SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Test 16 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company is deploying a containerized application on Amazon EKS. The application requires persistent storage that can be shared across multiple pods in different Availability Zones. Which TWO storage solutions meet this requirement? (Choose TWO.)

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

Accepted Answer

Amazon FSx for Lustre. Amazon EFS provides a fully managed, scalable, and elastic NFS file system that can be mounted concurrently by multiple Amazon EKS pods across different Availability Zones, making it suitable for shared persistent storage. Amazon FSx for Lustre is a high-performance file system optimized for workloads like machine learning and HPC, and it supports concurrent access from multiple clients across AZs, meeting the requirement for shared storage.

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Amazon EBS with io2 volumes

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Amazon S3

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Amazon EC2 Instance Store

Question 2

A company is designing a new microservices architecture on AWS. Each service needs to store and retrieve small amounts of configuration data (under 10 KB per item) with low latency. The data is accessed frequently and must be highly available across multiple Availability Zones. Which AWS service should be used?

Accepted Answer

Amazon DynamoDB. Amazon DynamoDB is the correct choice because it is a fully managed NoSQL key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond latency at any scale, making it ideal for frequently accessed configuration data under 10 KB. It provides built-in high availability and durability by automatically replicating data across three Availability Zones in an AWS Region, meeting the requirement for multi-AZ resilience without manual setup.

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Amazon S3

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Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached

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Amazon RDS for MySQL

Question 3

A company is designing a new data lake on AWS. The data lake must support SQL queries using Amazon Athena and also allow Amazon SageMaker to access training data. The solution must minimize storage costs for infrequently accessed data while providing immediate access when needed. Which storage tier should be used for the data lake?

Accepted Answer

Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering. Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering is the correct choice because it automatically moves data between access tiers (frequent, infrequent, and archive instant access) based on changing access patterns, optimizing storage costs without compromising performance. This meets the requirement for infrequently accessed data to be cost-effective while still providing immediate access for Athena queries and SageMaker training, as data in the archive instant access tier can be retrieved within milliseconds.

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Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive

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Amazon S3 Standard

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Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access

Question 4

A company is designing a web application that must handle sudden spikes in traffic. The application runs in a VPC and uses an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to distribute traffic to EC2 instances. The solution must be cost-effective for variable traffic patterns. Which scaling strategy should be used?

Accepted Answer

Target tracking scaling policy based on average CPU utilization. Target tracking scaling policy is the correct choice because it automatically adjusts the desired capacity of the Auto Scaling group to maintain a target metric (e.g., average CPU utilization at 50%) without requiring manual thresholds or step adjustments. This policy is ideal for variable traffic patterns as it dynamically scales in response to real-time demand, optimizing cost by adding or removing instances only as needed.

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Simple scaling with step adjustments

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Scheduled scaling

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Manual scaling

Question 5

A company is designing a serverless application using AWS Lambda. The function needs to process files uploaded to an S3 bucket and store metadata in DynamoDB. The solution must handle up to 1,000 concurrent invocations. Which configuration should be used to avoid throttling?

Accepted Answer

Set reserved concurrency to 1,000. Setting reserved concurrency to 1,000 ensures that the Lambda function has its own dedicated concurrency pool of 1,000, preventing throttling as long as the account's regional concurrency limit is at least 1,000. Option A is unnecessary since the default limit is already 1,000. Option B (provisioned concurrency) addresses cold starts, not throttling. Option C (DLQ) handles failures after invocation, not prevention of throttling.

Answer

Request a concurrency limit increase from AWS Support

Answer

Enable provisioned concurrency

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Use a dead-letter queue (DLQ) to retry throttled requests

Question 6

A company is designing a new multi-region disaster recovery solution for a critical database. The database runs on Amazon RDS for MySQL in us-east-1. The recovery point objective (RPO) is 1 second, and the recovery time objective (RTO) is 1 minute. Which strategy meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Multi-AZ RDS instance with a cross-Region read replica in us-west-2. A Multi-AZ RDS instance with a cross-Region read replica in us-west-2 can achieve an RPO of 1 second and an RTO of 1 minute. The cross-Region read replica uses asynchronous replication with a typical lag of less than 1 second, meeting the RPO. For RTO, you can promote the read replica to a standalone instance in under a minute, and the Multi-AZ configuration in the primary region ensures high availability during the promotion process.

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Single-AZ RDS instance with cross-Region snapshot copy

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Multi-AZ RDS instance in us-east-1

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Amazon Aurora Global Database

Question 7

A company is designing a solution to capture changes from an Amazon RDS database and stream them to a data lake. Which AWS service should be used to capture database changes in real time?

Accepted Answer

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) with change data capture (CDC). AWS DMS with change data capture (CDC) is the correct service because it is specifically designed to capture ongoing changes from source databases (including Amazon RDS) in near real time and replicate them to targets like Amazon S3 (data lake). DMS reads the database transaction logs (e.g., MySQL binlog, PostgreSQL WAL) to capture inserts, updates, and deletes without requiring application-level polling or custom code, making it the most appropriate managed solution for streaming database changes to a data lake.

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AWS Glue with streaming ETL

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AWS Lambda with database polling

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Amazon Kinesis Data Streams with a custom producer

Question 8

A company is designing a new microservices application using Amazon ECS with Fargate. The services need to communicate securely within the VPC. Which approach should be used for service discovery?

Accepted Answer

AWS Cloud Map. AWS Cloud Map is the correct choice because it provides a fully managed service discovery solution that integrates natively with Amazon ECS and Fargate. It allows microservices to register themselves with DNS-based or API-based service endpoints, enabling dynamic, secure communication within the VPC without requiring manual IP management or external DNS configuration.

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Amazon Route 53 private hosted zones with health checks

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VPC peering connections between services

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Application Load Balancer with path-based routing

Question 9

A company is designing a real-time analytics pipeline to process streaming data from IoT devices. The solution must be serverless and handle data transformation before storage. Which combination of services is most cost-effective?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to Amazon S3. It combines Kinesis Data Streams for real-time ingestion, AWS Lambda for serverless data transformation, and Kinesis Data Firehose to buffer and deliver transformed data to Amazon S3. This architecture is serverless, scales automatically, and is cost-effective as you pay only for data throughput and compute time without provisioning any servers.

Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon EC2 instances for transformation, and Amazon S3

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Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), AWS Lambda, and Amazon S3

Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for real-time SQL and Amazon S3

Question 10

A company is designing a new application that must meet PCI DSS compliance requirements. The application will process credit card transactions and store encrypted data. Which AWS service should be used to manage the encryption keys?

Accepted Answer

AWS CloudHSM. AWS CloudHSM is the correct choice because PCI DSS requires that encryption keys used to protect cardholder data be stored in a hardware security module (HSM) that is FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated, and that the customer retains sole control over the keys. CloudHSM provides dedicated, single-tenant HSM appliances that you manage directly, ensuring you meet the key management and physical security requirements of PCI DSS without sharing the HSM with other AWS customers.

Answer

AWS Key Management Service (KMS)

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AWS Secrets Manager

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Amazon S3 server-side encryption (SSE-S3)

Question 11

A company is designing a new hybrid cloud architecture that extends on-premises storage to AWS. The solution must provide low-latency access to frequently accessed data and use AWS storage for backup. Which TWO services should be used together?

Accepted Answer

AWS Storage Gateway (File Gateway). AWS Storage Gateway (File Gateway) provides a low-latency, on-premises cache for frequently accessed data while asynchronously uploading the underlying data to Amazon S3 for durable backup. This hybrid architecture allows applications to access data with local file-system performance while leveraging S3 as the backup target, meeting both the low-latency and backup requirements.

Answer

Amazon EFS

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AWS Snowball Edge

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AWS Direct Connect

Question 12

A company is designing a new serverless application using AWS Lambda. The function needs to access an Amazon RDS database. Which THREE practices should be followed to avoid connection exhaustion?

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon RDS Proxy to pool connections. Amazon RDS Proxy sits between Lambda and the database, managing a pool of established connections. It reduces the overhead of opening and closing connections per invocation and prevents Lambda from exhausting database connections during concurrent executions. This is the recommended pattern for serverless applications with relational databases.

Answer

Store the database connection in a global variable to reuse across invocations

Answer

Assign a static IP address to the Lambda function

Question 13

A company is designing a new data processing pipeline that must transform data from JSON to Parquet format. The pipeline should run daily and handle data up to 10 GB. Which TWO AWS services can be used to perform this transformation?

Accepted Answer

AWS Glue. AWS Glue is correct because it provides a fully managed ETL service that can natively read JSON and write Parquet, with built-in transforms and schema inference. Glue jobs run on Apache Spark under the hood, making them suitable for daily batch processing of up to 10 GB without managing any infrastructure.

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Amazon EMR

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AWS Lambda

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Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

Question 14

A company is designing a new microservices platform on AWS. The platform consists of 50 microservices, each running in its own Amazon ECS service on AWS Fargate. The services communicate via REST APIs. The company wants to implement a service mesh to handle traffic routing, observability, and security (mTLS). They also need to meet compliance requirements that all traffic between services must be encrypted and logged. The solution must be fully managed and reduce operational overhead. After implementing the service mesh, the operations team notices that latency between services has increased by 20%, and some services are experiencing connection timeouts. The team has enabled mTLS and distributed tracing. Which course of action should the team take to diagnose and resolve the latency issues?

Accepted Answer

Check the Envoy proxy resource limits in the App Mesh configuration and increase the CPU and memory allocated to the sidecar proxies.. AWS App Mesh can inject Envoy sidecar proxies, and increasing the proxy resources can reduce latency caused by insufficient CPU or memory. Option B (using AWS Cloud Map for service discovery) does not address the latency issues; Cloud Map is a service discovery mechanism, not a replacement for the service mesh. Option C (replacing the service mesh with VPC peering and security groups) removes the service mesh benefits like mTLS and observability, and is not a direct solution to proxy resource constraints. Option D (converting to Lambda and API Gateway) is a major redesign and not necessary for diagnosing the latency problem.

Answer

Use AWS Cloud Map for service discovery instead of App Mesh.

Answer

Replace the service mesh with VPC peering and security groups, and use direct HTTP calls.

Answer

Convert the microservices to AWS Lambda functions and use API Gateway.

Question 15

A company is designing a multi-region active-active application using Amazon Aurora Global Database. The application writes to a custom domain endpoint that routes to the primary cluster. To minimize write latency, the application should write to the nearest region. Which configuration should the solutions architect use?

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon DynamoDB global tables instead of Aurora Global Database, as DynamoDB supports multi-region writes.. Amazon Aurora Global Database does not support multi-region writes; it has a single primary (writer) cluster and multiple read-only secondary regions. Amazon DynamoDB global tables, however, natively support active-active multi-region writes, allowing the application to write to the nearest region and achieve low write latency. Therefore, DynamoDB global tables are the correct service for this requirement.

Answer

Configure Aurora Global Database with multiple primary clusters, each in a different region, and use Route 53 to route writes.

Answer

Use Aurora cross-region read replicas and failover to a secondary region for writes.

Answer

Use Route 53 latency-based routing to direct writes to the nearest region. Each region has its own Aurora cluster.