SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Test 14 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company runs a containerized application on Amazon ECS with Fargate. The application uses an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to distribute traffic. The company has configured a target tracking scaling policy based on average memory utilization. During a traffic spike, the ECS service scales out, but the new tasks are immediately deregistered and replaced. The CloudWatch logs show that the new tasks are failing the ALB health check. The health check is configured to ping the '/health' endpoint on the container. The solutions architect verifies that the application container correctly responds to the '/health' endpoint with a 200 status code. What is the MOST likely cause of the health check failures?

Accepted Answer

The security group attached to the ECS tasks does not allow inbound traffic from the ALB on the health check port.. Option C is correct. When using Fargate, each task gets an ENI. If the security group for the tasks does not allow inbound traffic from the ALB on the health check port, the health check will fail. The architect confirmed the application responds correctly, so the issue is likely network connectivity. Option A is wrong because the health check path is correct. Option B is wrong because target group deregistration delay does not cause health check failures. Option D is wrong because the ALB is already configured correctly; the issue is at the task level.

Answer

The ALB is not configured with a proper listener rule to forward traffic to the target group.

Answer

The deregistration delay (connection draining) is set too high, causing the ALB to think the tasks are unhealthy.

Answer

The health check path is incorrect; it should be '/index.html' instead of '/health'.

Question 2

A financial services company runs a critical application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. The application uses an Amazon RDS for MySQL database with Multi-AZ deployment. The company has a recovery time objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a recovery point objective (RPO) of 1 hour for the database. During a recent disaster recovery drill, the solutions architect simulated an Availability Zone failure by terminating all EC2 instances and the primary RDS instance in one AZ. The Auto Scaling group launched new instances in the other AZ, and the RDS Multi-AZ failover completed in about 2 minutes. However, the application remained unavailable for 30 minutes because the new EC2 instances could not connect to the RDS secondary instance. The security groups are configured correctly. The RDS instance is not publicly accessible. What is the MOST likely cause of the connectivity issue?

Accepted Answer

The application is using a hardcoded IP address or an endpoint that points to the old primary RDS instance instead of the RDS DNS name.. Option D is correct. The RDS Multi-AZ failover promotes the standby to primary, but the DNS record may take time to propagate. However, the more common issue is that the EC2 instances' security group or network ACL may be referencing the old primary's IP or the security group may not allow traffic to the new primary's IP. But given that security groups are correct, the likely issue is that the EC2 instances are using an endpoint that points to the old primary's DNS name or IP, which becomes invalid after failover. The RDS DNS name should be used (CNAME) that automatically points to the new primary. If the application uses a hardcoded IP or an endpoint that is not updated, connectivity fails. Option A is wrong because Multi-AZ failover typically completes within 1-2 minutes. Option B is wrong because the RDS endpoint DNS record updates quickly (within seconds). Option C is wrong because security groups are correctly configured.

Answer

The security group for the EC2 instances does not allow outbound traffic to the RDS instance.

Answer

The RDS Multi-AZ failover took longer than expected, exceeding the RTO.

Answer

The RDS endpoint DNS record did not update to point to the new primary.

Question 3

A company runs a web application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Users report intermittent 503 errors. The Auto Scaling group has a minimum of 2 and maximum of 10 instances. CloudWatch metrics show that CPU utilization rarely exceeds 30%. What is the MOST likely cause of the 503 errors?

Accepted Answer

The ALB connection draining is enabled with a very short timeout, causing in-flight connections to be dropped.. The 503 errors are likely due to the ALB connection draining setting. If connection draining is enabled and the drain timeout is too short, in-flight requests may be terminated, causing 503 errors. Low CPU utilization suggests the instances are not overloaded.

Answer

The EC2 instances are running out of memory.

Answer

The Auto Scaling group launch configuration uses an AMI that is not compatible with the instance type.

Answer

The ALB health check is misconfigured, causing healthy instances to be marked unhealthy.

Question 4

A company is migrating a monolithic application to microservices on Amazon ECS. The application uses a legacy database that does not support distributed transactions. The team wants to ensure data consistency across services. Which solution is BEST for achieving eventual consistency with minimal code changes?

Accepted Answer

Implement the Saga pattern using AWS Step Functions.. Implementing the Saga pattern with AWS Step Functions allows orchestrating distributed transactions across services, managing rollbacks and compensating actions. This is the best approach for eventual consistency with minimal code changes.

Answer

Use Amazon DynamoDB transactions across all services.

Answer

Modify the legacy database to support two-phase commit.

Answer

Use Amazon SQS to queue all database writes and process them sequentially.

Question 5

A company is using Amazon RDS for MySQL and wants to minimize downtime during a major version upgrade. Which approach is the MOST effective?

Accepted Answer

Create a read replica with the new version, promote it to primary, and update the application endpoint.. Creating a read replica, upgrading it, and then promoting it to primary minimizes downtime because the promotion is a quick operation.

Answer

Take a snapshot, restore as a new instance with the new version, and update the application endpoint.

Answer

Launch a new RDS instance with the new version, use DMS to migrate data, and switch the application endpoint.

Answer

Use the AWS RDS modify-db-instance command with the --allow-major-version-upgrade option. This typically causes a few minutes of downtime but is the simplest.

Question 6

A company uses AWS CloudFormation to deploy infrastructure. The operations team notices that stack updates frequently fail because of updates to resources that are not supported for updates. What is the BEST way to handle this?

Accepted Answer

Use a change set to review the proposed changes before executing the update.. The best practice is to use a change set to preview changes and identify unsupported updates before executing the update.

Answer

Use AWS Config rules to prevent updates.

Answer

Delete the stack and create a new one for each update.

Answer

Use AWS Service Catalog to enforce version control.

Question 7

A company is using Amazon S3 to store sensitive documents. The security team requires that all objects be encrypted at rest using a customer-managed key (CMK) stored in AWS KMS. Additionally, the CMK must be rotated automatically every year. How should the company configure this?

Accepted Answer

Use S3 default encryption with SSE-KMS and enable automatic key rotation on the CMK.. Enable S3 default encryption with SSE-KMS and configure automatic key rotation on the CMK. This meets both requirements.

Answer

Use S3 default encryption with SSE-KMS and create a new CMK every year.

Answer

Use S3 bucket policies to enforce encryption and use KMS manual key rotation.

Answer

Use S3 default encryption with SSE-S3 and enable KMS automatic key rotation.

Question 8

A company runs a critical application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The application needs to maintain a fixed number of instances and should automatically replace any unhealthy instance. Which scaling policy should be used?

Accepted Answer

Manual scaling with health check replacement. A manual scaling policy set to maintain a fixed number of instances combined with health checks ensures that unhealthy instances are replaced.

Answer

Scheduled scaling policy

Answer

Simple scaling policy

Answer

Target tracking scaling policy

Question 9

A company uses Amazon DynamoDB as a data store for a mobile application. The application experiences throttling errors during peak hours. The table has a provisioned read capacity of 5000 RCUs and write capacity of 2000 WCUs. The throttling is on writes. What is the MOST cost-effective solution?

Accepted Answer

Enable auto scaling for DynamoDB write capacity.. DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a read cache, not for writes. The most cost-effective solution is to use DynamoDB auto scaling for writes to handle peak loads without over-provisioning.

Answer

Enable DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) to offload writes.

Answer

Switch to on-demand capacity mode.

Answer

Increase write capacity to 4000 WCUs.

Question 10

A company is designing a disaster recovery strategy for a multi-tier application hosted on AWS. The application uses Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ deployment. The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is 15 minutes and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is 1 hour. Which solution meets these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Accepted Answer

Configure a Cross-Region Read Replica of the RDS instance and promote it during disaster.. Using Cross-Region Read Replicas for RDS MySQL allows automatic replication with an RPO of seconds and failover in minutes, meeting the requirements with minimal overhead.

Answer

Use AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) to continuously replicate data to a standby RDS instance in another region.

Answer

Take automated snapshots every hour and copy them to another region. Restore from snapshot during disaster.

Answer

Use RDS Multi-AZ in a different region.

Question 11

A company wants to monitor CPU utilization of their EC2 instances and receive an alert when utilization exceeds 80% for 10 minutes. Which AWS service should be used?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Alarms. CloudWatch Alarms can monitor metrics and trigger actions when a threshold is breached.

Answer

Amazon Inspector

Answer

AWS Config

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Question 12

A company is using Amazon CloudFront to distribute content globally. They want to optimize cost and performance. Which TWO actions are recommended?

Accepted Answer

Enable Regional Edge Caches to reduce load on the origin.. Using Regional Edge Caches reduces origin load and latency. Price Class selection reduces cost by limiting edge locations.

Answer

Disable compression to reduce CPU usage on the origin.

Answer

Use a single origin server to simplify configuration.

Answer

Use multiple CloudFront distributions for the same content.

Question 13

A company is designing a serverless event-driven application using AWS Lambda. The application processes messages from an Amazon SQS queue. The team needs to ensure that messages are processed in order and exactly once. Which THREE steps should be taken?

Accepted Answer

Configure the Lambda event source mapping to use the FIFO queue.. To achieve ordering and exactly-once processing, use a FIFO queue with a deduplication ID and configure a reserved concurrency of 1 to prevent parallel processing.

Answer

Enable Lambda function's batch window to 0.

Answer

Use a standard SQS queue.

Question 14

A company wants to implement a centralized logging solution for multiple AWS accounts. Which TWO services should be used together?

Accepted Answer

Amazon S3. Amazon S3 serves as a central log repository, and Amazon Athena allows querying logs directly in S3.

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Answer

Amazon RDS

Answer

AWS Config

Question 15

A company hosts a web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application uses an Amazon Aurora MySQL database. Recently, the application has become slow during peak hours. The operations team notices that the database CPU utilization is high, but the number of connections is within limits. The application is read-heavy. The team wants to improve performance with minimal changes to the application code. The database is currently a single Aurora instance. Which solution should the team implement?

Accepted Answer

Add an Aurora Replica and configure the application to use the reader endpoint for read-only queries.. Adding an Aurora Replica distributes read traffic, reducing load on the primary instance. The application must be configured to use the reader endpoint for read queries.

Answer

Use Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) to cache database queries.

Answer

Add an Amazon ElastiCache Redis cluster in front of the database.

Answer

Increase the instance size of the Aurora primary instance.