SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Test 9 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company is running a stateful web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application stores session data locally on the instance. The company wants to make the application highly available and fault-tolerant without rewriting the application code. What should the solutions architect do?

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

Accepted Answer

Configure the ALB with sticky sessions (session affinity) and use a custom cookie.. Configuring the ALB with sticky sessions (session affinity) using a custom cookie allows the ALB to consistently route requests from a user's session to the same EC2 instance, preserving the locally stored session state without requiring any application code changes. This approach leverages the ALB's built-in session affinity feature, which is transparent to the application and ensures high availability by distributing traffic across healthy instances while maintaining session continuity.

Answer

Replace the ALB with a Network Load Balancer (NLB) and enable cross-zone load balancing.

Answer

Move session state to Amazon ElastiCache and configure the ALB to use sticky sessions.

Answer

Use an Auto Scaling group to add more instances and distribute load.

Question 2

Refer to the exhibit. A solutions architect has attached this key policy to an AWS KMS key. The IAM role MyAppRole is used by an application running on an EC2 instance in us-east-1. The application tries to decrypt an object stored in the S3 bucket my-bucket using server-side encryption with AWS KMS (SSE-KMS). What will happen?

Accepted Answer

The decryption fails if the application calls KMS Decrypt directly instead of letting S3 decrypt.. The key policy includes a condition that limits the `kms:Decrypt` permission to only be allowed when the request comes from Amazon S3 (using `kms:ViaService`). When the application calls KMS Decrypt directly, the request does not come from S3, so the condition is not satisfied, and the decryption fails. The IAM role MyAppRole does not have an IAM policy granting `kms:Decrypt`, and the key policy does not grant it directly to the role. Options A, B, and D are incorrect because the decryption fails only when calling KMS directly, not because of the role's permissions or encryption context.

Answer

The decryption fails because the key policy does not grant decrypt to the role.

Answer

The decryption succeeds because the role has permissions via this key policy.

Answer

The decryption succeeds only if the object was uploaded with the correct encryption context.

Question 3

A company is designing a new application that will be deployed on Amazon EKS. The application must meet PCI DSS compliance requirements. Which TWO steps should the solutions architect take to secure the cluster?

Accepted Answer

Configure IAM roles and RBAC policies to limit access.. Option C is correct because configuring IAM roles for service accounts (IRSA) and Kubernetes RBAC policies enforces least-privilege access to the EKS control plane and cluster resources, a core PCI DSS requirement for restricting access to cardholder data environments. Option E is correct because enabling envelope encryption of Kubernetes Secrets with AWS KMS protects sensitive data such as credentials and tokens at rest, satisfying PCI DSS encryption requirements for stored data. Option A is not required as CloudTrail logging, while useful for audit trails, is not one of the two steps specifically needed to secure the cluster's access and data protections. Option B is not necessary because EKS natively supports the Amazon VPC CNI with Kubernetes NetworkPolicy enforcement, so Calico is not a mandatory step. Option D is not required because Bottlerocket, though a hardened OS, is an optional node choice rather than a required control for PCI DSS compliance on EKS.

Answer

Enable AWS CloudTrail logging for the EKS cluster.

Answer

Install Calico for network policy enforcement.

Answer

Use Bottlerocket as the node operating system.

Question 4

A company runs a high-traffic e-commerce platform on AWS. The application consists of a web tier, an application tier, and a database tier using Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with Multi-AZ. During a recent sales event, the database experienced high CPU utilization and read replicas were added to offload read traffic. However, the application team noticed that some product detail pages were showing stale data (prices and inventory levels) even though the primary database had the correct data. The application uses read replicas for read queries. The solutions architect investigated and found that the read replica lag was minimal (under 1 second). The application uses Django ORM with default transaction isolation. What is the most likely cause of the stale data?

Accepted Answer

The application is reading from read replicas, which are eventually consistent, and the data may be stale if the replica has not yet applied changes from the primary.. Amazon RDS read replicas use asynchronous replication, so they are eventually consistent by design. Even with sub-second replica lag, a read issued immediately after a write on the primary can land on a replica that has not yet applied that write, returning stale prices or inventory. This is the textbook behavior of read replicas and matches the symptom described.

Answer

The Multi-AZ standby was promoted due to a failover, causing a brief inconsistency.

Answer

The application is not using a connection pool, causing connections to be established to different replicas.

Answer

The read replica is using a different storage type (Aurora I/O-Optimized) than the primary.

Question 5

A company is designing a serverless application using AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway. The application must handle sudden spikes in traffic and ensure that no requests are lost. Which of the following design choices will BEST meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Configure API Gateway with a usage plan and throttling, and set Lambda reserved concurrency to limit the function's maximum capacity.. Configuring API Gateway with usage plans and throttling prevents overwhelming the backend, while Lambda reserved concurrency ensures a minimum capacity for the function. Option A is wrong because Lambda provisioned concurrency adds cost and is for reducing cold starts, not for handling spikes without loss. Option C is wrong because Step Functions add orchestration overhead and complexity, and while they can implement retry logic, they do not directly prevent request loss during sudden traffic spikes. Option D is wrong because SQS buffers requests but does not prevent loss if the Lambda function fails to scale and process messages fast enough; it relies on the Lambda scaling and may still result in throttling if the queue grows too large.

Answer

Use Lambda provisioned concurrency to pre-warm the function and reduce cold starts.

Answer

Use AWS Step Functions to orchestrate the Lambda invocations and implement retry logic.

Answer

Use Amazon SQS to buffer requests and have Lambda poll the queue at a fixed rate.

Question 6

A healthcare company is storing sensitive patient data in Amazon S3. The compliance team requires that all data be encrypted at rest and that the encryption keys be rotated every 90 days. Additionally, the company must maintain an audit trail of all key usage. Which solution meets these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Accepted Answer

Use client-side encryption with the AWS Encryption SDK and store the keys in AWS Secrets Manager with automatic rotation.. Meets all requirements with the least operational overhead. Client-side encryption with the AWS Encryption SDK ensures data is encrypted at rest. Keys are stored in AWS Secrets Manager, which supports automatic rotation on a custom 90-day schedule. CloudTrail logs all Secrets Manager API calls, providing an audit trail of key usage. Option A requires custom Lambda code for rotation. Option B uses SSE-S3, which cannot be rotated on a 90-day schedule and lacks key usage audit. Option C uses SSE-KMS, but automatic rotation for customer managed keys is fixed at 365 days, failing the 90-day requirement.

Answer

Use S3 server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C) and implement a Lambda function to rotate keys every 90 days.

Answer

Use S3 server-side encryption with S3-managed keys (SSE-S3) and enable S3 server access logs.

Answer

Use S3 server-side encryption with AWS KMS-managed keys (SSE-KMS) and enable automatic key rotation every 90 days. Enable AWS CloudTrail for KMS key usage logging.

Question 7

A company is migrating a monolithic application to microservices on Amazon ECS with Fargate. The application currently uses a central MySQL database. The architects plan to refactor the database into separate RDS instances per microservice. Which strategy will ensure data consistency across services with minimal application changes?

Accepted Answer

Implement a saga pattern using choreography, where each service publishes events and reacts to events from other services.. The saga pattern with choreography allows each microservice to maintain its own RDS instance while ensuring data consistency through a sequence of local transactions and compensating events. This approach avoids the need for distributed transactions across separate databases, which aligns with the goal of minimal application changes by leveraging existing event-driven communication patterns in ECS with Fargate.

Answer

Enable the STRICT_TRANS_TABLES SQL mode on all RDS instances to enforce data integrity.

Answer

Configure RDS read replicas for each service to ensure eventually consistent reads.

Answer

Use distributed transactions with a two-phase commit protocol across RDS instances.

Question 8

A media company is designing a video transcoding pipeline using AWS Lambda and Amazon S3. The pipeline must process videos uploaded to an S3 bucket, transcode them into multiple formats, and store the results in another S3 bucket. The processing time for each video can vary from a few seconds to several minutes. Which architecture will minimize cost and ensure all videos are processed, even if Lambda execution timeout is reached?

Accepted Answer

Configure S3 event notifications to send messages to an Amazon SQS queue. Have Lambda poll the queue and process each message. Set the SQS visibility timeout to match the expected maximum processing time.. Using S3 event notifications to send messages to an Amazon SQS queue decouples the upload from processing, allowing Lambda to poll the queue at its own pace. Setting the visibility timeout to match the expected maximum processing time ensures that if a Lambda invocation times out, the message becomes visible again after the visibility timeout, so it can be reprocessed. This minimizes cost (no additional services like Step Functions or Kinesis) and guarantees all videos are processed. Option A is incorrect because direct Lambda invocation via S3 events can lead to throttling under high concurrency, and the dead-letter queue only captures events after all retries fail, but timeouts within the function may not be handled elegantly. Option B is incorrect because AWS Step Functions adds cost and complexity for orchestration; while it can manage long-running workflows, the simpler SQS approach is more cost-effective. Option D is incorrect because Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is designed for real-time streaming and is overkill for this batch-oriented transcoding pipeline, increasing cost and complexity.

Answer

Configure S3 event notifications to invoke Lambda directly and use a dead-letter queue to capture failed events.

Answer

Use AWS Step Functions to orchestrate the transcoding workflow, with each step as a separate Lambda function.

Answer

Use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to ingest S3 events and have Lambda process records from the stream.

Question 9

A financial services company is designing a multi-tier application that must achieve a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1 hour and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes for a database tier. The application uses Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ deployment. Which disaster recovery strategy meets these requirements at the LOWEST cost?

Accepted Answer

Create a cross-Region read replica of the RDS MySQL instance in another Region. In a disaster, promote the read replica to a standalone instance.. A cross-Region read replica for Amazon RDS MySQL provides asynchronous replication with an RPO typically under 15 minutes, and promoting it during a disaster can achieve an RTO of 1 hour. This approach incurs only the cost of the replica instance and cross-Region data transfer, making it the lowest-cost option that meets the stated RTO and RPO requirements.

Answer

Deploy the RDS instance in Multi-AZ configuration and take frequent snapshots to another Region.

Answer

Use AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) for continuous replication to an RDS instance in another Region.

Answer

Use Amazon Aurora Global Database, which provides global replication with typical RPO of 1 second.

Question 10

A company is migrating its on-premises Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database is 2 TB in size and has a 100 Mbps internet connection. The migration must be completed within a week and have minimal downtime. Which AWS service should the company use to transfer the initial database dump to AWS?

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) with ongoing replication to migrate the data with minimal downtime.. AWS DMS with ongoing replication (change data capture) is the correct choice because it allows the initial full load of the 2 TB database to be migrated while continuously capturing and applying changes from the source Oracle database. This minimizes downtime to a brief cutover window, meeting the requirement of minimal downtime. The 100 Mbps internet connection is sufficient for the initial load over a week (2 TB at 100 Mbps ≈ 2.3 days theoretical), and DMS handles the schema conversion and data transfer natively without requiring manual dump files.

Answer

Upload the database dump directly to an S3 bucket using multipart upload.

Answer

Use AWS Snowball Edge to transfer the data offline.

Answer

Use S3 Transfer Acceleration to speed up the upload of the dump file.

Question 11

A company runs a critical web application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group across three Availability Zones. The application uses an Application Load Balancer (ALB) with a target group that has health checks configured. Recently, the operations team noticed that during a deployment, the ALB started routing traffic to a new instance before it was ready to serve requests, causing a brief period of errors. The team wants to ensure that new instances are fully initialized and ready before receiving traffic. The application takes about 30 seconds to start up. Current health check settings: health check protocol HTTP, path /, interval 30 seconds, timeout 5 seconds, healthy threshold 2, unhealthy threshold 2. The deployment uses the Auto Scaling group's instance refresh feature. Which of the following is the MOST effective way to prevent traffic from being sent to instances that are not ready?

Accepted Answer

Implement a lifecycle hook in the Auto Scaling group that waits for the instance to signal readiness. Also, configure the target group health check with a longer interval and a higher healthy threshold to ensure the instance is fully operational.. It uses a lifecycle hook to pause the instance until it signals readiness (e.g., via a custom script that completes initialization), and then configures the target group health check with a longer interval and higher healthy threshold to ensure the instance is fully operational before receiving traffic. This prevents the ALB from routing traffic to an instance that is not yet ready. Option B is wrong because simply increasing the health check interval and threshold does not guarantee the instance has finished its startup process; it may still fail if the application is not ready when the first health check occurs (if the instance takes 30 seconds and interval is 60, the first check is at 60 seconds, but the threshold of 5 means it needs 5 consecutive successes, which delays traffic but doesn't ensure the instance is fully functional from the start). Option C is wrong because the instance refresh warm-up time only delays the start of the refresh process, not the time before an instance receives traffic; it does not integrate with application readiness. Option D is wrong because AWS Global Accelerator does not pre-warm endpoints; it provides static IP addresses and improves performance but does not handle application readiness checks.

Answer

Increase the health check interval to 60 seconds and the healthy threshold to 5.

Answer

Use the Auto Scaling group's instance refresh feature with a warm-up time of 60 seconds.

Answer

Use AWS Global Accelerator to pre-warm the endpoints before directing traffic.

Question 12

A company is designing a data processing pipeline for real-time analytics. The pipeline ingests data from IoT devices that send JSON messages via MQTT to AWS IoT Core. The messages must be processed in real-time to detect anomalies and the results must be stored in Amazon S3 for later analysis. The company currently uses a Lambda function to process each message, but as the number of devices grows, the Lambda function is being throttled due to concurrency limits. The company needs a solution that scales to handle thousands of devices per second without losing messages. The processed data must be available in S3 within 1 minute of ingestion. Which architecture should the company use?

Accepted Answer

Ingest the messages into Amazon Kinesis Data Streams with multiple shards, and use a Lambda function to process records from the stream. Increase the Lambda concurrency limit.. The correct architecture is to ingest messages into Amazon Kinesis Data Streams with multiple shards to handle high throughput. Using a Lambda function to process records from the stream allows real-time anomaly detection. To address concurrency limits, the Lambda concurrency limit can be increased by requesting a limit increase from AWS Support, and you can use reserved concurrency to ensure processing capacity. This solution scales elastically and can meet the 1-minute latency requirement. Option D is incorrect because Kinesis Data Analytics cannot read directly from S3 or from Kinesis Data Firehose; it requires a Kinesis data stream as its source. The architecture in D would not provide real-time processing as it relies on periodic S3 queries.

Answer

Send the IoT messages to an Amazon SQS queue and have Lambda poll the queue in batches to reduce the number of concurrent invocations.

Answer

Store the raw messages in an S3 bucket and use S3 Select to query the data for anomalies periodically.

Answer

Use AWS IoT Core rules to route messages to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, which writes raw data to S3. Then use Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics to read from S3 and perform real-time anomaly detection, writing results back to S3 via Firehose.

Question 13

A company is designing a microservices architecture on AWS. Each service needs its own DynamoDB table, and services must be fully isolated. Which networking design ensures that services can only communicate through APIs and not directly to each other's databases?

Accepted Answer

Create a separate VPC for each service, with VPC peering only between the API gateway and each service VPC.. Creating a separate VPC for each service enforces full network isolation, and using VPC peering only between the API Gateway and each service VPC ensures that services can only communicate through APIs. This design prevents any direct network-level access between service databases, as there is no peering or routing between the service VPCs themselves, aligning with the microservices principle of strict isolation.

Answer

Place all services in a single VPC with security groups to control traffic.

Answer

Use a transit VPC with VPN connections to each service's VPC.

Answer

Use a single VPC with public and private subnets; place databases in private subnets and services in public subnets.

Question 14

A solutions architect is designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical application. The application runs on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in us-east-1. The recovery time objective (RTO) is 15 minutes, and the recovery point objective (RPO) is 1 hour. Which approach meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Use a warm standby: maintain a scaled-down copy of the environment in us-west-2 that can be scaled up within 15 minutes.. A warm standby strategy meets the RTO of 15 minutes and RPO of 1 hour by maintaining a scaled-down copy of the environment in us-west-2 that can be rapidly scaled up to full production capacity. This approach ensures data replication (e.g., using Amazon RDS cross-Region replication or EBS snapshots) meets the 1-hour RPO, while the pre-provisioned but smaller infrastructure allows scaling within the 15-minute RTO, unlike a pilot light which requires more time to provision resources.

Answer

Use backup and restore: take hourly snapshots of EBS volumes and copy to us-west-2, then restore EC2 instances from snapshots.

Answer

Implement a pilot light strategy: replicate data to us-west-2 and keep a minimal stack running.

Answer

Deploy a multi-site active-active configuration with full capacity in both regions.

Question 15

A company is designing a new web application that will be accessed by users worldwide. The application should have low latency and high availability. The application uses a stateless web tier and a relational database. Which architecture minimizes latency for global users?

Accepted Answer

Deploy the application in multiple regions with Route 53 latency-based routing, and use Amazon Aurora Global Database for the database tier.. Deploying in multiple regions with Route 53 latency-based routing directs users to the region with the lowest network latency, minimizing response times. Amazon Aurora Global Database provides a fully managed cross-region replication solution with typical latency of under one second, ensuring the relational database tier is available close to each application deployment for low-latency reads and fast failover.

Answer

Deploy the application in a single region and use Route 53 geolocation routing.

Answer

Deploy the application in multiple regions, use CloudFront to cache static content, and route dynamic requests to the nearest region via Route 53 latency-based routing.

Answer

Deploy the application in a single region and use Amazon CloudFront to cache content globally.