SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Test 8 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company uses AWS CloudFormation to deploy infrastructure. The operations team wants to implement a change management process that requires approval before stack updates can proceed. Which TWO approaches can achieve this?

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

Accepted Answer

Create a service role with specific IAM policies and require that updates be initiated with that role.. Options B and E are correct. Using a service role with specific IAM policies (B) ensures that only authorized roles can initiate stack updates, enforcing an approval workflow. CloudFormation change sets (E) allow the operations team to review proposed changes before executing them, providing a mechanism for approval. Option A is incorrect because StackSets are used for deploying across multiple accounts and regions, not for approval workflows. Option C is incorrect because manually reviewing template changes before uploading to S3 is not a built-in CloudFormation mechanism for change management. Option D is incorrect because stack policies protect specific resources from being updated or deleted, but they do not enforce an approval process for updates.

Answer

Use AWS CloudFormation StackSets to deploy updates across multiple accounts.

Answer

Manually review all template changes before uploading to S3.

Answer

Configure a stack policy to prevent updates to critical resources.

Question 2

A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application stores session data locally on the EC2 instances. The company wants to make the application stateless to improve availability and scalability. Which solution should the solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon ElastiCache for Redis to store session data externally.. Storing session data in Amazon ElastiCache for Redis externalizes state so any EC2 instance behind the ALB can serve any request, making the application stateless and horizontally scalable. Redis provides low-latency, highly available session storage with replication and automatic failover. This eliminates the need for sticky sessions and improves availability during instance failures.

Answer

Configure session stickiness on the ALB to route requests from the same user to the same EC2 instance.

Answer

Mount an Amazon EFS file system on the EC2 instances and store session files there.

Answer

Store session data in Amazon S3 and update the application to read and write sessions to S3.

Question 3

A company has an AWS Lambda function that processes files uploaded to an S3 bucket. The Lambda function has been running successfully for months. Recently, the company updated the Lambda function code and started seeing occasional throttling errors (HTTP 429) from the Lambda service. The function's reserved concurrency is set to 100. The company is unsure why throttling is occurring only after the code update. What is the MOST likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The code update increased the execution time of the Lambda function, leading to a higher number of concurrent executions that exceed the account-level concurrency limit.. Lambda throttling with HTTP 429 occurs when the number of concurrent executions exceeds the account-level concurrency limit (default 1000) or the function's reserved concurrency. If the code update increased execution time, each invocation holds concurrency longer, leading to more simultaneous executions and hitting the account limit. The reserved concurrency of 100 is a subset of the account limit, but if other functions consume the rest, this function can still be throttled at the account level.

Answer

The Lambda function is writing logs to CloudWatch Logs at a rate that exceeds the CloudWatch throttling limit.

Answer

The S3 bucket is receiving more uploads than before, causing more Lambda invocations.

Answer

The updated Lambda function no longer has the required IAM permissions to access S3, causing retries that throttle.

Question 4

A company runs a critical application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The application uses a custom health check that reports instance health to Amazon CloudWatch. The Auto Scaling group is configured with an EC2 health check type. Recently, the company noticed that instances failing the custom health check are not being terminated and replaced. What should the solutions architect do to ensure that instances failing the custom health check are automatically replaced?

Accepted Answer

Change the Auto Scaling group health check type to ELB and ensure the custom health check is integrated with the ELB target group.. Auto Scaling only uses EC2 status checks (system/reachability) by default. To use a custom health check, you must configure the Auto Scaling group to use ELB health checks and integrate the custom health check with the ELB target group, so that instances failing the custom check are marked unhealthy by the ELB and automatically replaced. Option A is wrong because manually terminating instances is not automated and defeats the purpose of Auto Scaling. Option B is wrong because instance metadata cannot be used to report custom health to Auto Scaling; it only provides instance metadata, not health information. Option C is wrong because a CloudWatch alarm alone cannot terminate instances; you would need a lifecycle hook or EventBridge to act on the alarm.

Answer

Manually terminate the unhealthy instances from the EC2 console.

Answer

Configure the Auto Scaling group to use instance metadata to report health.

Answer

Create a CloudWatch alarm based on the custom health check metric and configure the alarm to terminate the instance.

Question 5

A company uses AWS CloudFormation to deploy infrastructure. The operations team wants to implement a change management process that requires approval before stack updates can proceed. Which TWO approaches can achieve this?

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

Accepted Answer

Set the 'Rollback on failure' option to 'Yes' when performing the stack update.. When performing a stack update, you can set the 'Rollback on failure' option to 'Yes'. This ensures that if the update fails, CloudFormation automatically rolls back to the last known good state. Option A is incorrect because termination protection prevents accidental deletion, not rollback. Option B is incorrect because a stack policy controls which resources can be updated, not rollback behavior. Option D is incorrect because change sets allow you to review changes but do not provide automatic rollback.

Answer

Enable termination protection on the stack.

Answer

Configure a stack policy to prevent updates to critical resources.

Answer

Use a change set to review changes before updating the stack.

Question 6

A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application experiences high request latency during peak traffic. A solutions architect discovers that the ALB is not distributing traffic evenly across the instances. The instances have different sizes (t3.large and t3.xlarge). Which TWO actions should the solutions architect take to improve load distribution?

Accepted Answer

Replace all instances with the same instance type.. The correct answers are B and C. Option B: Using the same instance type ensures uniform capacity, so round-robin routing distributes traffic evenly. Option C: Changing the routing algorithm to least outstanding requests (LOR) distributes traffic based on pending requests, naturally giving more traffic to larger instances (t3.xlarge) and balancing load despite size differences. Option A (connection draining) helps with graceful deregistration but does not improve distribution. Option D (sticky sessions) worsens distribution by pinning users. Option E (increasing deregistration delay) does not affect distribution.

Answer

Enable connection draining on the target group.

Answer

Enable sticky sessions (session affinity) on the target group.

Answer

Increase the deregistration delay (connection draining) on the target group to 300 seconds.

Question 7

A company uses Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ deployment. The database experiences high CPU utilization during peak hours. The company wants to reduce the load on the primary database instance without making changes to the application code. Which TWO solutions should the solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Create one or more Read Replicas in the same region and direct read traffic to them.. Options B and E are correct. Read Replicas offload read traffic from the primary database instance, reducing CPU utilization. ElastiCache caches the results of frequently accessed queries, decreasing the number of database queries and CPU load. Option A is incorrect because increasing the instance size does not address the root cause and may require downtime. Option C is incorrect because RDS Proxy manages connection pooling, not reducing CPU load from queries. Option D is incorrect because the instance is already Multi-AZ, which provides failover but does not reduce read load.

Answer

Increase the instance size of the primary RDS instance.

Answer

Enable Amazon RDS Proxy to manage database connections.

Answer

Convert the RDS instance to a Multi-AZ deployment if not already.

Question 8

A media company runs a video processing pipeline on AWS. The pipeline uses AWS Step Functions to orchestrate multiple AWS Lambda functions. The first Lambda function downloads a video file from an S3 bucket, the second transcodes it using AWS Elemental MediaConvert, and the third uploads the transcoded files to a different S3 bucket. Recently, the pipeline has been failing intermittently with 'State machine execution timed out' errors. The Step Functions execution history shows that the first Lambda function takes up to 25 minutes to complete for large video files. The Step Functions state machine has a default execution timeout of 5 minutes. The company wants to fix the timeout issue without redesigning the entire pipeline. Which solution should the solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Replace the Lambda function with an Amazon SQS queue and have the Step Functions wait for a callback.. The Lambda function has a maximum timeout of 15 minutes, so increasing the state machine timeout alone (Option A) does not solve the Lambda function's inability to run for 25 minutes. Replacing the Lambda with an SQS queue allows the long-running task to be processed asynchronously, with Step Functions waiting for a callback, avoiding the Lambda timeout limit and the state machine timeout error. Options B and C are invalid because Lambda cannot be configured beyond 15 minutes: setting it to 30 or 15 minutes still fails for a 25-minute task. Option D changes only the problematic component, meeting the requirement to fix the issue without redesigning the entire pipeline.

Answer

Increase the 'timeoutSeconds' value in the Step Functions state machine definition to 1800 (30 minutes) or more.

Answer

Increase the Lambda function timeout to 30 minutes in the Lambda configuration.

Answer

Increase the Lambda function timeout to 15 minutes and increase the state machine execution timeout to 30 minutes.

Question 9

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.. ALB connection draining (deregistration delay) with a very short timeout causes in-flight requests to be abruptly terminated when an instance is deregistered, leading to 503 errors. The ALB returns 503 when it cannot establish a connection to a healthy target or when the target closes the connection prematurely. Since CPU is low and the ASG has capacity, the issue is not scaling; the short draining timeout directly explains intermittent 503s during instance replacement or scale-in events.

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 10

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 11

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.. SSE-KMS with a customer-managed key (CMK) satisfies the requirement for encryption at rest with a CMK, and enabling automatic key rotation on the CMK rotates the backing key material every year (the default and only supported rotation period for KMS CMKs). This is the native, fully managed approach that meets both the encryption and rotation 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 12

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 13

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 14

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.. A Cross-Region Read Replica provides asynchronous replication with a typical lag of seconds to minutes, easily meeting the 1-hour RPO. Promotion to a standalone primary takes only a few minutes, satisfying the 15-minute RTO. It requires minimal ongoing management because AWS handles replication and you can promote via console or CLI, making it the lowest operational overhead solution.

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 15

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.