SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Test 9 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company is designing a serverless event-driven application using AWS Lambda. The application processes messages from an Amazon SQS queue. The team needs to ensure that messages are processed in order and exactly once. Which THREE steps should be taken?

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

Accepted Answer

Configure the Lambda event source mapping to use the FIFO queue.. To achieve message ordering and exactly-once processing with Lambda and SQS, you must use a FIFO queue (option B) because FIFO queues preserve the order of messages. Additionally, enable the queue's content-based deduplication or provide a deduplication ID (option E) to prevent duplicate messages from being processed. Finally, set the Lambda function's reserved concurrency to 1 (option D) to ensure that only one instance of the function processes messages at a time, maintaining the order. Option A (batch window 0) is incorrect because it would cause Lambda to wait longer, but does not help with ordering. Option C (standard queue) does not guarantee ordering or deduplication.

Answer

Enable Lambda function's batch window to 0.

Answer

Use a standard SQS queue.

Question 2

A company wants to implement a centralized logging solution for multiple AWS accounts. Which TWO services should be used together?

Accepted Answer

Amazon S3. Amazon S3 (A) is correct because it serves as the centralized, durable storage repository where CloudTrail log files from multiple accounts are aggregated into a single bucket, enabling cross-account log collection. Amazon Athena (D) is correct because it lets you run standard SQL queries directly against those S3-stored logs without loading them into a database, providing the query and analysis layer for the centralized logging solution. Together, S3 plus Athena form the classic AWS pattern for centralized, queryable log storage across accounts. AWS CloudTrail (B) is not selected here because it is the service that generates and delivers the logs, not the storage or query component the question asks for. Amazon RDS (C) is a relational database service and is not used to store or query CloudTrail logs in this pattern, and AWS Config (E) is a resource-configuration and compliance-tracking service, not a centralized log storage or query engine.

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Answer

Amazon RDS

Answer

AWS Config

Question 3

A company hosts a web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application uses an Amazon Aurora MySQL database. Recently, the application has become slow during peak hours. The operations team notices that the database CPU utilization is high, but the number of connections is within limits. The application is read-heavy. The team wants to improve performance with minimal changes to the application code. The database is currently a single Aurora instance. Which solution should the team implement?

Accepted Answer

Add an Aurora Replica and configure the application to use the reader endpoint for read-only queries.. Adding an Aurora Replica distributes read traffic, reducing load on the primary instance. The application must be configured to use the reader endpoint for read queries.

Answer

Use Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) to cache database queries.

Answer

Add an Amazon ElastiCache Redis cluster in front of the database.

Answer

Increase the instance size of the Aurora primary instance.

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.. Configuring origin groups with a primary origin in us-east-1 and a secondary origin in eu-west-1 allows CloudFront to serve content from the closer origin for European users, reducing latency and improving cache hit ratios. Option A (Increase default TTL) would keep objects in cache longer but does not address the root cause of low cache hit ratios in European edge locations due to the distant origin. Option B (Add additional cache behaviors) allows different caching rules but does not reduce geographic latency. Option D (Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration) speeds up uploads to S3, not downloads or CloudFront delivery.

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.. The Lambda function has a reserved concurrency of 5, which limits the number of concurrent executions. To increase throughput, you need to increase the reserved concurrency. The fastest way is to increase it to 20, allowing more concurrent executions and thus processing more messages from the SQS queue. This directly addresses the bottleneck.

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 Amazon EFS instead of EBS volumes.. Amazon EFS is a regional, fully managed file system that automatically replicates data across multiple Availability Zones, providing high availability and durability. This ensures no data loss during a single AZ failure. Option A is incorrect because periodic snapshots introduce a recovery point objective (RPO) that may result in data loss. Option C is incorrect because EBS volumes are tied to a single AZ and cannot be attached to instances in another AZ. Option D is incorrect because EBS multi-attach volumes only allow attachment within the same AZ, not across different AZs, thus cannot provide cross-AZ high availability.

Answer

Take periodic EBS snapshots and restore in another AZ.

Answer

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

Answer

Use an EBS multi-attach volume with a cluster-aware file system.

Question 7

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.. Option A is correct because Amazon EFS provides a shared, elastic NFS file system that can be mounted concurrently by EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones, which is essential for a stateful application whose data must be accessible from every AZ. Option C is correct because an Auto Scaling group configured across multiple AZs automatically launches and maintains instances in each AZ, distributing the workload and enabling recovery if one AZ fails. Option D is correct because an Application Load Balancer is an AZ-aware, regional load balancer that routes traffic to healthy targets in multiple AZs, providing fault tolerance and even traffic distribution. Option B is incorrect because an EBS volume is tied to a single AZ and cannot be attached to instances in different AZs simultaneously. Option E is incorrect because EBS does not support Read Replicas; that is an RDS feature, and EBS replication is achieved through snapshots or EBS Multi-Attach within the same AZ.

Answer

Attach the same EBS volume to instances in different AZs.

Answer

Configure EBS Read Replicas in another AZ.

Question 8

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.. Option B is correct because the UpdatePolicy attribute (specifically AutoScalingRollingUpdate or AutoScalingReplacingUpdate) lets CloudFormation perform rolling updates in batches, keeping capacity available and avoiding downtime during stack updates. Option E is correct because setting DeletionPolicy to Retain on the database resource ensures that if the stack or resource is deleted or replaced during an update, CloudFormation preserves the underlying database rather than deleting it, protecting the critical data. Option A is not appropriate because creating a new stack and migrating data is a manual, disruptive migration approach rather than a CloudFormation update strategy that avoids downtime. Option C is wrong because disabling rollback only affects failure behavior and does not prevent downtime. Option D is wrong because a service role merely grants CloudFormation permissions to act on your behalf and has no bearing on update availability or data retention.

Answer

Create a new stack and migrate data.

Answer

Disable rollback on stack update failures.

Answer

Use a service role for CloudFormation.

Question 9

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.. AWS CodePipeline with approval gates allows you to introduce manual or automated approval steps that can enforce security checks (e.g., vulnerability scan results, policy compliance) before a container image is promoted to production. This ensures that security validation occurs without blocking the entire CI/CD pipeline—only the deployment stage is gated, preserving pipeline speed for earlier stages like build and test.

Answer

Require manual vulnerability scanning before each deployment.

Answer

Encrypt all container images using AWS KMS.

Question 10

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.. ElastiCache (Redis or Memcached) offloads repeated read queries from RDS by serving cached results in memory, directly reducing CPU utilization and connection count on the database. Because the requirement is minimal application change, caching frequent queries is the standard AWS recommendation when the database is read-heavy and connection-bound. This addresses both symptoms (high CPU and near-max connections) without a schema or engine migration.

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 11

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.. The most likely cause is that the S3 bucket has a bucket policy that denies the pipeline's service role. Even though the IAM policy allows s3:PutObject, an explicit deny in the bucket policy overrides any allow. This would cause intermittent 'Access Denied' errors if the bucket policy was recently changed or if there are conditions. The other options do not directly cause access denied for PutObject.

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 12

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.. The Redis cluster is CPU- and memory-constrained, causing evictions and reduced cache hit ratio. Upgrading to a larger node type with more CPU and memory directly addresses the resource bottleneck with minimal application changes, restoring cache capacity and hit ratio. This is the least disruptive and most direct fix.

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 13

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.. CloudFormation supports updating an existing stack with a new template that changes the DBInstanceClass. For RDS, modifying the instance class is a supported in-place update that does not require recreating the database. The stack update will modify the RDS instance, and CloudFormation will handle the change, often with a brief downtime during the modification. This is the correct approach to change the instance class without recreating the database.

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.

Question 14

A company runs a web application on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. The application experiences periodic traffic spikes that cause the environment to scale out. However, the scaling is slow, leading to increased latency during spikes. The operations team wants to improve the responsiveness of the Auto Scaling group. The application is stateless and runs on a single instance type. What should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Decrease the Auto Scaling group's cooldown period.. The slow scale-out is caused by the Auto Scaling group's default cooldown period (300 seconds), which blocks additional scaling actions after a scaling event even if the new capacity is still insufficient. Reducing the cooldown lets the group evaluate CloudWatch alarms and add capacity again sooner, improving responsiveness to sustained spikes. Because the app is stateless and uses one instance type, cooldown tuning is the direct, low-risk fix.

Answer

Configure the Auto Scaling group to use multiple instance types.

Answer

Use scheduled scaling to add capacity before expected spikes.

Answer

Change the instance type to a larger size.

Question 15

A financial services company runs a critical trading application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in three Availability Zones. The application uses a MySQL-compatible Amazon RDS for MariaDB database with Multi-AZ deployment. Recently, the operations team noticed that during periods of heavy trading, the database CPU utilization spikes to 100%, causing query timeouts and application errors. The team has already reviewed slow query logs and enabled Performance Insights, but the issue persists. The application is read-heavy with frequent writes. The team needs to reduce database load with minimal changes to the application code. Which solution is the MOST effective and scalable?

Accepted Answer

Create read replicas of the RDS for MariaDB instance and configure the application to send read queries to the read replicas.. (RDS for MariaDB read replicas with read-only database connections) offloads read traffic without code changes, as read replicas can be used by modifying the connection string. Option A (Aurora) would require migration. Option B (ElastiCache) requires application code to cache data. Option C (DynamoDB Accelerator) is for DynamoDB, not MariaDB.

Answer

Migrate the database to Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition with Auto Scaling and enable performance insights.

Answer

Implement an in-memory caching layer using Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached and modify the application to check the cache first.

Answer

Replace the RDS database with Amazon DynamoDB and use DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) for caching.