SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Test 18 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company runs a legacy Java application on a single Amazon EC2 instance with a 500 GB gp2 EBS volume. The application performs many small random writes and experiences latency spikes during peak hours. The operations team wants to improve storage performance without changing the instance type. Which action should a solutions architect recommend?

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

Accepted Answer

Modify the EBS volume to gp3 and provision 6000 IOPS and 500 MB/s throughput.. The legacy application suffers from random write latency on a gp2 volume. gp3 volumes allow independent provisioning of IOPS and throughput, so the team can set 6000 IOPS and 500 MB/s without resizing the volume or changing the instance. This directly improves performance and is cost-effective. The other options either don't provide enough IOPS, introduce data durability risks, or add unnecessary complexity.

Answer

Enable EBS optimization on the instance and increase the volume size to 1 TB.

Answer

Create a RAID 0 array using two 500 GB gp2 volumes and attach it to the instance.

Answer

Attach an instance store volume to the instance and move the application's data directory to it.

Question 2

A company runs a stateless web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application stores session state in a self-managed Redis cluster on EC2. The operations team wants to improve the availability and reduce operational overhead of the session store. The solutions architect must recommend a solution that provides high availability across multiple Availability Zones with minimal management. (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Migrate the session store to Amazon ElastiCache for Redis with a cluster mode disabled replication group and Multi-AZ enabled.. ElastiCache for Redis, whether cluster mode disabled or enabled, is a managed service that supports Multi-AZ with automatic failover. This provides high availability across Availability Zones and reduces operational overhead compared to self-managed Redis. The other options either require significant refactoring, increase management burden, or use inappropriate storage for session state.

Answer

Deploy a self-managed Redis cluster across three Availability Zones using EC2 Auto Scaling groups and an Application Load Balancer.

Answer

Configure the application to use Amazon DynamoDB with a TTL attribute for session data and enable DynamoDB Streams.

Answer

Store session data in Amazon S3 with cross-region replication and have the application read and write sessions directly to S3.

Question 3

A company runs a stateful web service on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. During peak hours, the load balancer's target group shows a rising number of HTTP 502 errors, while CPU utilization on the instances remains below 40%. The application logs show that worker threads are frequently blocked waiting on a shared file lock stored on an Amazon EBS volume attached to a single instance. The operations team wants to reduce the 502 errors without rewriting the application. Which solution is MOST operationally efficient?

Accepted Answer

Replace the shared file lock with a distributed lock implemented using Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, and update the application to acquire and release the lock through Redis.. The root cause is a single shared lock on an EBS volume that only one instance can host, so worker threads across the fleet block and the load balancer returns 502s. Replacing that lock with a managed distributed lock in ElastiCache for Redis removes the single-instance bottleneck and lets every instance coordinate safely. It is the least invasive change because only the locking mechanism is updated, not the application architecture.

Answer

Increase the size of the EBS volume attached to the instance and enable EBS Multi-Attach so all instances can mount the same volume.

Answer

Configure the Application Load Balancer to use sticky sessions with a longer cookie duration so each user is pinned to one instance.

Answer

Move the shared lock file to an Amazon EFS file system and mount it on every instance in the Auto Scaling group.

Question 4

A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application experiences performance degradation during peak hours. A solutions architect reviews Amazon CloudWatch metrics and notices high CPU utilization on the instances and increased latency. The architect wants to improve performance and reduce cost by optimizing the existing architecture. Which two actions should the architect take? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Compute Optimizer to rightsize the EC2 instances and adjust the instance type in the launch template.. Auto Scaling based on CPU utilization dynamically adds capacity during peaks and removes it during lows, improving performance and reducing cost. AWS Compute Optimizer provides rightsizing recommendations to ensure instances are appropriately sized. Together, they optimize the existing architecture by matching resources to demand and eliminating over-provisioning.

Answer

Implement Amazon ElastiCache for Redis to cache frequently accessed data and reduce database load.

Answer

Enable Application Load Balancer access logs and analyze them with Amazon Athena to identify slow endpoints.

Answer

Enable EC2 Auto Scaling group health checks to replace unhealthy instances.

Question 5

A company uses AWS CodeDeploy to deploy a monolithic Java application to an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances. The deployment must be automatically rolled back if the application fails to start on any instance, and the rollback must happen without manual intervention. The team has configured the deployment group with a CodeDeploy agent and a healthy application revision in the repository. Which combination of settings should be configured to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Enable automatic rollback on deployment failure and on alarm threshold, and configure a CloudWatch alarm that monitors the application's health endpoint.. Automatic rollback in CodeDeploy is triggered by deployment failures or CloudWatch alarms. Enabling rollback on failure and on alarm, combined with a health-check alarm, ensures that if the application fails to start, the deployment reverts automatically. This is the native, low-effort solution that meets the requirement without custom code or additional infrastructure.

Answer

Configure the deployment group to use a blue/green deployment with a load balancer, and enable automatic rollback on failure.

Answer

Use an AWS Lambda function as a deployment hook to verify application health and invoke a rollback via the CodeDeploy API if the check fails.

Answer

Set the deployment configuration to 'OneAtATime' and enable termination protection on the instances to prevent failed deployments from affecting other instances.

Question 6

A company runs a two-tier web application on AWS. The web tier consists of Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. The database tier runs on an Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. During a recent marketing campaign, the web tier scaled out successfully, but the application experienced severe latency because the database could not handle the read-heavy traffic. The database CPU utilization remained above 90% for extended periods. The company wants to improve read scalability with minimal application changes and without modifying the existing database endpoint. Which solution meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Create an Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ cluster with two readable standby instances and use the cluster endpoint for writes and reader endpoint for reads.. The RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ cluster with readable standbys provides read scaling without requiring application changes to the write endpoint. The reader endpoint distributes read queries across standbys, reducing load on the primary. This directly addresses the read-heavy traffic issue while maintaining high availability. Other options either require application modifications, do not scale reads, or address availability rather than read scalability.

Answer

Create an Amazon ElastiCache for Redis cluster and configure the application to cache frequent read queries.

Answer

Enable Multi-AZ for the RDS instance and increase the instance size to a larger instance class.

Answer

Add Amazon RDS read replicas and update the application to use a reader endpoint for read queries.

Question 7

A media company stores millions of small JSON objects in an Amazon S3 bucket that uses the S3 Standard storage class. Analytics jobs read each object once and then never access it again. The data is accessed heavily for the first 30 days and then only for compliance audits after 180 days. The compliance team requires that objects be retrievable within minutes after the 180-day mark. The company wants to minimize storage costs without changing the application's S3 GET calls. Which lifecycle configuration meets these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Accepted Answer

Transition objects to S3 Standard-IA after 30 days, then to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval after 180 days.. The workload needs low-cost infrequent access between 30 and 180 days, then fast retrieval after 180 days for audits. S3 Standard-IA handles the middle period with multi-AZ durability, and S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval delivers millisecond access at archive pricing. Because both classes remain accessible through the standard S3 GET API, the analytics application needs no modification.

Answer

Transition objects to S3 One Zone-IA after 30 days, then to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval after 180 days.

Answer

Transition objects to S3 Standard-IA after 30 days, then to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after 180 days.

Answer

Transition objects to S3 Intelligent-Tiering after 30 days, then to S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval after 180 days.

Question 8

A company has a large Amazon S3 bucket with millions of objects. The security team wants to ensure that all objects are encrypted at rest with a customer-managed AWS KMS key. The company also wants to monitor and audit any changes to the encryption configuration. Which combination of actions should a solutions architect take to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Enable default encryption on the bucket using SSE-KMS with the customer-managed key, and enable AWS CloudTrail data events for the bucket.. Default encryption with SSE-KMS using a customer-managed key ensures all new objects are encrypted with the required key. CloudTrail data events provide a detailed audit log of object-level operations and KMS key usage. Together they satisfy both the encryption and monitoring requirements.

Answer

Enable default encryption with SSE-KMS using the AWS managed key aws/s3, and enable Amazon GuardDuty for S3 protection.

Answer

Use an S3 bucket policy to deny uploads without the x-amz-server-side-encryption header, and enable AWS Config to record S3 bucket changes.

Answer

Enable default encryption with SSE-S3, and use S3 server access logging to monitor encryption changes.

Question 9

A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application experiences occasional traffic spikes, and the operations team wants to ensure that the application scales automatically based on demand. They have configured an Auto Scaling group with a target tracking scaling policy based on average CPU utilization. However, during a recent spike, the scaling did not occur quickly enough, and some requests failed. What should a solutions architect recommend to improve the scaling responsiveness?

Accepted Answer

Add a step scaling policy to scale out more aggressively when CPU exceeds a threshold.. Target tracking scaling policies are reactive and may not scale quickly enough during sudden spikes. Step scaling policies allow for more aggressive scaling actions based on alarm thresholds, enabling faster addition of capacity. Combining target tracking with step scaling or using step scaling alone can improve responsiveness. Other options either delay scaling or are irrelevant to the scaling mechanism.

Answer

Enable EC2 Auto Scaling instance warmup to reduce the time to scale.

Answer

Replace the ALB with a Network Load Balancer.

Answer

Increase the cooldown period for the Auto Scaling group.

Question 10

A company has a microservices application running on Amazon ECS with the Fargate launch type. The services communicate over a service discovery namespace. The company wants to improve observability without modifying application code. They need to trace requests across services and identify performance bottlenecks. Which solution meets these requirements with the LEAST effort?

Accepted Answer

Use AWS App Mesh with Envoy proxies to collect tracing data and send it to AWS X-Ray.. AWS App Mesh uses Envoy proxies to intercept network traffic and can emit tracing data to X-Ray without changing application code. This provides distributed tracing across microservices. Other options either require code instrumentation or do not provide tracing. App Mesh is a managed service that integrates natively with ECS and X-Ray, reducing effort.

Answer

Deploy a third-party APM solution as a sidecar container and configure it to auto-instrument the application.

Answer

Enable AWS X-Ray tracing by adding the X-Ray daemon as a sidecar container to each task definition and instrumenting the application code.

Answer

Configure Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights to collect metrics and logs from the ECS tasks.

Question 11

A solutions architect is optimizing a legacy three-tier application that runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The database tier uses a self-managed MySQL instance on an EC2 instance with a 500 GB gp2 EBS volume. CloudWatch metrics show average read/write latency of 25 ms and burst balance frequently at zero during business hours. The architect must improve storage performance with minimal application changes. Which action should the architect take?

Accepted Answer

Replace the gp2 volume with an io2 Block Express volume and provision the required IOPS.. The database is experiencing sustained high I/O with latency far above what general-purpose SSDs can deliver. Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes, specifically io2 Block Express, provide consistent sub-millisecond latency and high IOPS without burst limitations. Because the volume is attached to the existing instance, the application and database configuration remain unchanged, satisfying the minimal-change requirement.

Answer

Create a RAID 0 array using two additional gp2 volumes and migrate the database to the array.

Answer

Enable EBS Multi-Attach on the existing gp2 volume to allow parallel I/O from multiple EC2 instances.

Answer

Change the EBS volume type to gp3 and provision additional IOPS and throughput.

Question 12

A company operates a web application on an Auto Scaling group of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application stores user session data in an Amazon ElastiCache for Redis cluster. During peak traffic, the operations team observes that the Redis cluster's CPU utilization is consistently above 90%, causing increased latency. The team wants to reduce the load on Redis without changing the application code. Which solution is MOST cost-effective and operationally efficient?

Accepted Answer

Enable ElastiCache for Redis cluster mode and shard the data across multiple shards.. Enabling cluster mode in ElastiCache for Redis shards data across multiple nodes, distributing the workload and reducing CPU utilization on any single shard. This is a horizontal scaling approach that requires no application changes if the client is cluster-aware. It is cost-effective and operationally efficient because it leverages native ElastiCache scaling capabilities without downtime or code modifications.

Answer

Add read replicas to the Redis cluster and configure the application to direct read traffic to them.

Answer

Increase the instance type of the existing Redis cluster to a larger node with more vCPUs.

Answer

Migrate the session data to Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity and update the application to use DynamoDB.

Question 13

A company runs a stateful web application on a single m6i.large Amazon EC2 instance with an attached gp3 EBS volume. The application writes critical transaction data to the volume. The RTO is 15 minutes and the RPO is 5 minutes. The operations team currently takes manual EBS snapshots once per day. What should a solutions architect recommend to meet the RTO and RPO requirements with minimal operational overhead?

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery to replicate the instance and its volumes continuously to a staging area, and configure a 5-minute point-in-time recovery window.. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery continuously replicates server blocks to a staging area and supports point-in-time recovery down to one-minute granularity, which satisfies the 5-minute RPO. Its automated launch process brings up replacement instances in minutes, meeting the 15-minute RTO. Because replication, launch templates, and drill automation are managed by the service, the operations team avoids building custom snapshot or replication scripts.

Answer

Configure AWS Backup with a continuous backup vault and a 5-minute backup frequency for the EBS volume.

Answer

Enable EBS Multi-Attach on the gp3 volume and attach it concurrently to a standby EC2 instance in another Availability Zone.

Answer

Create a multi-volume, crash-consistent EBS snapshot schedule using Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager with a 5-minute interval.

Question 14

A company stores application logs in an Amazon S3 bucket with S3 Standard storage. The logs are accessed frequently for the first 30 days for troubleshooting, occasionally between 30 and 180 days for audits, and almost never after 180 days but must be retained for 7 years for compliance. The compliance team requires that any log object be retrievable within minutes if a legal hold is placed. Which S3 Lifecycle configuration meets these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Accepted Answer

Transition objects to S3 Standard-IA after 30 days, to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval after 180 days, and expire them after 2,555 days.. The access pattern declines over time, so a lifecycle ladder should move data to progressively cheaper classes while preserving the required retrieval latency. S3 Standard-IA covers the audit phase, and S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval provides minutes-level access for compliance data at lower cost, with expiration at 2,555 days enforcing the 7-year retention. Single-AZ and deep-archive options fail durability or latency requirements.

Answer

Transition objects to S3 One Zone-IA after 30 days, to S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval after 180 days, and expire them after 2,555 days.

Answer

Keep all objects in S3 Standard, enable S3 Object Lock in compliance mode, and expire them after 2,555 days.

Answer

Transition objects to S3 Intelligent-Tiering after 30 days, to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after 180 days, and expire them after 2,555 days.

Question 15

A company runs a production application on AWS that uses an Amazon Aurora MySQL cluster. The application performs a high volume of read and write operations. The company wants to improve performance and reduce costs by optimizing the database tier. The database currently uses an r5.2xlarge instance for the writer and two r5.xlarge instances for readers. The application performs many complex read queries that consume significant CPU. The company wants to ensure that read queries do not impact write performance and wants to minimize costs. Which solution meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Use Aurora parallel query for the read queries and scale down the reader instances.. Aurora parallel query optimizes complex read queries by offloading processing to the storage layer, reducing the CPU burden on Aurora Replicas. This allows the company to use smaller, less expensive reader instances while maintaining performance. It also isolates read queries from the writer, ensuring write performance is unaffected. Other options either increase cost, add complexity, or do not directly address the need to minimize costs while improving read performance.

Answer

Add more Aurora Replicas and enable auto scaling for Aurora Replicas.

Answer

Migrate the cluster to Aurora Serverless v2 and configure the capacity range appropriately.

Answer

Create a separate Aurora cluster for read queries and use Aurora Global Database for replication.