SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Test 34 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A developer ran the AWS CLI command shown in the exhibit. The instance has an attached EBS volume with 'DeleteOnTermination' set to false. The instance will be started again soon. What will happen to the EBS volume when the instance is stopped?

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

Accepted Answer

The EBS volume remains attached to the instance and the data persists.. Stopping an EC2 instance does not affect the attached EBS volumes; they remain attached and their data persists. The 'DeleteOnTermination' attribute only controls behavior when the instance is terminated, not stopped. Since the instance will be started again soon, the volume stays attached with its data intact.

Answer

The EBS volume is detached but the data is preserved.

Answer

The EBS volume is deleted.

Answer

The EBS volume is deleted because the instance is stopped.

Question 2

A security engineer created the S3 bucket policy shown in the exhibit. The policy is intended to allow the role MyAppRole to get objects only if they are encrypted with SSE-S3. However, the role is getting access denied errors when trying to get objects that are encrypted with SSE-S3. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The condition key 's3:x-amz-server-side-encryption' checks the request header, not the object's encryption state.. The condition key `s3:x-amz-server-side-encryption` evaluates the `x-amz-server-side-encryption` request header sent by the client during the GET request, not the encryption state of the object stored in S3. Since the role is making GET requests without this header (or with a different value), the condition fails even though the object is encrypted with SSE-S3. To enforce that only objects encrypted with SSE-S3 can be retrieved, you must use a different approach, such as a bucket policy with `s3:ExistingObjectTag` or a pre-signed URL that includes the required header.

Answer

The Principal is incorrect; it should be the role name, not ARN.

Answer

The Resource ARN is incorrect; it should be 'arn:aws:s3:::my-bucket'.

Answer

The condition key is misspelled.

Question 3

A financial services company is designing a new application that processes sensitive transactions. The application runs on Amazon ECS with Fargate. The compliance team requires that all data in transit between the application and the database must be encrypted. The database is an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance. The application connects to the database using a connection string that includes the database endpoint. The security team has enabled encryption in transit on the RDS instance using a certificate. The application is currently failing to connect to the database with an error related to SSL/TLS. The development team verified that the connection string includes the sslmode=require parameter. What is the most likely cause of the connection failure?

Accepted Answer

The RDS DB parameter group does not have the 'rds.force_ssl' parameter set to 1.. The most likely cause is that the RDS DB parameter group does not have the 'rds.force_ssl' parameter set to 1. Even though the application uses sslmode=require in the connection string, the RDS instance must enforce SSL connections by setting this parameter. Without it, the RDS instance may not require SSL, leading to a connection failure when the client attempts to negotiate SSL. Option A is incorrect because RDS uses certificates signed by a trusted CA; the issue is not about trust. Option B is incorrect because the database port is 5432, not 443. Option C is incorrect because Fargate containers include necessary SSL libraries by default.

Answer

The RDS instance is using a public certificate that is not trusted by the application.

Answer

The security group for the RDS instance does not allow inbound traffic on port 443.

Answer

The Fargate task does not have the necessary SSL libraries installed.

Question 4

A media company is designing a new video processing pipeline on AWS. Videos are uploaded to an S3 bucket, which triggers an AWS Lambda function to start an AWS Elemental MediaConvert job. The MediaConvert job uses a custom job template. The pipeline must handle bursty uploads of up to 50 videos simultaneously. The company has noticed that some uploads are not being processed. The Lambda function is configured with a reserved concurrency of 10. The S3 event notification is configured to send events to the Lambda function. The MediaConvert job template is configured correctly. What is the most likely reason for the missed processing?

Accepted Answer

The Lambda function's reserved concurrency of 10 is too low, causing throttling and missed events.. With reserved concurrency set to 10, only 10 Lambda invocations can happen concurrently; if more than 50 uploads occur simultaneously (burst), many events will be throttled and not processed. Option A is incorrect because the job template is configured correctly. Option B is incorrect because S3 event notifications are reliable for Lambda triggers. Option D is incorrect because there is no evidence of timeout issues.

Answer

The MediaConvert job template is not being applied correctly.

Answer

The S3 event notification is not guaranteed to deliver events.

Answer

The Lambda function is failing due to a timeout.

Question 5

A startup is designing a new web application that will be hosted on AWS. The application consists of a static frontend and a backend API. The frontend is built with React and the backend is a RESTful API built with Node.js. The startup expects low traffic initially but wants to be able to scale to millions of users. The team wants to minimize operational overhead and cost. Which architecture should they use?

Accepted Answer

Host the frontend on Amazon S3 with static website hosting and the backend as AWS Lambda functions behind Amazon API Gateway.. S3 for static hosting and API Gateway with Lambda provides a serverless, scalable solution with low overhead. Option A is wrong because EC2 requires management. Option C is wrong because Lightsail has limited scalability. Option D is wrong because Elastic Beanstalk has more overhead than serverless.

Answer

Host the frontend and backend on a single EC2 instance using Amazon Lightsail.

Answer

Host the frontend on EC2 instances behind an ALB and the backend on EC2 instances behind another ALB.

Answer

Host the frontend on S3 and the backend on Amazon Elastic Beanstalk with a load balancer.

Question 6

A company is migrating a monolithic e-commerce application to AWS. The application consists of a web frontend, a REST API, and a PostgreSQL database. The migration plan is to containerize the frontend and API using Amazon ECS with Fargate, and use Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The company expects variable traffic with peak loads during promotional events. The architecture must be highly available and cost-effective. The operations team wants to minimize manual scaling interventions. Which solution should a Solutions Architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Deploy the API and frontend on Amazon ECS with Fargate. Use Application Auto Scaling with target tracking based on average CPU and memory utilization. Use Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with Multi-AZ deployment and Auto Scaling for storage.. It combines ECS with Fargate for serverless containers, Application Auto Scaling with target tracking based on CPU and memory utilization for automatic scaling, and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with Multi-AZ deployment for high availability and storage auto scaling. This meets the requirements for variable traffic, high availability, cost-effectiveness, and minimal manual intervention. Option A is wrong because it suggests Amazon DynamoDB instead of PostgreSQL, which is unsuitable for the relational workload. Option C is wrong because it uses EC2 instances with Auto Scaling, which adds management overhead and is less cost-effective than Fargate. Option D is wrong because it relies on scheduled scaling, which cannot handle unexpected spikes in traffic.

Answer

Deploy the API and frontend on Amazon ECS with Fargate. Use Application Auto Scaling with target tracking based on average CPU and memory utilization. Use Amazon DynamoDB for the database with on-demand capacity mode.

Answer

Deploy the API and frontend on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Use Auto Scaling groups with dynamic scaling policies. Use Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with Multi-AZ deployment.

Answer

Deploy the API and frontend on Amazon ECS with Fargate. Configure a scheduled task to scale out during known promotional events. Use Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with Multi-AZ deployment.

Question 7

A financial services company is designing a new system on AWS to process real-time stock trades. The system must handle up to 10,000 trades per second with end-to-end latency under 500 milliseconds. Trades are ingested via REST API, validated, enriched with market data, and stored in a database for regulatory compliance. The architecture must be highly available across three Availability Zones. The company wants to use AWS managed services to minimize operational overhead. Which solution should a Solutions Architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon API Gateway to ingest trades, send to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams for buffering, use AWS Lambda to process in parallel, and store results in DynamoDB with on-demand capacity.. It uses Amazon API Gateway for ingestion, Kinesis Data Streams for durable buffering and scalability (handles up to 10,000 tps by adding shards), AWS Lambda for stateless validation/enrichment (auto-scales with Kinesis), and DynamoDB with on-demand capacity for low-latency storage (millisecond response). This combination provides high availability across three AZs with minimal operational overhead. Option A is wrong because managing EC2 instances and RDS Multi-AZ adds operational overhead and slower scaling compared to serverless services. Option B is wrong because SNS does not provide a persistent buffer; if the Lambda subscriber is unavailable or throttled, messages can be lost, and ordering is not guaranteed. Option C is wrong because SQS FIFO queues have a maximum throughput of 3,000 tps (with batching) or 300 tps (without), which is insufficient for 10,000 tps. Additionally, Kinesis Data Streams is better suited for real-time streaming at high throughput.

Answer

Use Network Load Balancer to distribute trade requests to a fleet of EC2 instances running a custom Java application. The application processes trades and writes to Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ.

Answer

Use Amazon API Gateway to ingest trades, publish to an SNS topic, subscribe an SQS queue and a Lambda function. Lambda validates and enriches, then stores in DynamoDB.

Answer

Use Amazon API Gateway to ingest trades, send to an SQS FIFO queue for ordered processing, trigger an AWS Lambda function for validation and enrichment, and store in DynamoDB.

Question 8

A startup is building a serverless photo-sharing application on AWS. Users upload photos via a web app, which stores them in Amazon S3. Each upload triggers an AWS Lambda function that creates a thumbnail and stores it in another S3 bucket. The application is expected to have unpredictable traffic patterns. The startup wants to minimize costs and operational overhead while ensuring the thumbnail generation completes reliably. Which solution should a Solutions Architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Configure S3 event notifications to invoke a Lambda function directly upon upload to generate thumbnails.. Configuring S3 event notifications to directly invoke a Lambda function upon upload is a serverless, cost-effective solution that scales automatically with traffic, minimizes operational overhead, and ensures reliable thumbnail generation (Lambda retries on failure). Option A (ECS with Fargate) is more complex and expensive than necessary for this simple processing task. Option B (SQS queue) adds an unnecessary intermediate service, increasing latency and complexity without benefit. Option C (Auto Scaling EC2) requires managing servers, incurs costs even when idle, and is not serverless.

Answer

Use Amazon ECS with Fargate to run a container that processes S3 events and generates thumbnails.

Answer

Upload to S3, send a message to an SQS queue, and have a Lambda function poll the queue to generate thumbnails.

Answer

Use an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances to poll S3 for new uploads and generate thumbnails.

Question 9

A media company is designing a new video transcoding pipeline on AWS. Raw video files (up to 10 GB each) are uploaded by users to an S3 bucket. Each upload must be transcoded into multiple formats (MP4, WebM, HLS) and stored in another S3 bucket. The transcoding job can take up to 30 minutes per file. The company needs a solution that is cost-effective and can handle hundreds of concurrent uploads. The operations team wants to minimize maintenance. Which solution should a Solutions Architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Use S3 event notifications to invoke a Lambda function that submits a job to AWS Elemental MediaConvert for each file.. AWS Elemental MediaConvert is a fully managed, serverless media transcoding service designed for high-volume, multi-format video processing. Using S3 event notifications to invoke a Lambda function that submits a job to MediaConvert offloads the transcoding complexity, scales automatically to handle hundreds of concurrent uploads, and requires no infrastructure maintenance, making it both cost-effective and operationally minimal.

Answer

Use S3 event notifications to invoke an AWS Lambda function that performs transcoding and stores results.

Answer

Use an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances with transcoding software installed. Configure S3 events to send messages to an SQS queue, which the instances poll.

Answer

Use S3 event notifications to trigger an AWS Step Functions workflow that runs an ECS Fargate task for each file.

Question 10

A global e-commerce company is designing a new recommendation engine on AWS. The engine processes user behavior data (clicks, purchases) from multiple sources in real time and updates recommendations stored in Amazon DynamoDB. The data stream can reach 100,000 events per second. The solution must be highly available and process events with minimal latency (< 1 second). The company wants to use a managed streaming service and a real-time processing framework. Which solution should a Solutions Architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to ingest events, process them in real time with Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics using SQL, and write results to DynamoDB.. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams can ingest up to 100,000 events per second with shard-level scaling, and Kinesis Data Analytics (SQL) provides sub-second processing latency for real-time transformations. Writing directly to DynamoDB from the analytics application meets the <1 second latency requirement while maintaining high availability through Kinesis's built-in replication across three Availability Zones.

Answer

Use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to ingest events, transform data with Lambda, and deliver to DynamoDB.

Answer

Use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to ingest events, use AWS Lambda to process each event, and write results to DynamoDB.

Answer

Use Amazon MSK (Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka) to ingest events, process them with Apache Spark Streaming on Amazon EMR, and write to DynamoDB.

Question 11

A small business wants to host a simple static website on AWS. The website consists of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images. The company expects low traffic and wants to minimize costs. The website must be highly available and load quickly for users globally. Which solution should a Solutions Architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Store the website files in an S3 bucket configured for static website hosting, and use Amazon CloudFront as a CDN.. S3 static website hosting with CloudFront provides low cost, high availability, and global low latency. Option B is wrong because Lightsail with a load balancer and two instances is more expensive and overkill for a simple static site. Option C is wrong because a single EC2 instance is not highly available and costs more than S3. Option D is wrong because Elastic Beanstalk is designed for dynamic web apps, not static sites, and a single EC2 instance lacks high availability.

Answer

Host the website on Amazon Lightsail with a load balancer and two instances.

Answer

Host the website on a single EC2 instance running Apache web server, with an Elastic IP address.

Answer

Deploy the website on AWS Elastic Beanstalk with a single EC2 instance.

Question 12

A company is building a new microservices-based application on AWS using Amazon ECS with Fargate. The application has a frontend service, an order service, and a payment service. Services communicate synchronously via REST APIs. The company expects variable traffic and wants to ensure that failures in one service do not cascade to others. Which solution should a Solutions Architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Implement retry logic with exponential backoff, circuit breakers, and timeouts in each service's client code.. Implementing retry logic with exponential backoff, circuit breakers, and timeouts is the standard pattern to handle transient faults and prevent cascading failures in synchronous microservices communication. Circuit breakers stop calls to a failing service, allowing it to recover, while retries with backoff avoid overwhelming the service. Option A is wrong because API Gateway throttling only protects API Gateway itself, not cascading failures between internal services. Option C is wrong because converting to asynchronous messaging is an architectural change that may not be suitable for synchronous REST APIs and does not directly address failure cascading without additional patterns. Option D is wrong because deploying multiple instances across AZs improves availability but does not protect against failures within a single service instance; it does not prevent cascading failures.

Answer

Use Amazon API Gateway in front of each service to throttle requests and protect against traffic spikes.

Answer

Convert all inter-service communication to asynchronous messaging using Amazon SQS or SNS.

Answer

Deploy multiple instances of each service across multiple Availability Zones and use an Application Load Balancer.

Question 13

A healthcare company is designing a new system on AWS to store and analyze patient health records. The system must comply with HIPAA regulations. Data includes structured lab results and unstructured clinical notes. The company needs to run complex SQL queries on the structured data and perform natural language processing (NLP) on the unstructured data. The solution should be cost-effective and minimize administrative overhead. Which solution should a Solutions Architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Store structured data in Amazon Redshift, store unstructured data in S3, and use Amazon Comprehend Medical for NLP.. Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service that is ideal for running complex SQL queries on structured data, and it supports HIPAA compliance. Amazon Comprehend Medical is a HIPAA-eligible natural language processing (NLP) service specifically designed to extract medical information from unstructured clinical text. Storing unstructured data in Amazon S3 is cost-effective and scalable. This combination minimizes administrative overhead with managed services. Option A is incorrect because Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL is not optimized for complex analytics at scale and may require additional setup for performance. Option B is incorrect because Amazon Athena is best for ad-hoc queries and not ideal for frequent, complex SQL workloads; moreover, Amazon Textract is for document extraction (e.g., OCR), not NLP. Option C is incorrect because Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL database not suited for complex SQL queries, and Amazon SageMaker would require custom model building, increasing overhead compared to using a managed NLP service like Comprehend Medical.

Answer

Store structured data in Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, store unstructured data in S3, and use AWS Glue to run NLP jobs.

Answer

Store all data in S3, use Amazon Athena for SQL queries and Amazon Textract for NLP.

Answer

Store structured data in DynamoDB, store unstructured data in S3, use Amazon SageMaker to build custom NLP models.

Question 14

A company is designing a new application on AWS that processes real-time IoT sensor data from thousands of devices. The data must be ingested, processed, and stored for analysis. The company wants to use a serverless architecture to reduce operational overhead. The processing includes filtering, aggregation, and transformation. Which solution should a Solutions Architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Use AWS IoT Core to ingest data, use IoT rules to route data to Kinesis Data Analytics for real-time processing, and store results in S3.. AWS IoT Core is purpose-built for ingesting data from IoT devices, its rules engine can route data to Kinesis Data Analytics for real-time processing using SQL, and results can be stored in S3 for analysis. Option A is incorrect because Kinesis Data Firehose delivers data in batches, not real-time processing as required. Option B is incorrect because while Lambda can process, it may have concurrency limits and is less optimal for high-throughput streaming compared to Kinesis Data Analytics. Option C is incorrect because SQS is not designed for real-time streaming ingestion from IoT devices; it's a message queue, not a streaming service.

Answer

Use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to ingest data, use Kinesis Data Firehose to deliver data to S3, and use Athena for queries.

Answer

Use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to ingest data, trigger a Lambda function for processing, and store results in DynamoDB.

Answer

Use Amazon SQS to ingest sensor data, trigger a Lambda function for processing, and store results in DynamoDB.

Question 15

A company is designing a new multi-region disaster recovery solution for a critical application running on AWS. The primary region is us-east-1. The application uses Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ, and runs on EC2 instances behind an ALB. The RPO must be less than 5 minutes, and RTO less than 30 minutes. The company wants to minimize costs when the DR solution is not in use. Which solution should a Solutions Architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Set up an RDS MySQL cross-Region read replica in us-west-2. Keep a standby EC2 environment with Auto Scaling configured to scale from 0 to minimum instances using a CloudWatch alarm on health checks. Use Route 53 failover routing to switch DNS to us-west-2.. Option D meets the RPO of less than 5 minutes because RDS cross-Region read replicas use asynchronous replication with a typical lag of seconds. It meets the RTO of less than 30 minutes because the read replica can be promoted to a standalone primary in minutes. The standby EC2 environment with Auto Scaling set to 0 (scaling up based on health check alarms) minimizes cost when not in use. Route 53 failover routing redirects traffic to us-west-2 after promotion. Option A is incorrect because a single hot standby EC2 instance incurs ongoing cost, and it does not meet the cost minimization requirement. Option B is incorrect because automated snapshots have an RPO of up to 24 hours (not <5 minutes), and restoring to S3-mounted volumes is not a functional database serving solution. Option C is incorrect because Multi-AZ in both regions is costly (always running instances) and cross-Region load balancing with ALB is not a native feature for failover; plus Multi-AZ does not provide a separate read replica in another region for DR without additional replication.

Answer

Use RDS MySQL with cross-Region read replicas in us-west-2. Use a hot standby EC2 environment with a single instance. Use Route 53 failover routing.

Answer

Back up RDS MySQL to S3 using automated snapshots and copy them to us-west-2. Use EC2 instances with S3-mounted volumes to serve traffic from the backup.

Answer

Use RDS MySQL with Multi-AZ in us-east-1 and a second Multi-AZ deployment in us-west-2. Keep EC2 instances running in us-west-2 behind an ALB with cross-Region load balancing.