SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Test 7 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company is designing a new application that will run on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application needs to store session state. Which AWS service provides a fully managed, highly scalable solution for session state management?

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

Accepted Answer

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis. Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is the correct choice because it provides a fully managed, in-memory data store that is ideal for session state management. Redis offers sub-millisecond latency, built-in replication, and automatic failover, making it highly scalable and durable for session data. The Application Load Balancer can be configured with stickiness (session affinity) to route requests to the same EC2 instance, but using ElastiCache for Redis decouples session state from the compute layer, enabling stateless application tiers and seamless scaling.

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Amazon DynamoDB

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Amazon S3

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Amazon RDS for MySQL

Question 2

A company is deploying a containerized microservices architecture on Amazon ECS with Fargate. They need to securely store and rotate database credentials. Which AWS service should they use?

Accepted Answer

AWS Secrets Manager. AWS Secrets Manager is the correct choice because it is purpose-built for securely storing, automatically rotating, and managing the lifecycle of database credentials. It integrates natively with Amazon ECS and Fargate via task role permissions, allowing containers to retrieve secrets at runtime without hardcoding them. Secrets Manager also supports automatic rotation of credentials for Amazon RDS, Aurora, and other databases, which directly addresses the requirement for credential rotation.

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AWS CloudHSM

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AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles

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AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store

Question 3

A company is designing a disaster recovery solution that must recover an application in a different AWS Region within 15 minutes of a failure. The application uses an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster. Which combination of strategies will meet the recovery time objective (RTO) while minimizing costs?

Accepted Answer

Configure an Aurora cross-Region replica in the DR Region. Use Amazon Route 53 to fail over DNS.. An Aurora cross-Region replica asynchronously replicates data to a DR Region with minimal performance impact, and you can promote it to a standalone cluster within minutes. Combined with Amazon Route 53 DNS failover, this achieves an RTO under 15 minutes while keeping costs low, as you only pay for the replica storage and minimal compute until failover.

Answer

Deploy a standby Aurora cluster in the DR Region and use synchronous replication.

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Use Aurora Global Database with a secondary cluster in the DR Region.

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Take daily snapshots and restore them in the DR Region using cross-Region snapshot copy.

Question 4

A company wants to serve static content (images and videos) to users worldwide with low latency. The content is stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. What is the most cost-effective solution?

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon CloudFront with the S3 bucket as the origin.. Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) that caches static content at edge locations worldwide, reducing latency for users. Using an S3 bucket as the origin is cost-effective because CloudFront egress costs are often lower than direct S3 data transfer, and you only pay for data transfer out from CloudFront and occasional origin fetches. This solution minimizes origin load and provides low-latency delivery without the overhead of managing servers or additional acceleration services.

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Use AWS Global Accelerator with endpoints pointing to the S3 bucket.

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Deploy EC2 instances in multiple Regions and use a load balancer.

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Host the content directly from the S3 bucket and use S3 Transfer Acceleration.

Question 5

A company runs a web application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. The application experiences sudden traffic spikes. What is the most effective way to ensure the application can handle the spikes without manual intervention?

Accepted Answer

Use a target tracking scaling policy based on average CPU utilization.. A target tracking scaling policy based on average CPU utilization is the most effective approach because it automatically adjusts the Auto Scaling group's desired capacity in real-time to maintain a target CPU metric (e.g., 50%). This dynamic scaling method responds directly to sudden traffic spikes without any manual intervention, ensuring the application can handle increased load while optimizing cost.

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Increase the instance size to handle more load per instance.

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Manually increase the desired capacity when traffic spikes.

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Use scheduled scaling to add instances at expected peak times.

Question 6

A company is migrating a legacy on-premises application to AWS. The application requires a shared file system that can be mounted by multiple EC2 instances concurrently, with strong consistency and low-latency access. Which AWS storage solution should be used?

Accepted Answer

Amazon EFS. Amazon EFS provides a fully managed, scalable, and elastic NFS file system that can be mounted concurrently by multiple EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones. It offers strong read-after-write consistency and low-latency access, making it ideal for shared file workloads requiring POSIX permissions and concurrent access.

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AWS Storage Gateway File Gateway

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Amazon EBS with multi-attach enabled

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Amazon S3

Question 7

A company wants to decouple a front-end web application from a backend processing service to improve scalability. Which AWS service should be used to send tasks from the web tier to the processing tier?

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 front-end web application from the backend processing service. The web tier can send tasks (messages) to an SQS queue, and the processing tier can poll and consume those messages asynchronously, enabling independent scaling of each tier. This pattern is a classic example of a producer-consumer architecture where SQS acts as the buffer between components.

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Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

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Amazon EventBridge

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Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

Question 8

A company is designing a new application that will run on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application needs to store session state. Which AWS service provides a fully managed, highly scalable solution for session state management?

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

Accepted Answer

Enable EBS encryption on the volumes and configure the application to use TLS for all network traffic.. It addresses both encryption requirements: EBS encryption ensures data at rest is encrypted using AWS KMS-managed keys, and configuring the application to use TLS encrypts data in transit between clients and the EC2 instances. This combination directly meets the stated security needs without relying on external services like S3 or ACM for the EC2-hosted application.

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Use Amazon S3 with server-side encryption and enforce HTTPS.

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Use AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to generate keys and enable encryption on EBS volumes.

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Use AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) to issue TLS certificates and configure the application to use HTTPS.

Question 9

A company is building a serverless application using AWS Lambda. The function needs to access a private Amazon RDS MySQL database. The Lambda function and the RDS instance are in the same VPC. What is the correct way to configure the Lambda function to connect to the database?

Accepted Answer

Configure the Lambda function to run in the same VPC, subnets, and security group as the RDS instance.. Lambda functions in a VPC must be configured with the same VPC, subnets, and security group as the RDS instance to establish direct network connectivity. By placing the Lambda function in the same security group, you can allow inbound traffic from the security group itself (self-referencing rule) or explicitly open the database port (e.g., 3306 for MySQL) to the Lambda's security group. This ensures traffic stays within the VPC and does not traverse the internet, meeting security and latency requirements.

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Use a NAT Gateway to allow Lambda to access RDS through the internet.

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Assign an IAM role that allows Lambda to access RDS and configure the security group to allow traffic from the Lambda service.

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Attach an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) to the Lambda function in the same subnet as the RDS instance.

Question 10

A company is designing a new application that will run on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application needs to store session state. Which AWS service provides a fully managed, highly scalable solution for session state management?

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

Accepted Answer

Amazon RDS Multi-AZ. Amazon RDS Multi-AZ provides built-in high availability across Availability Zones by automatically provisioning a synchronous standby replica in a different AZ, with automatic failover. Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is inherently highly available across AZs; it distributes traffic to healthy targets in multiple AZs and automatically fails over if an AZ becomes unavailable. While Amazon S3 also stores objects redundantly across multiple AZs, the question specifically asks for services that provide built-in HA across AZs in the context of application design, and the two most directly relevant services are RDS Multi-AZ and ELB. Amazon EBS volumes and EC2 instances are AZ-scoped and do not provide built-in cross-AZ HA.

Answer

Amazon EBS volumes

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Amazon EC2 instances

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Amazon S3

Question 11

A company is designing a new application that will run on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application needs to store session state. Which AWS service provides a fully managed, highly scalable solution for session state management?

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

Accepted Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is the correct ingestion service because it provides a durable, scalable, real-time data streaming platform that can handle the high throughput from thousands of IoT devices. It stores data in shards for up to 365 days, enabling Apache Flink to consume and process the data with exactly-once semantics and low latency.

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AWS Lambda

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Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

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Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

Question 12

A company wants to implement a cost-effective disaster recovery strategy for a production Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database. The solution must provide a recovery point objective (RPO) of less than 5 minutes and a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than 15 minutes. Which strategies meet these requirements? (Choose THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Deploy the database in a Multi-AZ configuration.. Multi-AZ deployments provide synchronous replication to a standby in a different Availability Zone, achieving an RPO near zero and RTO typically under 2 minutes, meeting the requirements. Option C is correct because manual snapshots can be copied to another Region, and while snapshots themselves are not continuous, they can be taken frequently (e.g., every few minutes) to meet a 5-minute RPO, and the RTO can be under 15 minutes when restoring from a snapshot in the same Region or by promoting a read replica. Option E is correct because a cross-Region read replica provides asynchronous replication with an RPO typically under 1 second and can be promoted to a standalone database within minutes, meeting both RPO and RTO. Option A is incorrect because automated backups are point-in-time, but the RPO is typically up to 5 minutes (backup window) and RTO is longer due to restore time, often exceeding 15 minutes. Option D is incorrect because DMS continuous replication is a viable DR strategy, but it is not as cost-effective as the other options and introduces additional complexity; also, the requirement specifically asks for strategies involving Amazon RDS features, and DMS is a separate service.

Answer

Enable automated backups with point-in-time recovery.

Answer

Use AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) for continuous replication to a target in another Region.

Question 13

A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to AWS. The application currently uses a shared filesystem for storing user-uploaded documents. The company wants to decouple storage and compute, ensure high durability, and minimize operational overhead. Which AWS service should the company use to replace the shared filesystem?

Accepted Answer

Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is the correct choice because it provides a highly durable (99.999999999% durability), scalable, and fully managed object storage service that decouples storage from compute. Unlike a shared filesystem, S3 allows multiple compute instances (e.g., EC2, Lambda) to access the same documents via HTTP/HTTPS APIs without needing a mounted filesystem, minimizing operational overhead. It also supports features like versioning, lifecycle policies, and cross-region replication, making it ideal for user-uploaded documents in a migration scenario.

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Amazon EBS

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Amazon EFS

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Amazon FSx for Windows File Server

Question 14

A company runs a high-traffic web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application experiences intermittent latency spikes during peak hours. Analysis shows that the latency spikes correlate with high CPU utilization on the EC2 instances. The company wants to reduce latency without over-provisioning. Which solution is MOST cost-effective and scalable?

Accepted Answer

Configure an Auto Scaling group with a target tracking scaling policy based on average CPU utilization.. A target tracking scaling policy based on average CPU utilization automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances in the Auto Scaling group to maintain a target CPU utilization level. This directly addresses the latency spikes caused by high CPU utilization during peak hours by scaling out horizontally, while scaling in during low traffic to avoid over-provisioning, making it both cost-effective and scalable.

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Add Amazon ElastiCache to cache database queries.

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Use Spot Instances to reduce costs and scale horizontally.

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Increase the EC2 instance size to handle peak loads.

Question 15

A startup is building a serverless application using AWS Lambda for business logic and Amazon DynamoDB for data storage. The application must process a high volume of writes to a single DynamoDB table. The development team is concerned about throttling due to hot partitions. Which design should the team implement to avoid throttling?

Accepted Answer

Use a composite primary key with a partition key that has high cardinality, such as a user ID.. Using a partition key with high cardinality, such as a user ID, ensures that write requests are evenly distributed across all partitions in the DynamoDB table. This prevents any single partition from becoming a hot partition, which would otherwise lead to throttling when the partition's throughput capacity is exceeded. DynamoDB scales by splitting partitions based on the partition key's hash, so high cardinality is essential for avoiding throttling under high write volumes.

Answer

Enable DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) to cache write operations.

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Use a global secondary index (GSI) as the primary index for writes.

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Add a local secondary index (LSI) to the table.