SAP-C02 Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization Practice Test 26 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company is migrating a web application to AWS. The application uses a three-tier architecture with a web server, application server, and MySQL database. The company wants to ensure high availability by deploying across multiple Availability Zones. The web and application servers are stateless. Which solution provides the HIGHEST availability with the LEAST administrative effort?

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

Accepted Answer

Deploy web and application servers on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group across two AZs with an Application Load Balancer. Use Multi-AZ Amazon RDS for MySQL.. Deploying web and application servers in an Auto Scaling group across two AZs behind an Application Load Balancer, and using Multi-AZ Amazon RDS for MySQL, provides high availability with minimal administrative effort. The ALB distributes traffic, Auto Scaling maintains capacity, and Multi-AZ RDS automatically fails over to a standby in another AZ. This is a fully managed, highly available architecture.

Answer

Deploy web and application servers on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group in one AZ. Use Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing to another region.

Answer

Deploy web, application, and database on a single large EC2 instance in one AZ. Take snapshots every hour.

Answer

Deploy web and application servers on EC2 instances in two AZs with Elastic IP addresses. Use Amazon Route 53 with health checks to route traffic.

Question 2

A company is migrating a web application to AWS. The application uses a three-tier architecture with a web server, application server, and MySQL database. The company wants to ensure high availability by deploying across multiple Availability Zones. The web and application servers are stateless. Which solution provides the HIGHEST availability with the LEAST administrative effort?

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

Accepted Answer

Deploy the web application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones, with an Application Load Balancer. To achieve high availability and scalability for the web application, the company should deploy the web tier across multiple Availability Zones using an Auto Scaling group with an Application Load Balancer (Option A), which distributes traffic and automatically scales instances. For the MySQL database, using Multi-AZ Amazon RDS (Option C) provides automatic failover and high availability. Option B (single RDS instance) is a single point of failure. Option D (ElastiCache) is for caching, not for high availability or scaling. Option E (large EC2 instance with Elastic IP) does not provide scalability or availability.

Answer

Use a single Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance

Answer

Use Amazon ElastiCache to cache database queries

Answer

Use a large EC2 instance for the web application with Elastic IP

Question 3

Refer to the exhibit. A company is using AWS Migration Hub to track migrations. The above IAM policy is attached to an IAM role used by the migration tool. The migration tool reports that it cannot register the migration task with Migration Hub. Which action should the company add to the policy to fix the issue?

Accepted Answer

mgh:ImportMigrationTask. The IAM policy shown in the exhibit likely grants permissions for various Migration Hub actions but is missing the specific permission required to register a migration task. The AWS Migration Hub API action `mgh:ImportMigrationTask` is used to register a migration task with Migration Hub, which is exactly what the migration tool is attempting to do. Without this permission, the tool cannot associate the task with Migration Hub, resulting in the reported error. Therefore, adding `mgh:ImportMigrationTask` to the policy resolves the issue.

Answer

mgh:AssociateDiscoveredResource

Answer

mgh:CreateHomeRegion

Answer

mgh:GetHomeRegion

Question 4

A company is migrating a critical 3-tier application to AWS. The application consists of a web tier, an application tier, and a PostgreSQL database. The web and application tiers are stateless and run on Linux. The company has deployed the web tier on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) across two Availability Zones. The application tier is deployed on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group across two Availability Zones. The PostgreSQL database is migrated to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with Multi-AZ deployment. The application uses sticky sessions (session affinity) to maintain user sessions on the web tier. After migration, users report that they are frequently logged out and lose session data. The web tier logs show that requests are being routed to different web instances. What is the MOST likely cause of this issue?

Accepted Answer

The target group for the web tier does not have sticky sessions (session affinity) enabled. The most likely cause is that the ALB target group does not have sticky sessions enabled. Sticky sessions (session affinity) ensure that all requests from a user during a session are routed to the same target. Without it, the ALB distributes requests across multiple instances, causing session loss. The application relies on sticky sessions, so this misconfiguration directly explains the symptoms.

Answer

The ALB is configured to disable cross-zone load balancing, causing uneven traffic distribution

Answer

The idle timeout of the ALB is set too low, causing sessions to expire

Answer

The web tier should use a Network Load Balancer (NLB) instead of an ALB for sticky sessions

Question 5

A company is migrating a large on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database is 2 TB in size and has a 24/7 uptime requirement. The company plans to use AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) for continuous replication with minimal downtime. The source database is Oracle 11g running on Linux. During the full load phase, AWS DMS reports high latency and the replication slows down significantly. The source database CPU utilization is at 100% during the migration. The company needs to minimize the impact on production workload. What should the company do to improve the migration performance and reduce impact on the source database?

Accepted Answer

Set up an Oracle read replica and use it as the source for AWS DMS. The source Oracle 11g database is at 100% CPU during the full load, meaning the DMS full-load threads are competing with production workload on the same host. Offloading the DMS read workload to an Oracle read replica (via Oracle Active Data Guard or a manually maintained standby) isolates the migration reads from the primary, preserving production performance while still allowing DMS to perform full load plus CDC against the replica. This is the standard AWS-recommended pattern for minimizing source impact on large Oracle migrations.

Answer

Use AWS DMS change data capture (CDC) only, without full load, to reduce the load

Answer

Increase the size of the DMS replication instance to handle more load

Answer

Reduce the number of parallel load threads in the DMS task to decrease source CPU usage

Question 6

A company is migrating a legacy application to AWS using the 7 Rs migration strategy. The application is a monolithic Java application running on a single on-premises server with a MySQL database. The company wants to reduce operational overhead and improve scalability. The development team has already containerized the application and tested it locally. The company wants to run the containerized application on AWS without managing the underlying infrastructure. Which AWS service should the company use to deploy the containerized application?

Accepted Answer

Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate launch type. Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate launch type is a serverless compute engine for containers, eliminating infrastructure management. Option B (EKS with managed node groups) still requires managing the node groups at the EC2 level. Option C (EC2 with Docker) requires managing EC2 instances. Option D (Lightsail containers) is not as scalable or integrated with AWS services as ECS with Fargate.

Answer

Amazon EKS with managed node groups

Answer

Amazon EC2 with Docker installed

Answer

Amazon Lightsail containers

Question 7

A company is migrating a legacy on-premises .NET application to AWS. The application uses a SQL Server database and requires full control over the operating system for compliance. Which migration strategy should the solutions architect recommend to minimize rework while meeting compliance requirements?

Accepted Answer

Rehost the application on EC2 instances and use RDS Custom for SQL Server.. Rehosting (lift-and-shift) with EC2 and RDS Custom for SQL Server allows the company to move the application and database with minimal changes while retaining OS-level control for compliance. RDS Custom provides OS access (SSH, patching) unlike standard RDS, meeting the compliance requirement. Option B (DynamoDB) would require significant application refactoring. Option C (RDS for SQL Server without Custom) lacks OS access. Option D (ECS with containers) adds containerization rework and does not inherently provide OS-level control.

Answer

Replace the database with Amazon DynamoDB and refactor the application.

Answer

Replatform the application to use RDS for SQL Server and deploy the application on EC2 instances.

Answer

Refactor the application to run on Amazon ECS using Docker containers.

Question 8

A company is migrating a large-scale Oracle data warehouse to Amazon Redshift. The migration must minimize downtime. The source database is 10 TB and runs on a single on-premises server with 1 Gbps network. Which approach should be used for the initial data load?

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Snowball Edge to transfer data to S3, then copy to Redshift.. Using AWS Snowball Edge devices for offline transfer avoids network bandwidth limitations and provides fast, secure transfer of large data volumes. Option A is wrong because 1 Gbps network would take over 22 hours and may cause congestion. Option B is wrong because DMS works for ongoing replication but initial load over network is slow. Option D is wrong because S3 Transfer Acceleration only speeds up S3 uploads, not the full pipeline.

Answer

Use AWS DMS to migrate data directly to Redshift over the network.

Answer

Use AWS DMS with ongoing replication after initial load via network.

Answer

Use S3 Transfer Acceleration to upload data to S3, then COPY to Redshift.

Question 9

A company is planning a hybrid cloud migration and needs to establish a dedicated network connection between its on-premises data center and AWS with consistent low latency. Which AWS service should be used?

Accepted Answer

AWS Direct Connect. AWS Direct Connect provides a dedicated private network connection from on-premises to AWS, offering consistent low latency. Option A is correct for this reason. Option B (AWS Client VPN) is incorrect because it is designed for individual remote clients, not a dedicated connection. Option C (AWS Transit Gateway) is incorrect as it is a hub for connecting networks, not a direct connection method. Option D (AWS Site-to-Site VPN) is incorrect because it uses the public internet and does not provide dedicated bandwidth or consistent low latency.

Answer

AWS Client VPN

Answer

AWS Transit Gateway

Answer

AWS Site-to-Site VPN

Question 10

A company is migrating a legacy application to AWS. The application requires a relational database with read replicas for reporting. The company wants to minimize operational overhead. Which TWO database services meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Aurora. Amazon Aurora is a MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, combining the performance and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases. It supports up to 15 low-latency read replicas, which can be used for reporting workloads, and it automates time-consuming tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups, thereby minimizing operational overhead.

Answer

Amazon DynamoDB

Answer

Amazon Redshift

Answer

Amazon ElastiCache

Question 11

A company is modernizing a monolithic application into microservices on AWS. The application currently uses a single SQL database. Which THREE AWS services can help decouple the data layer and enable event-driven communication between microservices?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). Amazon SNS (A) is correct because it provides a pub/sub messaging service that lets microservices publish events to multiple subscribers (SQS queues, Lambda, HTTP endpoints), enabling fan-out event-driven communication without tight coupling. Amazon SQS (C) is correct because it offers durable, decoupled point-to-point queues that buffer messages between producers and consumers, allowing microservices to communicate asynchronously and independently scale. Amazon EventBridge (E) is correct because it is a serverless event bus that routes events from AWS services, custom applications, and SaaS sources to targets using rules and filters, which is ideal for event-driven microservice architectures. Amazon RDS (B) is not correct because it is a relational database service, not a decoupling or event-driven messaging mechanism, and the scenario is moving away from a single SQL database. Amazon ElastiCache (D) is not correct because it is an in-memory caching service (Redis/Memcached) for performance, not a service for decoupling data layers or enabling event-driven communication.

Answer

Amazon RDS

Answer

Amazon ElastiCache

Question 12

A company is migrating its on-premises file server to AWS. The file server contains 50 TB of data stored on a Windows Server with NTFS permissions. The company needs to maintain the folder structure and permissions after migration. The migration must be completed within one week. The company has a 100 Mbps internet connection. Which approach should the solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Snowball Edge to transfer data to an S3 bucket, then use AWS DataSync to copy to Amazon FSx for Windows File Server.. AWS Snowball Edge is used to physically transfer large datasets (50 TB) quickly, bypassing the slow 100 Mbps internet connection (which would take ~46 days). After transfer to S3, AWS DataSync can copy the data to Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, preserving NTFS permissions and folder structure. This meets the one-week deadline and maintains permissions.

Answer

Use AWS Storage Gateway File Gateway to cache data on-premises and sync to S3.

Answer

Use AWS DataSync to transfer data directly to Amazon EFS over the internet.

Answer

Use AWS CLI to copy data directly to an S3 bucket, then mount S3 as a file system.

Question 13

A company is modernizing a legacy Java application to run on AWS. The application currently uses a monolithic architecture with a shared MySQL database. The company wants to adopt a microservices architecture using containers and wants to decouple the database. The solutions architect proposes using Amazon ECS with Fargate for compute and Amazon RDS for MySQL for the database. However, during the transition, the performance team notices that the database CPU utilization is consistently above 80% during peak hours. The application logs show many slow queries. The team suspects that the database is the bottleneck. The company wants to improve performance without rewriting the application. Which action should the solutions architect take first?

Accepted Answer

Enable Amazon RDS Performance Insights to identify the most resource-intensive queries.. The first step to address the database bottleneck is to identify the root cause of the slow queries. Enabling Amazon RDS Performance Insights provides detailed visibility into query performance, allowing the team to pinpoint the most resource-intensive queries and their execution plans. This diagnostic information guides further optimization efforts (e.g., indexing, query rewriting, or schema changes) without requiring application code changes. Options B and C are premature without understanding which queries are problematic; a read replica would not help if the bottleneck is write-heavy or if reads are already well-distributed, and scaling up may only mask the issue. Option D would require significant application rewriting, which contradicts the requirement to improve performance without rewriting the application.

Answer

Add an RDS read replica and direct read traffic to it.

Answer

Scale up the RDS instance to a larger instance type.

Answer

Migrate the database to Amazon DynamoDB to eliminate relational bottlenecks.

Question 14

A company is migrating its on-premises VMware VMs to AWS using AWS MGN. After the test cutover, the migrated EC2 instance fails the health check. The source VM runs Windows Server 2016 with a static IP. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The source VM's static IP configuration was not changed to DHCP.. When migrating a Windows VM with a static IP using AWS MGN, the source VM must be configured to use DHCP before migration, because AWS relies on DHCP for IP assignment. If the static IP configuration persists, the EC2 instance will not obtain an IP address, causing the health check to fail. Option A is incorrect because security groups do not affect DHCP-based IP assignment. Option B is incorrect because the EBS volume type (e.g., gp3) does not impact health checks. Option D is incorrect because the instance type is not related to DHCP configuration; Windows Server 2016 is compatible with most current instance types.

Answer

The security group does not allow inbound RDP.

Answer

The EBS volume type is not gp3.

Answer

The instance type is not compatible with Windows Server 2016.

Question 15

A company is modernizing its application by breaking a monolith into microservices on Amazon EKS. The application uses a shared PostgreSQL database. The company wants to implement a database-per-service pattern. The migration must be done with zero downtime. Which approach should the company use?

Accepted Answer

Implement the strangler fig pattern: gradually migrate functionality and data to new services.. The strangler fig pattern incrementally extracts functionality from the monolith into new microservices, each with its own database, while keeping the monolith running. This allows zero-downtime migration because traffic is gradually shifted, and data can be migrated in phases with dual-write or CDC synchronization. It is the standard approach for decomposing a monolith into a database-per-service architecture without downtime.

Answer

Use AWS DMS with CDC to replicate the shared database to multiple target databases.

Answer

Use Amazon RDS read replicas to create separate databases for each service.

Answer

Create new databases for each service, migrate data during a maintenance window.