on EC2 and query with Hive

Answer

Store data in Amazon Redshift and query with Redshift Spectrum

Question 2

A company is migrating from a monolithic application to microservices on AWS. They need to reduce the blast radius of failures. Which architecture pattern should they implement?

Accepted Answer

Use a cell-based architecture where each microservice runs in isolated cells with independent data stores.. A cell-based architecture isolates each microservice (or group) into independent cells with their own data stores, so a failure in one cell cannot cascade to others — this directly reduces blast radius. Independent data stores prevent a shared database from becoming a single point of failure and coupling failure domains. This pattern is the AWS-recommended approach for fault isolation in microservices.

Answer

Implement Auto Scaling groups for each microservice without separating data stores.

Answer

Route all traffic through a single Application Load Balancer to simplify management.

Answer

Deploy all microservices in a single Availability Zone with a shared database.

Question 3

A company wants to migrate a legacy monolithic application to AWS with minimal changes. The application currently runs on a single on-premises server with a Microsoft SQL Server database. The company wants to use AWS managed services to reduce operational overhead. Which combination of services should the company use to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) to Amazon EC2, and AWS DMS to Amazon RDS for SQL Server. AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) enables lift-and-shift migration of the on-premises server to Amazon EC2 with minimal changes, while AWS DMS can migrate the Microsoft SQL Server database to Amazon RDS for SQL Server, a fully managed service that reduces operational overhead. This combination meets the requirement of minimal application changes and leverages AWS managed services for the database.

Answer

AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) to Amazon EC2, and AWS DMS to Amazon DynamoDB

Answer

AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) to Amazon EC2, and AWS DMS to Amazon RDS for SQL Server

Answer

AWS CloudFormation to provision EC2 instances, and AWS DMS to Amazon RDS for SQL Server

Question 4

A company is using an AWS Lambda function to process records from an Amazon Kinesis stream. The function stores results in an Amazon DynamoDB table. The team notices that the Lambda function sometimes fails due to throttling from DynamoDB. Which TWO actions should the team take to improve the continuous processing of records? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Switch the DynamoDB table to on-demand capacity mode.. Switching the DynamoDB table to on-demand capacity mode eliminates the need to provision read/write capacity, allowing the table to automatically scale to handle any throttling caused by sudden spikes in Lambda writes. This directly addresses the throttling issue without requiring manual capacity management.

Answer

Increase the number of shards in the Kinesis stream to reduce data per Lambda invocation.

Answer

Configure reserved concurrency for the Lambda function to limit its maximum concurrency.

Answer

Increase the concurrency limit for the Lambda function to allow more parallel executions.

Question 5

Which THREE design patterns can help a microservices application achieve loose coupling and independent deployability? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Circuit breaker pattern to handle service failures. The circuit breaker pattern (B) prevents cascading failures by monitoring for failures and opening the circuit to stop calls to an unhealthy service, allowing it time to recover. This supports loose coupling because the caller does not need to know the internal state of the downstream service, and it enables independent deployability by isolating failures during deployment or scaling events.

Answer

Shared database schema across services

Answer

Synchronous RESTful HTTP calls between services

Question 6

A company is designing a multi-region active-active application that uses Amazon DynamoDB global tables. The application must be able to handle write conflicts that may occur when the same item is updated in two different regions at the same time. The company needs to ensure that the application uses the most recently written data. What should the architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Use the default last writer wins conflict resolution. Amazon DynamoDB global tables use a last writer wins (LWW) conflict resolution mechanism based on the timestamp of the update. When concurrent updates to the same item occur in different regions, DynamoDB automatically compares the update timestamps and retains the most recently written data. This satisfies the requirement to use the most recently written data without requiring custom reconciliation logic.

Answer

Use optimistic locking with a version number

Answer

Use DynamoDB Streams to capture changes and reconcile conflicts

Answer

Use conditional writes to prevent overwrites

Question 7

A company is running a stateful web application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. Users report that their sessions are lost when instances are terminated during scale-in. What should a solutions architect do to preserve session state?

Accepted Answer

Store session state in Amazon ElastiCache.. ElastiCache provides a centralized, fast session store that persists across instance terminations, ensuring session state is retained even when instances are scaled in. Option A is wrong because using lifecycle hooks to save session data to Amazon S3 is unreliable due to the high latency and the risk that the termination process may not complete the save in time. Option B is wrong because sticky sessions (session affinity) on the Application Load Balancer can cause uneven load distribution and still result in session loss if all instances in a target group are replaced or if the specific instance with the session is terminated. Option D is wrong because increasing the Auto Scaling group's cooldown period only delays the next scaling activity but does not preserve session state when instances are eventually terminated.

Answer

Use lifecycle hooks to save session data to Amazon S3 before instance termination.

Answer

Enable sticky sessions (session affinity) on the Application Load Balancer.

Answer

Increase the Auto Scaling group's cooldown period to prevent rapid scaling.

Question 8

A company is migrating a monolithic application to AWS. The application consists of a web server, an application server, and a MySQL database. The web server and application server run on the same EC2 instance. The company wants to minimize changes during migration. Which migration strategy should the architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Rehost using AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN). Rehosting using AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) is the correct strategy because it minimizes changes by lifting and shifting the existing servers to EC2. The application remains monolithic, and the database can stay on the same instance or be moved as-is. This aligns with the requirement to minimize changes during migration.

Answer

Refactor the application into microservices on Amazon ECS

Answer

Replatform by migrating the database to Amazon RDS

Answer

Retire the application and replace it with a SaaS solution

Question 9

A solutions architect is reviewing the above IAM policy attached to an S3 bucket. A user from IP address 10.0.1.5 makes a request over HTTP (not HTTPS). Will the user be able to download an object?

Accepted Answer

No, because the request is not using HTTPS.. The IAM policy includes a condition that requires requests to use HTTPS (aws:SecureTransport = true). Since the user's request is over HTTP, the condition fails, and the Allow statement does not apply. Therefore, the request is denied by default, and the user cannot download the object.

Answer

No, because the IP address is not in the allowed range.

Answer

Yes, because the IP address is allowed.

Answer

Yes, because the Allow statement is evaluated first.

Question 10

A company is migrating a critical application to AWS. The application requires a relational database with high availability and automated failover. The company wants to use a fully managed database service. Which AWS service should the architect choose?

Accepted Answer

Amazon RDS Multi-AZ. Amazon RDS Multi-AZ provides a fully managed relational database with synchronous replication to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone and automatic failover, meeting the high availability and automated failover requirements. It is the correct choice for a relational workload needing managed HA.

Answer

Amazon ElastiCache

Answer

Amazon DynamoDB

Answer

Amazon RDS Single-AZ