SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Test 36 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company runs a serverless application using AWS Lambda functions that process messages from an Amazon SQS queue. The company wants to improve the reliability of message processing by ensuring that failed messages are not lost and can be reprocessed later. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?

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

Accepted Answer

Configure a dead-letter queue (DLQ) for the source SQS queue and set a maximum receive count.. Configuring a dead-letter queue on the source SQS queue ensures that messages that repeatedly fail processing are moved to a separate queue for later analysis and reprocessing. This prevents message loss and is a built-in reliability feature of SQS.

Answer

Increase the visibility timeout of the SQS queue to allow more time for Lambda to process messages.

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Enable long polling on the SQS queue to reduce the number of empty responses.

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Use an Amazon SNS topic to fan out messages to multiple SQS queues for redundancy.

Question 2

A company runs a stateful containerized application on Amazon ECS using the EC2 launch type. The application requires persistent storage that must be accessible from multiple tasks simultaneously and must provide high throughput. The company wants to minimize operational overhead. Which storage solution should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Amazon EFS file system mounted into the containers.. The application requires shared persistent storage that can be accessed by multiple tasks concurrently with high throughput. Amazon EFS is a managed NFS file system that supports concurrent access from multiple EC2 instances and containers, scales automatically, and requires minimal operational effort. EBS is not shareable across instances, S3 is not a file system, and FSx for Windows is not ideal for Linux containers.

Answer

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server mounted into the containers.

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Amazon S3 bucket mounted as a file system using s3fs.

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Amazon EBS volumes attached to each EC2 instance and mounted into the containers.

Question 3

A company runs a batch processing workload on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances managed by an Auto Scaling group. The workload checkpoints progress to Amazon S3 every 10 minutes. Spot Instances are frequently interrupted, causing the workload to restart from the last checkpoint. The team wants to reduce the impact of interruptions and improve job completion time. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Configure the Auto Scaling group to use a mixed instances policy with multiple instance types and Availability Zones, and enable capacity rebalancing.. Diversifying across instance types and Availability Zones with a mixed instances policy spreads the workload over multiple Spot capacity pools, reducing correlated interruptions. Capacity rebalancing uses the two-minute Spot interruption notice to launch replacement instances and drain existing ones, so the workload can checkpoint and continue. Together they improve resilience and job completion time while retaining Spot cost savings.

Answer

Purchase a 1-year Reserved Instance for the batch workload and use it instead of Spot Instances.

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Increase the checkpoint frequency to every 1 minute and continue using a single Spot capacity pool.

Answer

Use On-Demand Instances for the entire batch workload and enable EC2 Auto Scaling predictive scaling.

Question 4

A company has a critical application running on AWS Lambda that processes messages from an Amazon SQS queue. The queue occasionally receives a large backlog of messages, causing Lambda to scale up significantly and incur high costs. The company wants to optimize costs while ensuring that all messages are processed in a timely manner. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Configure the SQS queue as an event source for Lambda with a larger batch size and a longer maximum batching window.. By increasing the batch size and maximum batching window, Lambda can retrieve more messages per invocation and wait to accumulate a full batch, reducing the number of invocations and associated costs. This is especially effective during backlogs because Lambda can process messages in larger chunks. It maintains timely processing because the batching window is limited. Other options either do not reduce invocations or may throttle processing.

Answer

Configure the SQS queue as an event source for Lambda with a batch size of 10 and a maximum batching window of 0 seconds.

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Set the Lambda function's reserved concurrency to a low value to limit scaling.

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Increase the Lambda function's memory allocation to reduce execution time.

Question 5

A company has a web application running on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The application uses a self-signed SSL certificate on the instances, and an Application Load Balancer (ALB) terminates SSL. Users report intermittent SSL certificate errors. The security team requires that the certificate be managed and rotated automatically. Which solution should a solutions architect implement to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Request a public certificate from AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for the application's domain and attach it to the ALB. Remove the self-signed certificate from the instances.. The intermittent SSL errors are likely due to the self-signed certificate not being trusted by clients. Using a public ACM certificate on the ALB provides a trusted certificate that is automatically managed and renewed. Since the ALB terminates SSL, the instances do not need any certificate. This solution meets the security team's requirement for automatic management and rotation.

Answer

Request a public certificate from AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for the application's domain, attach it to the ALB, and configure the instances to use it.

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Import the self-signed certificate into AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) and use it on the ALB. Configure ACM to rotate the certificate annually.

Answer

Use AWS Secrets Manager to store the self-signed certificate and configure the instances to retrieve and install it on a schedule using a Lambda function.

Question 6

A company operates a web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application stores session state in a self-managed Redis cluster on EC2. During a recent marketing campaign, the Redis cluster became a bottleneck, causing session timeouts and poor user experience. The company wants to improve the solution's scalability and resilience with minimal operational overhead. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Migrate the session store to Amazon ElastiCache for Redis with cluster mode enabled and automatic failover.. Migrating to Amazon ElastiCache for Redis with cluster mode enabled provides a managed, scalable, and highly available session store. It eliminates the operational burden of self-managed Redis while offering automatic sharding and failover. This directly resolves the bottleneck and improves resilience. Other options either require significant application changes, introduce latency, or do not address scalability.

Answer

Replace the self-managed Redis cluster with an Amazon DynamoDB table using on-demand capacity mode and DAX.

Answer

Configure the EC2 instances to store session state in Amazon S3 with Transfer Acceleration enabled.

Answer

Enable sticky sessions on the Application Load Balancer and store session state in instance memory.

Question 7

A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The application stores user session data in a local MySQL database on each instance, which has caused issues when instances are replaced. The company wants to make the application stateless and improve scalability. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Move the session data to an Amazon ElastiCache for Redis cluster and configure the application to use it.. To make the application stateless, session data must be externalized to a shared, scalable store. Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is an in-memory data store that provides low-latency access and high throughput, ideal for session management. It is a managed service, so it reduces operational overhead. This allows instances to be added or removed without affecting user sessions, improving scalability and resilience.

Answer

Store session data in an Amazon RDS for MySQL database with Multi-AZ.

Answer

Use Amazon S3 to store session data and have the application read/write to it.

Answer

Enable sticky sessions on the Application Load Balancer.

Question 8

A company runs a serverless image-processing pipeline. When an image is uploaded to an S3 bucket, an AWS Lambda function is invoked to resize it and write the output to another S3 bucket. The company wants to reduce the cost of Lambda invocations and improve performance for a new workload that processes large batches of images at scheduled intervals. The images are already stored in S3 and do not require immediate processing. What is the MOST cost-effective solution?

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Batch with a managed compute environment that uses Spot Instances to process the images in parallel.. AWS Batch is purpose-built for batch computing, allowing the use of Spot Instances to reduce costs significantly. It can process large volumes of images in parallel and be scheduled to run at intervals, matching the requirement for non-urgent, cost-effective batch processing. Lambda and Fargate are more expensive for long-running, high-volume tasks, and Step Functions adds orchestration overhead without addressing the core compute cost.

Answer

Use AWS Lambda with a larger memory allocation and increase the timeout to 15 minutes.

Answer

Use an AWS Step Functions state machine with parallel branches to orchestrate Lambda functions for each image.

Answer

Use Amazon ECS with Fargate tasks triggered by an Amazon EventBridge scheduled rule to process the images.

Question 9

A company runs a nightly batch job on a single Amazon EC2 instance that reads 2 TB of data from Amazon S3, transforms it, and writes results back to S3. The job currently takes 9 hours and must finish within a 4-hour maintenance window. The instance is a compute-optimized type with 10 Gbps network bandwidth, and CloudWatch shows the CPU is never above 35%. Which change should a solutions architect make to shorten the runtime?

Accepted Answer

Redesign the job to process data in parallel across multiple EC2 instances using S3 multipart uploads and range-based GET requests.. Low CPU utilization with high data volume points to a network and concurrency bottleneck rather than insufficient compute. Sharding the dataset and processing shards concurrently across multiple instances multiplies aggregate S3 bandwidth, and range-based GETs with multipart uploads let each worker fully use its network path. Vertical scaling and Transfer Acceleration leave the sequential processing model intact.

Answer

Move the job to an AWS Lambda function with 10 GB of memory and a 15-minute timeout.

Answer

Change the instance type to a larger compute-optimized size with 25 Gbps network bandwidth and keep the single-instance design.

Answer

Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on the bucket and rerun the job unchanged on the same instance.

Question 10

A company has a critical application that uses an Amazon Aurora MySQL database cluster. The application experiences occasional slow queries during peak hours, impacting user experience. A solutions architect needs to identify the root cause and improve performance with minimal changes. The architect has enabled Performance Insights and sees high wait times on the database. Which action should the architect take FIRST to resolve the issue?

Accepted Answer

Analyze Performance Insights to identify the top SQL statements and wait events causing the bottleneck.. Performance Insights offers granular visibility into database load and wait events. Analyzing it first allows the architect to identify the specific cause of slow queries, enabling targeted fixes like query optimization or index changes. This is more efficient than blindly scaling, which may not resolve the issue and adds cost.

Answer

Scale up the Aurora cluster by changing the instance class to a larger size.

Answer

Modify the application to use Aurora's reader endpoint for all read queries.

Answer

Add additional read replicas to the Aurora cluster to distribute the read load.

Question 11

A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The application uses an Amazon RDS for MySQL database. The company wants to improve the performance of read-heavy workloads and reduce the load on the primary database instance. The application currently connects to the primary instance for all read and write operations. The solutions architect needs to implement a solution that requires minimal changes to the application code. Which approach should the solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Create an RDS read replica and configure the application to direct read queries to the read replica endpoint.. Creating an RDS read replica and directing read queries to it is the most straightforward way to offload read traffic from the primary database. It requires only a change to the application's connection configuration for read operations, with no schema changes or major code modifications. This improves read performance and reduces load on the primary instance, addressing the company's needs effectively.

Answer

Migrate the database to Amazon Aurora MySQL and enable Aurora Auto Scaling for read replicas.

Answer

Enable Multi-AZ deployment for the RDS instance to automatically offload read traffic to the standby instance.

Answer

Use Amazon ElastiCache for Redis to cache the results of frequent read queries.

Question 12

A company runs a microservices application on Amazon ECS with the Fargate launch type. The services communicate over HTTP and are deployed across multiple Availability Zones. The company wants to improve the application's resilience by implementing automatic retries and circuit breaking for inter-service communication. The services are registered in AWS Cloud Map. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Accepted Answer

Deploy an AWS App Mesh service mesh and configure retry policies and circuit breakers for the virtual services.. AWS App Mesh is a managed service mesh that provides retry policies, circuit breaking, and traffic routing without application code changes. It integrates with ECS and Cloud Map, reducing operational overhead. Other options require custom development or do not provide the required resilience features.

Answer

Use an Application Load Balancer with health checks and configure the ECS services to use it for service-to-service communication.

Answer

Configure Amazon Route 53 with latency-based routing and health checks for each service, and rely on DNS failover for resilience.

Answer

Implement retry logic and circuit breakers in each microservice using an AWS SDK and the Cloud Map API for service discovery.

Question 13

A company is deploying a new three-tier application on AWS. The application consists of a web tier, an application tier, and a database tier. The company wants to ensure that the application can withstand the failure of a single Availability Zone and that the database tier can fail over automatically. The company also wants to minimize operational overhead. Which two solutions should a solutions architect recommend? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Deploy the database tier on Amazon RDS with a Multi-AZ configuration.. Deploying the web and application tiers across multiple Availability Zones with an Auto Scaling group and Application Load Balancer provides AZ resilience and automatic recovery. Using Amazon RDS Multi-AZ ensures automatic database failover with synchronous replication. Together, these solutions meet the high availability and low operational overhead requirements. Self-managed databases on EC2 increase overhead, single-AZ deployments are not fault-tolerant, and multi-Region routing is unnecessary for AZ-level resilience.

Answer

Deploy the web and application tiers in a single Availability Zone with a larger instance size to reduce the chance of failure.

Answer

Use Amazon Route 53 with a latency-based routing policy to distribute traffic across multiple Regions.

Answer

Deploy the database tier on Amazon EC2 instances with a primary and standby replica, and use a third-party clustering solution for automatic failover.

Question 14

A company has a web application running on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The application writes logs to local instance storage. The operations team wants to centralize log analysis and enable near-real-time monitoring for errors. They also want to archive logs for long-term compliance. The logs are generated continuously and can be large in volume. Which two actions should a solutions architect take to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Create a CloudWatch Logs subscription filter to stream logs to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, which delivers them to Amazon S3 for archival.. To centralize and monitor logs in near-real-time, the CloudWatch agent should be installed to send logs to CloudWatch Logs. For long-term archival, a subscription filter can stream logs to Kinesis Data Firehose, which delivers to S3. CloudTrail and detailed monitoring do not capture application logs, and the CloudWatch agent does not send logs directly to S3.

Answer

Use AWS CloudTrail to capture log data from the instances and store it in an S3 bucket.

Answer

Enable detailed monitoring on the EC2 instances to capture application logs and store them in CloudWatch Logs.

Answer

Configure the CloudWatch agent to also send logs to Amazon S3 for long-term archival.

Question 15

A company has a web application running on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The application stores user-uploaded files in an Amazon S3 bucket. The company wants to improve the security of the application by ensuring that the EC2 instances can access the S3 bucket without embedding long-term AWS credentials in the application code or on the instances. Which solution meets these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Accepted Answer

Create an IAM role with the necessary S3 permissions and attach it to the EC2 instances via an instance profile. The application uses the instance metadata service to obtain temporary credentials.. Attaching an IAM role to EC2 instances via an instance profile allows the application to obtain temporary credentials from the instance metadata service automatically. This eliminates the need to embed or manage long-term credentials, reduces operational overhead, and follows AWS security best practices. The other options either use long-term credentials, require secret management, or do not eliminate credential handling.

Answer

Generate a pre-signed URL for each file upload using AWS credentials stored in the application, and have the application provide the URL to users.

Answer

Create an IAM user with programmatic access and an access key, store the credentials in AWS Secrets Manager, and have the application retrieve them at startup.

Answer

Store the S3 bucket credentials in an encrypted Amazon EBS volume attached to each EC2 instance, and have the application read them from the volume.