SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Test 24 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company uses AWS CodeBuild to compile and test code. The build process takes a long time because dependencies are downloaded from the internet each time. The company wants to speed up the build process. Which TWO actions should the company take? (Choose TWO.)

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

Accepted Answer

Use a custom Docker image in CodeBuild that includes the dependencies. Option B is correct because using a custom Docker image in CodeBuild that already includes the dependencies eliminates the need to download them from the internet on every build, directly reducing build time. Option E is correct because enabling the CodeBuild cache feature (for example, S3 caching) stores dependencies between builds so they can be reused instead of re-downloaded each time, which speeds up subsequent builds. Option A is not correct because CodeArtifact is a repository for storing and retrieving packages, but it still requires downloading dependencies during each build rather than avoiding the download entirely. Option C is not correct because local build agents running builds in parallel address throughput, not the per-build dependency download time described. Option D is not correct because increasing the compute type provides more CPU/memory but does not eliminate the repeated dependency downloads that cause the slowdown.

Answer

Use AWS CodeArtifact to store and retrieve dependencies

Answer

Use local build agents to run builds in parallel

Answer

Increase the compute type of the build environment

Question 2

A company runs a microservices architecture on Amazon ECS with Fargate. The operations team observes that some services are experiencing high latency during peak hours. The team wants to identify the root cause. Which THREE approaches should the team use? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Use AWS X-Ray to trace requests through the microservices. Option A is correct because AWS X-Ray traces requests as they travel through the microservices, revealing which service or downstream call is introducing latency during peak hours. Option D is correct because CloudWatch ServiceLens combines traces from X-Ray with CloudWatch metrics and logs in a single view, making it possible to correlate latency spikes with specific services and resources. Option E is correct because Container Insights for Amazon ECS collects CPU, memory, network, and task-level metrics for Fargate tasks, helping pinpoint resource saturation that causes high latency. Option B is not appropriate because CloudTrail records control-plane API activity, not application request latency. Option C is not appropriate because VPC Flow Logs capture IP-level traffic metadata and cannot trace application requests or identify which microservice is slow.

Answer

Enable AWS CloudTrail to log API calls

Answer

Enable VPC Flow Logs to analyze network traffic

Question 3

A company uses Amazon S3 to store critical data. They need to ensure that data is automatically replicated to another AWS Region for disaster recovery. Which configuration meets this requirement with minimal operational overhead?

Accepted Answer

Enable S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) on the source bucket.. S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) is the native S3 feature that asynchronously replicates objects from a source bucket in one Region to a destination bucket in another Region. Once configured with a replication rule and the required IAM role, new objects are copied automatically with no ongoing operational effort. This satisfies the disaster-recovery requirement with minimal overhead.

Answer

Enable S3 Versioning on the source bucket.

Answer

Use S3 Transfer Acceleration to upload objects to both Regions.

Answer

Configure an S3 Lifecycle policy to transition objects to S3 Glacier.

Question 4

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 5

A company runs a web application on a single EC2 instance. They want to improve availability and fault tolerance with minimal architectural changes. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Use an Auto Scaling group with a minimum of two instances across two Availability Zones.. Using an Auto Scaling group with a minimum of two instances across two Availability Zones provides high availability and fault tolerance by distributing the application across multiple physically separate data centers. If one Availability Zone fails, the other instance continues to serve traffic, and the Auto Scaling group can automatically replace failed instances. This approach requires minimal architectural changes—just moving from a single instance to an Auto Scaling group—and directly addresses the requirements.

Answer

Attach multiple EBS volumes to the instance.

Answer

Create multiple subnets in the same Availability Zone.

Answer

Upgrade to a larger instance type.

Question 6

A company runs a critical application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. They want to ensure that during a patching cycle, the application remains available and no requests are dropped. Which TWO strategies should they implement? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Perform a rolling update using a batch size of 50% with a pause time.. Option C is correct because a rolling update with a batch size of 50% and a pause time replaces instances in controlled waves, so the remaining healthy instances continue serving traffic and capacity never drops to zero, keeping the application available during patching. Option D is correct because an Auto Scaling lifecycle hook puts instances into a wait state (Terminating:Wait or Launching:Wait) so a custom action—such as draining connections, deregistering from the load balancer, or finishing in-flight requests—can complete before the instance is terminated, preventing dropped requests. Option A is not correct because simply raising desired capacity adds instances but does not orchestrate safe patching or connection draining, so requests can still be dropped when instances are replaced. Option B is not correct because stopping all instances simultaneously causes an outage and drops all requests, directly violating the availability requirement. Option E is not correct because Amazon Inspector is a vulnerability assessment service that detects issues; it does not automatically patch EC2 instances.

Answer

Increase the desired capacity of the Auto Scaling group before patching.

Answer

Stop all instances at the same time to apply patches consistently.

Answer

Use Amazon Inspector to automatically patch instances.

Question 7

A company runs a critical web application on EC2 instances behind an ALB. The application stores session data in an ElastiCache Redis cluster. During a recent outage, the Redis cluster failed and all active sessions were lost, causing users to be logged out. Which solution would provide the HIGHEST availability for session data?

Accepted Answer

Enable Cluster Mode and deploy Redis in Multi-AZ with replicas.. Enabling ElastiCache Redis Cluster Mode with Multi-AZ and replicas provides the highest availability because data is sharded across multiple nodes, each with one or more replicas in different AZs. If a primary node or AZ fails, ElastiCache automatically promotes a replica, preserving session data and minimizing downtime. This eliminates the single point of failure that caused the outage.

Answer

Deploy a single-node Redis cluster with automatic backups.

Answer

Disable Redis persistence to improve performance.

Answer

Use a larger Redis instance type to handle more connections.

Question 8

A company has a microservices architecture running on Amazon ECS with Fargate. Each service writes logs to CloudWatch Logs. The operations team needs to search across all logs for a specific error pattern. Currently, they manually query each log group, which is time-consuming. What is the MOST efficient way to enable centralized log search?

Accepted Answer

Use CloudWatch Logs Insights to query all log groups from a single query.. CloudWatch Logs Insights enables querying multiple log groups in a single query using a query language, allowing centralized search across all services. Option A is wrong because exporting to S3 and using Athena is for analyzing historical data, not real-time search. Option B is wrong because CloudWatch Contributor Insights identifies top contributors and is not for arbitrary pattern search. Option C is wrong because subscription filters to Kinesis Data Firehose can centralize logs but require additional infrastructure and do not provide a built-in query interface like Logs Insights.

Answer

Export logs to Amazon S3 and use Amazon Athena to query them.

Answer

Use CloudWatch Contributor Insights to identify the top error sources.

Answer

Create a subscription filter for each log group that sends logs to a Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream.

Question 9

A company runs a static website on Amazon S3 behind Amazon CloudFront. The website uses a custom domain and SSL certificate from AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). Users report that they sometimes see an older version of the website after updates. What should the company do to ensure users always see the latest content?

Accepted Answer

Create a CloudFront invalidation for the updated files.. CloudFront caches objects at edge locations based on TTL and only re-fetches from the S3 origin when the cache expires or is explicitly invalidated. When a static site is updated, existing cached copies at edge locations continue to be served until they expire, which is why users sometimes see stale content. Creating a CloudFront invalidation for the updated files (or a wildcard path like /*) forces the edge locations to discard the cached objects and retrieve the latest versions from S3 on the next request.

Answer

Disable and re-enable the CloudFront distribution after each update.

Answer

Enable S3 bucket versioning and use version IDs in URLs.

Answer

Reduce the CloudFront TTL to 0 seconds for all objects.

Question 10

A company has a data pipeline that uses AWS Glue to process large datasets in Amazon S3. The pipeline runs daily and takes over 12 hours to complete. The company wants to reduce the processing time. Which approach would be MOST effective?

Accepted Answer

Increase the number of DPUs allocated to the Glue job.. Increasing the number of DPUs (data processing units) allocated to the Glue job allows for greater parallelism, which directly reduces processing time for CPU-bound or memory-bound workloads. Option A is incorrect because increasing the timeout does not improve performance; it only prevents the job from failing due to time limits. Option B is incorrect because S3 Transfer Acceleration speeds up data transfer to S3, not the processing within Glue. Option D is incorrect because while converting to Parquet can improve read performance and reduce data volume, it does not address the core processing bottleneck if the job is compute-intensive; the most effective immediate step is to increase DPUs.

Answer

Increase the Glue job timeout setting to 24 hours.

Answer

Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on the source bucket.

Answer

Convert the input data from CSV to Parquet format.

Question 11

A company uses Amazon RDS for MySQL for its database. The operations team notices that read queries are slow during peak hours. The application is read-heavy and can tolerate eventual consistency. Which solution would improve read performance with minimal application changes?

Accepted Answer

Create an RDS read replica and direct read traffic to it.. Creating an RDS read replica and directing read traffic to it offloads read queries from the primary instance, improving read performance for a read-heavy application that tolerates eventual consistency. This requires minimal application changes—typically just updating the connection string for read operations to point to the replica endpoint. Read replicas use asynchronous replication, so they are suitable for eventually consistent reads.

Answer

Increase the DB instance class to a larger size.

Answer

Enable Multi-AZ deployment for failover support.

Answer

Enable RDS Proxy to pool database connections.

Question 12

A company runs a containerized application on Amazon ECS with Fargate. The application needs to access an Amazon S3 bucket that contains sensitive data. The security team requires that all traffic between the ECS tasks and S3 remain within the AWS network and not traverse the internet. What is the MOST secure way to meet this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Create a VPC endpoint for S3 and attach it to the VPC.. Using a VPC endpoint for S3 (Gateway or Interface) ensures traffic stays within the AWS network. Option A is wrong because internet traffic goes over the public internet. Option B is wrong because a NAT gateway is for outbound internet, not private access to S3. Option D is wrong because S3 Transfer Acceleration uses the internet.

Answer

Use an internet gateway and route traffic through a NAT gateway.

Answer

Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on the bucket.

Answer

Use a NAT gateway and update the route table to direct S3 traffic to the NAT.

Question 13

A company uses AWS CloudFormation to manage infrastructure. A recent stack update failed because a resource exceeded a service quota. The team wants to be notified proactively when service limits are approaching. Which solution meets this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor service quota usage metrics and set CloudWatch alarms.. AWS Service Quotas publishes CloudWatch metrics (e.g., AWS/Usage namespace with Resource and Service dimensions) that track current usage against quotas. Creating CloudWatch alarms on these metrics allows proactive notification before a quota is exhausted, directly addressing the requirement. This is the AWS-recommended approach for quota monitoring at scale.

Answer

Use AWS CloudTrail to monitor API calls that indicate quota exhaustion.

Answer

Use AWS Config rules to check if resources are within limits.

Answer

Use AWS Trusted Advisor to check service limits regularly.

Question 14

A company runs a web application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Users report intermittent slowdowns. CloudWatch metrics show high CPU utilization on the instances. The company wants to improve performance with minimal architectural changes. What should a solutions architect do?

Accepted Answer

Configure an Auto Scaling group with a dynamic scaling policy based on CPU utilization.. An Auto Scaling group with a dynamic CPU-based scaling policy directly addresses the root cause (high CPU utilization) by adding more instances when demand rises, distributing load and improving performance. This is a minimal architectural change because the ALB already exists and simply registers new instances automatically. It preserves the existing application design while providing elasticity to handle intermittent spikes.

Answer

Use Amazon ElastiCache to offload database queries.

Answer

Replace the EC2 instances with a larger instance type.

Answer

Enable Amazon CloudFront in front of the ALB to cache content.

Question 15

A company has a legacy monolithic application running on a single EC2 instance. The application stores customer data in an attached EBS volume. The company wants to modernize the application to improve scalability and availability. Which approach should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Refactor the application into microservices running on Amazon ECS with data stored in Amazon S3.. Migrating to a containerized, stateless application decouples storage and allows scaling. Option A is wrong because a larger instance still has a single point of failure. Option B is wrong because Multi-Attach EBS volumes have limited support and multiple instances writing to the same volume can cause data corruption. Option C is wrong because RDS is for databases, not for application data stored in files.

Answer

Use a larger EC2 instance with enhanced networking.

Answer

Configure multiple EC2 instances to share the same EBS volume using Multi-Attach.

Answer

Replace the EBS volume with an Aurora RDS database.