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

Question 1

A company has a CI/CD pipeline that builds and deploys a containerized application to Amazon ECS Fargate. The pipeline uses AWS CodeBuild to run tests and build Docker images. Recently, the pipeline has been failing intermittently with the error 'CannotPullContainerError: Error response from daemon: manifest for <image> not found'. The image is stored in Amazon ECR. The team suspects the issue is related to image tag inconsistency. The pipeline tags images with the commit hash. Which change will prevent this error?

Accepted Answer

Ensure the pipeline builds and pushes the image with a unique tag, such as the commit hash, and uses that tag in the ECS task definition.. Ensuring that the image tag is unique and not reused prevents stale image references. Using the commit hash ensures uniqueness.

Answer

Store the Docker image in Amazon S3 instead of ECR.

Answer

Use the 'latest' tag for all images.

Answer

Retry the failed pipeline step after a delay.

Question 2

A company runs a batch processing job on Amazon EC2 instances that are part of an Auto Scaling group. The job runs every night and takes approximately 2 hours. The instances are launched using a launch template with a Spot Instance request. Recently, the job has been failing because Spot Instances are being reclaimed before the job completes. The company wants a cost-effective solution that ensures the job completes reliably. The job can handle interruptions by checkpointing. Which solution should the company implement?

Accepted Answer

Use a mixed instances policy with a percentage of On-Demand Instances as a fallback.. Using Spot Instances with a termination notice and checkpointing allows the job to save progress and resume if interrupted. Mixed Instances policy can use On-Demand as a fallback.

Answer

Increase the instance size to complete the job faster.

Answer

Switch to On-Demand Instances only.

Answer

Use Reserved Instances for the batch job.

Question 3

A company runs a web application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Users report intermittent 503 errors. CloudWatch logs show the ALB's healthy host count occasionally drops to zero during traffic spikes. Which design change should a solutions architect implement to improve availability?

Accepted Answer

Increase the size of the Auto Scaling group and adjust scaling policies.. The correct answer is D because increasing the number of instances and adding an Auto Scaling group ensures capacity can handle spikes, preventing all hosts from becoming unhealthy. Option A is wrong because Reserved Instances don't help with scaling. Option B is wrong because instance refresh is for updates, not capacity. Option C is wrong because a larger ALB does not fix the root cause of insufficient capacity.

Answer

Enable EC2 instance refresh for the Auto Scaling group.

Answer

Purchase Reserved Instances for the existing EC2 fleet.

Answer

Replace the ALB with a larger Network Load Balancer.

Question 4

A media company uses AWS CloudFront to distribute video content. They notice that some users in Europe experience high latency. CloudFront metrics show low cache hit ratios for European edge locations. The origin is an S3 bucket in us-east-1. What is the MOST effective optimization?

Accepted Answer

Add a second origin in eu-west-1 and configure origin groups with failover.. Option C is correct because creating an additional CloudFront distribution with an origin in Europe or using a multi-region origin setup reduces latency for European users. Option A is wrong because S3 Transfer Acceleration improves uploads, not downloads. Option B is wrong because increasing TTL would reduce origin load but not latency for uncached objects. Option D is wrong because adding more cache behaviors doesn't help with geographic latency.

Answer

Increase the default TTL for objects in CloudFront.

Answer

Add additional cache behaviors for different file types.

Answer

Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on the bucket.

Question 5

A company uses AWS Lambda to process events from an SQS queue. The Lambda function has a reserved concurrency of 5. During peak hours, messages are being backed up in the queue. The function's duration is well within the 15-minute limit. What is the fastest way to increase throughput?

Accepted Answer

Increase the reserved concurrency to 20.. Option A is correct because increasing reserved concurrency allows more simultaneous invocations, processing more messages in parallel. Option B is wrong because Lambda functions don't have a 'thread count' setting. Option C is wrong because batch size is already maxed at 10 for SQS. Option D is wrong because adding more queues would require code changes and doesn't directly help.

Answer

Increase the function's maximum thread count.

Answer

Create additional SQS queues and distribute messages.

Answer

Increase the SQS batch size to 100.

Question 6

A financial services company runs a critical application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. They need to ensure that in the event of a single AZ failure, the application remains available with no data loss. The application uses EBS volumes for persistent storage. What should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Use an EBS multi-attach volume with a cluster-aware file system.. Option D is correct because using an EBS multi-attach enabled volume with a cluster file system allows instances in different AZs to share the same storage, providing high availability and no data loss. Option A is wrong because EBS snapshots are not real-time. Option B is wrong because EBS volumes cannot be attached to instances in different AZs. Option C is wrong because EFS is a different service and not EBS.

Answer

Take periodic EBS snapshots and restore in another AZ.

Answer

Use Amazon EFS instead of EBS volumes.

Answer

Use an EBS volume in one AZ and attach it to instances in another AZ.

Question 7

A company is migrating a monolithic application to a microservices architecture on AWS. They want to improve deployment frequency and reduce risk. Which TWO strategies should they adopt?

Accepted Answer

Implement blue/green deployments.. Correct answers are A and E. Option A reduces risk by limiting blast radius. Option E speeds up releases by automating testing and deployment. Option B is wrong because long-lived branches increase merge complexity. Option C is wrong because manual gates slow down frequency. Option D is wrong because rebuilding from scratch is risky and slow.

Answer

Deploy all microservices from a single codebase.

Answer

Require manual approval for each production deployment.

Answer

Use feature branches with manual merge approvals.

Question 8

A company runs a stateful web application on EC2 instances with EBS volumes. They want to improve resilience by distributing the workload across multiple Availability Zones. Which THREE steps should they take?

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon EFS for shared storage across AZs.. Correct answers are A, C, and D. Option A ensures data is available in multiple AZs. Option C distributes instances for high availability. Option D handles traffic distribution and health checks. Option B is wrong because EBS volumes cannot be attached cross-AZ. Option E is wrong because Read Replicas are for RDS, not EBS.

Answer

Attach the same EBS volume to instances in different AZs.

Answer

Configure EBS Read Replicas in another AZ.

Question 9

A company uses AWS CloudFormation to deploy infrastructure. They need to ensure that updates to a stack do not cause downtime for a critical database. Which TWO strategies should they use?

Accepted Answer

Use an UpdatePolicy attribute for rolling updates.. Correct answers are B and C. Option B prevents deletion of the database. Option C uses update policies to control how changes are applied. Option A is wrong because a new stack would require data migration. Option D is wrong because disabling rollback is risky. Option E is wrong because service roles don't prevent downtime.

Answer

Create a new stack and migrate data.

Answer

Disable rollback on stack update failures.

Answer

Use a service role for CloudFormation.

Question 10

A company runs a containerized application on Amazon ECS with Fargate. They want to improve the security of their container images without slowing down the CI/CD pipeline. Which THREE measures should they implement?

Accepted Answer

Use AWS CodePipeline with approval gates for security checks.. Correct answers are A, B, and C. Option A catches vulnerabilities before deployment. Option B provides centralized control and enforcement. Option C ensures only approved images are used. Option D is wrong because manual scanning slows down the pipeline. Option E is wrong because encryption alone doesn't address vulnerabilities.

Answer

Require manual vulnerability scanning before each deployment.

Answer

Encrypt all container images using AWS KMS.

Question 11

A company runs a customer-facing web application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application stores session data in an RDS MySQL database. Recently, they have been experiencing increased latency and occasional timeouts during peak hours. The operations team has observed that the RDS instance's CPU utilization is consistently above 80%, and the number of database connections is near the maximum allowed. The application code is not easily modifiable in the short term. The company needs a solution that reduces the load on the database with minimal changes to the application. What should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Implement an Amazon ElastiCache cluster and modify the application to cache frequent queries.. Option C is correct because implementing an in-memory cache like ElastiCache can offload frequent reads, reducing database load without code changes if the application uses caching libraries or can be configured to use a caching layer. Option A is wrong because read replicas would help with read scaling, but the issue is both CPU and connections; also, the application might not be read-heavy. Option B is wrong because switching to Aurora would require migration and may not address the connection limit. Option D is wrong because increasing instance size is a temporary fix and doesn't address the architectural issue.

Answer

Increase the RDS instance size to a larger instance type.

Answer

Create an RDS read replica and offload read traffic to it.

Answer

Migrate the database to Amazon Aurora with Multi-AZ.

Question 12

A company uses AWS CodePipeline to deploy a static website to an S3 bucket. The pipeline includes a source stage from GitHub and a deploy stage that syncs the S3 bucket. Recently, the deployment has been failing intermittently with the error 'Access Denied' when the pipeline tries to write to the S3 bucket. The bucket policy allows the pipeline's service role to perform s3:PutObject. The service role has the following IAM policy attached: { 'Effect': 'Allow', 'Action': 's3:PutObject', 'Resource': 'arn:aws:s3:::my-bucket/*' }. What is the MOST likely cause of the failure?

Accepted Answer

The bucket has a bucket policy that denies the pipeline's service role.. Option A is correct. The bucket policy might deny access even if the IAM role allows it, because bucket policies are evaluated in addition to IAM policies. Option B is wrong because the pipeline uses the service role, not Git credentials. Option C is wrong because there is no mention of encryption. Option D is wrong because the error is Access Denied, not a network issue.

Answer

The S3 bucket has default encryption enabled.

Answer

The pipeline is in a VPC without an S3 VPC endpoint.

Answer

The pipeline's source stage is not configured with Git credentials.

Question 13

A company runs a batch processing application on a scheduled EC2 instance that starts every night. The instance processes a large number of files from an S3 bucket and writes results to another S3 bucket. The job takes approximately 6 hours to complete. Recently, the job has been failing after 4 hours with an error indicating that the instance's EBS root volume is full. The instance type is t3.medium with a 20 GB gp2 root volume. The application writes temporary files to the root volume. The company wants to fix this with minimal changes to the application and infrastructure. What should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Increase the size of the EBS root volume to 100 GB.. Option B is correct because increasing the root volume size provides more space for temporary files without application changes. Option A is wrong because instance store is ephemeral and may not be available on t3 instances. Option C is wrong because mounting an EBS volume would require application changes to write to a different path. Option D is wrong because reducing file size may not be feasible and requires code changes.

Answer

Create an additional EBS volume and mount it to the instance.

Answer

Change the instance type to one with instance store volumes.

Answer

Modify the application to compress temporary files.

Question 14

A company runs a high-traffic web application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The application uses a Redis cluster for caching. Recently, they have noticed that the cache hit ratio has dropped significantly, causing increased load on the database. The operations team observed that the Redis cluster's CPU utilization is high and memory usage is near capacity. They need to improve the cache performance with minimal changes to the application code. What should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Upgrade the Redis cluster to a larger node type with more CPU and memory.. Option D is correct because using a larger node type provides more CPU and memory, improving performance without code changes. Option A is wrong because increasing TTL may reduce churn but does not address capacity. Option B is wrong because ElastiCache is already in use. Option C is wrong because enabling encryption adds overhead and does not solve the capacity issue.

Answer

Migrate from ElastiCache to Amazon MemoryDB for Redis.

Answer

Increase the TTL values for cached objects in the application.

Answer

Enable encryption in transit for the Redis cluster.

Question 15

A company uses AWS CloudFormation to deploy a stack that includes an Amazon RDS MySQL instance. The stack template defines the DBInstanceClass as db.t3.medium. After deployment, the database performance is insufficient for the workload. The company wants to change the instance class to db.r5.large without recreating the database. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Update the CloudFormation stack with the new instance class and apply the change.. Option B is correct because RDS supports modifying the DB instance class without recreating the database; the update will cause a brief downtime but preserves data. Option A is wrong because deleting the stack would destroy the database. Option C is wrong because creating a new stack would create a new database, not modify the existing one. Option D is wrong because RDS does not support blue/green deployments for instance class changes as a standard feature.

Answer

Create a new stack with the new instance class and migrate the data.

Answer

Use AWS Database Migration Service to perform a blue/green deployment.

Answer

Delete the stack and create a new one with the new instance class.