SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Test 32 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company is designing a new event-driven architecture using AWS services. The system must process events from multiple sources, filter and route events to different consumers, and ensure that events are processed exactly once. Which THREE services should be used to build this architecture? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

AWS Lambda functions to consume events from queues and process them.. AWS Lambda functions are correct because they can be triggered by Amazon SQS FIFO queues to process messages one at a time, preserving the order and enabling idempotent processing. Lambda integrates natively with SQS, automatically scaling the number of concurrent executions based on the queue depth, which supports the exactly-once processing requirement when combined with FIFO queues.

Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to deliver events to destinations.

Answer

AWS AppSync to provide real-time subscriptions for events.

Question 2

A company is designing a new cloud-native application that uses Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB. The application handles user authentication using Amazon Cognito User Pools. During a stress test, the team notices that some requests are failing with HTTP 503 (Service Unavailable) errors. The CloudWatch logs show that Lambda functions are being throttled, and the DynamoDB table is experiencing high write throttling. The team needs to resolve these issues while maintaining low latency. Which solution is the MOST effective?

Accepted Answer

Set Lambda reserved concurrency to a value that covers peak load and enable DynamoDB auto scaling with a target utilization of 70%.. Option A is correct because setting Lambda reserved concurrency ensures that the function always has capacity available to handle peak load without being throttled by the account-level concurrency limit, while DynamoDB auto scaling with a target utilization of 70% dynamically adjusts write capacity to match traffic patterns, preventing write throttling. This combination directly addresses both throttling issues without introducing additional latency from buffering or caching layers.

Answer

Use Amazon SQS to buffer requests to Lambda and configure a DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) cluster for caching.

Answer

Increase the DynamoDB write capacity units to the maximum expected peak and configure Lambda provisioned concurrency.

Answer

Replace AWS Lambda with Amazon ECS on Fargate and use an Application Auto Scaling target tracking policy.

Question 3

A company is designing a new solution to host a static website with global audience. The website content includes HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images. The company wants to minimize latency for users worldwide and reduce the load on the origin server. The origin server is an Amazon S3 bucket configured for static website hosting. Which solution should be used to achieve these goals?

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon CloudFront as a content delivery network (CDN) in front of the S3 bucket.. Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) that caches static content (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images) at edge locations worldwide, significantly reducing latency for a global audience. By placing CloudFront in front of an S3 bucket configured for static website hosting, it offloads requests from the origin server, reducing load and improving performance. CloudFront also supports features like custom SSL, geo-restriction, and origin shield to further optimize delivery.

Answer

Use AWS Global Accelerator to route traffic to the S3 bucket.

Answer

Use AWS Lambda@Edge to serve content from edge locations.

Answer

Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on the bucket.

Question 4

A company is designing a microservices architecture on AWS ECS with Fargate. Each service needs to store and retrieve session state. The solution must be highly available and low latency. Which AWS service should be used for session state storage?

Accepted Answer

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis. Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is the correct choice because it provides an in-memory data store with sub-millisecond latency, ideal for session state storage in a microservices architecture. Redis supports data structures like hashes and strings that map directly to session data patterns, and its replication and cluster modes ensure high availability across multiple Availability Zones. Fargate tasks can connect to ElastiCache via private subnets, maintaining low latency without the overhead of disk-based I/O.

Answer

Amazon RDS for MySQL

Answer

Amazon S3

Answer

Amazon DynamoDB

Question 5

A company is migrating a monolithic application to a serverless architecture using AWS Lambda. The application reads and writes to an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database. The database connection pool is exhausted during peak traffic. Which design change should a solutions architect recommend to avoid connection exhaustion?

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon RDS Proxy to pool and share database connections.. Amazon RDS Proxy sits between the Lambda function and the RDS database, managing a pool of database connections and reusing them across multiple invocations. This prevents the Lambda function from exhausting the database connection pool during traffic spikes, as each Lambda instance does not need to open its own connection. RDS Proxy also handles connection multiplexing and reduces the overhead of establishing new connections.

Answer

Use Amazon SQS to buffer write requests to the database.

Answer

Use DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) as a caching layer.

Answer

Increase the max_connections parameter in the RDS parameter group.

Question 6

A company wants to store application logs in a centralized location for analysis. The logs are generated by EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The solution must be cost-effective and support real-time analysis. Which service should be used to collect and analyze the logs?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Amazon CloudWatch Logs is the correct choice because it natively integrates with EC2 instances via the CloudWatch Logs agent to collect, monitor, and analyze log data in real time. It provides a centralized log storage with built-in metric filters and subscription filters for real-time analysis, making it cost-effective for logs generated by Auto Scaling groups without requiring additional infrastructure.

Answer

Amazon S3

Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

Answer

Amazon Elasticsearch Service

Question 7

A company is designing a disaster recovery solution for a critical application running on EC2 with data in an Amazon RDS MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. The recovery time objective (RTO) is 15 minutes and recovery point objective (RPO) is 1 hour. Which strategy meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Create a cross-Region read replica of the RDS DB instance.. Option B is correct because a cross-Region read replica of an Amazon RDS MySQL DB instance provides asynchronous replication with a typical replication lag of seconds to minutes, meeting the RPO of 1 hour and RTO of 15 minutes by promoting the replica to a standalone instance in the event of a disaster. This approach minimizes data loss and allows rapid failover without relying on snapshot restoration or backup copying.

Answer

Enable Multi-AZ in a different Region.

Answer

Take daily snapshots of the RDS DB instance and copy them to another Region.

Answer

Use Amazon S3 cross-Region replication for database backups.

Question 8

A company is deploying a web application on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. The application must be accessible over HTTPS only and must automatically redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS. The SSL/TLS certificate is provided by AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). How should this be configured?

Accepted Answer

Configure the environment’s load balancer to listen on port 443 with the ACM certificate and port 80 with a redirect rule.. Option C is correct because Elastic Beanstalk environments using a load balancer (ALB or CLB) can be configured to listen on port 443 with the ACM certificate for HTTPS termination, and simultaneously define a listener on port 80 with a redirect action that sends HTTP traffic to HTTPS. This is the simplest and most scalable approach, as it offloads SSL termination and redirection to the load balancer, eliminating the need to manage certificates or redirection logic on individual instances.

Answer

Use a NAT instance to perform SSL termination and redirect.

Answer

Install the certificate on each EC2 instance and configure the web server to redirect HTTP to HTTPS.

Answer

Deploy a CloudFront distribution with the ACM certificate and redirect HTTP to HTTPS at the distribution level.

Question 9

A company wants to decouple a frontend API from backend processing to improve scalability and fault tolerance. The frontend sends requests that can be processed asynchronously. Which AWS service should be used to decouple the components?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is the correct choice because it provides a fully managed message queue that decouples the frontend API from backend processing. The frontend can send requests to an SQS queue, and backend consumers can poll and process messages asynchronously, which improves scalability by buffering traffic spikes and enhances fault tolerance by persisting messages until they are successfully processed.

Answer

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

Answer

AWS Step Functions

Question 10

A company is designing a data lake solution on Amazon S3. Data is ingested from multiple sources and stored in a raw bucket. The data must be processed and transformed before being moved to a curated bucket. The processing logic is complex and includes conditional transformations. Which service should be used to orchestrate the transformation pipeline?

Accepted Answer

AWS Step Functions. AWS Step Functions is the correct choice because it is designed to orchestrate complex, multi-step workflows with conditional branching, retries, and error handling. It can coordinate AWS Lambda functions, AWS Glue jobs, and other services to process and transform data from a raw S3 bucket to a curated bucket, making it ideal for a transformation pipeline with complex logic.

Answer

AWS Data Pipeline

Answer

AWS Lambda functions

Answer

AWS Glue ETL jobs

Question 11

A company is building a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster on AWS for genomics research. The compute nodes require low-latency inter-node communication. Which networking solution should be used?

Accepted Answer

Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA). Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) is a network interface that enables HPC and machine learning applications to achieve low-latency inter-node communication by bypassing the operating system kernel and providing OS-bypass capabilities via the Libfabric library. This is essential for tightly coupled HPC workloads like genomics research, where MPI (Message Passing Interface) jobs require microsecond-level latency and high throughput between compute nodes.

Answer

Enhanced Networking (ENA)

Answer

VPC Peering

Answer

AWS Direct Connect

Question 12

A company is designing a CI/CD pipeline for a containerized application using AWS CodePipeline. The application is deployed to Amazon ECS with Fargate. The pipeline must automatically build and test code changes before deploying to production. Which service should be used to build and test the Docker images?

Accepted Answer

AWS CodeBuild. AWS CodeBuild is the correct service because it is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy. In this scenario, CodeBuild can build the Docker image from a Dockerfile, run unit or integration tests inside the build environment, and then push the image to Amazon ECR, all within the CI/CD pipeline defined in AWS CodePipeline.

Answer

AWS CodeDeploy

Answer

Amazon ECR

Answer

AWS CodeCommit

Question 13

A company is designing a web application that must support millions of concurrent users. The application uses a RESTful API frontend and a relational database backend. Which TWO strategies should be implemented to improve scalability?

Accepted Answer

Implement read replicas for the database.. Read replicas (Option C) offload read traffic from the primary database instance, allowing the relational database to handle a higher volume of concurrent read queries without degrading write performance. This directly improves scalability for read-heavy workloads common in web applications.

Answer

Use Amazon SQS to queue database write requests.

Answer

Use sticky sessions (session affinity) on the load balancer.

Answer

Use a single large EC2 instance for the database.

Question 14

A company is migrating a legacy application to AWS. The application consists of several components that communicate via TCP. The solutions architect must design a solution that minimizes operational overhead and provides high availability. Which TWO strategies should be used?

Accepted Answer

Use managed services like Amazon RDS and Amazon ElastiCache to reduce operational overhead.. Option B is correct because using managed services like Amazon RDS and Amazon ElastiCache offloads administrative tasks such as patching, backups, and replication setup, significantly reducing operational overhead. Option E is correct because an Application Load Balancer (ALB) distributes incoming TCP traffic across multiple EC2 instances in different Availability Zones, providing high availability and fault tolerance for the application components.

Answer

Use instance store volumes for data persistence.

Answer

Use Spot Instances for all compute resources.

Answer

Use VPC Peering to connect components.

Question 15

A company wants to implement a serverless data processing pipeline on AWS. The pipeline reads CSV files from Amazon S3, transforms the data, and loads it into Amazon Redshift. Which THREE AWS services should be used to build this pipeline?

Accepted Answer

AWS Lambda. AWS Lambda is correct because it can be triggered by S3 events when a CSV file is uploaded, and it can execute lightweight data transformation logic (e.g., parsing CSV rows, filtering, or converting formats) before loading the data into Amazon Redshift. Lambda is serverless, scales automatically, and integrates natively with S3 and Redshift via the AWS SDK, making it ideal for event-driven, short-running transformations in a serverless pipeline.

Answer

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)

Answer

Amazon EC2