SOA-C02 Practice Test 20 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company runs a batch processing job on a single EC2 instance that runs for 2 hours every night. The job is fault-tolerant and can be interrupted. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize compute costs. What is the MOST cost-effective solution?

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

Accepted Answer

Use a Spot Instance that can be interrupted but is significantly cheaper.. A Spot Instance is the most cost-effective choice because the job is fault-tolerant and can be interrupted, allowing you to leverage unused AWS EC2 capacity at up to 90% discount compared to On-Demand pricing. Since the job runs for only 2 hours nightly and can handle interruptions, Spot Instances provide the lowest compute cost while meeting the workload requirements.

Answer

Use an On-Demand instance to ensure the job runs every night.

Answer

Purchase a Reserved Instance for 1 year to get a discount.

Answer

Launch a Dedicated Host to ensure consistent performance.

Question 2

A company wants to be able to query application logs in near real-time using a SQL-like syntax. Which AWS service should be used?

Accepted Answer

CloudWatch Logs Insights. CloudWatch Logs Insights is the correct service because it enables interactive querying of log data stored in CloudWatch Logs using a purpose-built SQL-like query language. It is designed for ad-hoc analysis of logs in near real-time, allowing users to filter, aggregate, and visualize log events without needing to export data to another analytics platform.

Answer

CloudWatch Metrics Insights

Answer

CloudWatch Events

Answer

CloudWatch Logs subscription filters

Question 3

A company has an AWS Lambda function that processes S3 events. The function is critical and must be available even if one Availability Zone fails. How can a SysOps administrator ensure high availability for the Lambda function?

Accepted Answer

No action is required; Lambda functions are inherently highly available within a region.. AWS Lambda functions are inherently highly available within an AWS Region. The Lambda service automatically runs your function across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) to handle failures of individual AZs. No additional configuration is required to achieve AZ-level resilience; the service manages the underlying compute fleet and network infrastructure to ensure continued operation even if one AZ fails.

Answer

Use an Application Load Balancer to distribute events to multiple Lambda functions.

Answer

Configure the Lambda function to run in two subnets in different Availability Zones.

Answer

Deploy the Lambda function in two separate regions and use Route 53 failover.

Question 4

A company uses AWS CloudTrail to log all management events. The SysOps administrator needs to be notified when an IAM user creates a new access key. Which configuration is the MOST efficient?

Accepted Answer

Create a CloudWatch Events rule that matches the CreateAccessKey API call and triggers an SNS notification.. CloudWatch Events (now Amazon EventBridge) can directly match the CreateAccessKey API call from CloudTrail in real time and trigger an SNS notification. This is the most efficient solution as it requires no additional log analysis or polling, and it reacts immediately when the API call occurs.

Answer

Create a CloudWatch Logs metric filter on the CloudTrail log group for CreateAccessKey events and set an alarm.

Answer

Use AWS Trusted Advisor to check for excessive access keys.

Answer

Use AWS Config to monitor the 'iam-user' resource type for changes to access keys.

Question 5

Refer to the exhibit. A SysOps administrator creates the CloudWatch Alarm shown. However, the alarm never enters ALARM state even though the CPU utilization of the EC2 instance is consistently above 90%. What is the most likely reason?

Accepted Answer

The alarm is missing the InstanceId dimension.. The alarm never enters ALARM state because it is missing the required `InstanceId` dimension. CloudWatch metrics for EC2, such as `CPUUtilization`, are published with the `InstanceId` dimension to uniquely identify the data stream. Without specifying this dimension in the alarm configuration, CloudWatch cannot match the alarm to the metric data emitted by the EC2 instance, so the alarm remains in INSUFFICIENT_DATA or OK state regardless of actual CPU usage.

Answer

The threshold is set too high; it should be 80%.

Answer

The evaluation periods are too few.

Answer

The statistic should be Maximum instead of Average.

Question 6

A SysOps administrator is troubleshooting a Lambda function that is not processing messages from an SQS queue. The function is subscribed to the queue via an event source mapping. The function has a reserved concurrency of 0. Which TWO actions will resolve the issue?

Accepted Answer

Set the reserved concurrency to a value greater than 0.. Reserved concurrency of 0 means the Lambda function has no available execution capacity, so it cannot process any invocations, including those from SQS. Setting reserved concurrency to a value greater than 0 (e.g., 1 or more) allocates the necessary execution slots for the function to run. This directly resolves the issue because the event source mapping will successfully invoke the function only when concurrency is available.

Answer

Add SQS permissions to the Lambda execution role.

Answer

Configure a dead-letter queue for the Lambda function.

Answer

Increase the batch size in the event source mapping.

Question 7

A SysOps administrator needs to monitor the CPU utilization of an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. The administrator wants to receive a notification when the average CPU utilization exceeds 80% for 10 consecutive minutes. Which steps should the administrator take to set up this monitoring?

Accepted Answer

Create a CloudWatch alarm on the 'CPUUtilization' metric with a threshold of 80% and an SNS topic for notifications.. Amazon RDS automatically publishes the 'CPUUtilization' metric to CloudWatch, and a CloudWatch alarm can be configured with a threshold of 80% for the 'Average' statistic over a period of 10 consecutive minutes (e.g., 10 evaluation periods of 1 minute each). The alarm can then trigger an SNS topic to send notifications when the threshold is breached. This directly meets the requirement without additional services.

Answer

Use CloudWatch Logs to monitor the database logs and create an alarm based on log patterns.

Answer

Enable Enhanced Monitoring and create an alarm on the 'CPUUtilization' metric in RDS console.

Answer

Enable CloudTrail and create a metric filter for CPU utilization.

Question 8

A SysOps administrator wants to be alerted when an EC2 instance is terminated unexpectedly. Which CloudWatch event should be used to trigger a notification?

Accepted Answer

An Amazon EventBridge rule that matches EC2 Instance State-change Notification events.. Amazon EventBridge can capture EC2 Instance State-change Notification events, which are emitted whenever an EC2 instance transitions between states (e.g., running, stopped, terminated). By creating a rule that matches the 'terminated' state, the administrator can trigger an SNS notification or Lambda function to alert on unexpected termination, providing a real-time, event-driven response.

Answer

A CloudWatch alarm on the CPUUtilization metric dropping to zero.

Answer

A CloudTrail trail that logs TerminateInstances API calls.

Answer

A CloudWatch alarm on the StatusCheckFailed metric.

Question 9

A company has an AWS Lambda function that processes files uploaded to an S3 bucket. The function fails intermittently with a timeout error. What should the SysOps administrator do to monitor and resolve this issue?

Accepted Answer

Increase the Lambda function timeout and review the function logs in CloudWatch Logs.. Increasing the Lambda function timeout directly addresses the intermittent timeout error by allowing the function more time to complete execution before Lambda terminates it. Reviewing CloudWatch Logs is essential to identify the root cause, such as slow downstream dependencies or inefficient code, enabling targeted optimization. This approach aligns with standard troubleshooting for Lambda timeout issues.

Answer

Place the S3 bucket in a different AWS region to reduce latency.

Answer

Enable provisioned concurrency for the Lambda function.

Answer

Configure EC2 Auto Scaling to launch more instances for the Lambda function.

Question 10

A company has deployed a web application across multiple AWS regions and wants to use Amazon Route 53 to direct users to the region with the lowest latency. Which routing policy should the SysOps administrator use?

Accepted Answer

Latency routing policy. Latency routing policy is correct because it directs user traffic to the AWS region that provides the lowest network latency for the end user. Route 53 measures latency between the user's DNS resolver and each region's edge location, then responds with the IP of the region that has the lowest latency. This is ideal for multi-region deployments where the goal is to minimize response time.

Answer

Geolocation routing policy

Answer

Geoproximity routing policy

Answer

Weighted routing policy

Question 11

A company runs a production RDS for PostgreSQL instance with Multi-AZ enabled. The database experiences a failover due to an AZ outage. After the failover, the application experiences high latency on write operations. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

Synchronous replication to the standby instance in the other AZ is causing additional latency.. With Multi-AZ enabled, RDS for PostgreSQL uses synchronous replication to the standby instance in a different Availability Zone. After a failover, the new primary continues to use synchronous replication to the new standby, which adds latency to write operations because each write must be acknowledged by the standby before the primary commits. This synchronous replication overhead is the most likely cause of the increased write latency.

Answer

The application is now reading from the standby instance, which has higher read latency.

Answer

The failover switched to a read replica in a different AZ.

Answer

The failover switched to asynchronous replication mode.

Question 12

A company uses Amazon Route 53 for DNS resolution. The company wants to ensure that if a web server becomes unhealthy, traffic is automatically routed to a healthy server in another Availability Zone. Which routing policy should be used?

Accepted Answer

Failover routing policy. The Failover routing policy (D) is correct because it is specifically designed to route traffic to a primary resource (e.g., a web server) and automatically redirect to a secondary resource in a different Availability Zone when health checks fail. Route 53 uses health checks to monitor the primary endpoint; if the primary becomes unhealthy, it returns the secondary record in DNS responses, ensuring automatic failover.

Answer

Latency routing policy

Answer

Weighted routing policy

Answer

Geolocation routing policy

Question 13

A SysOps administrator is optimizing costs for an AWS account. The account has multiple EC2 instances running 24/7 with varying utilization. Which TWO actions will help reduce costs without impacting performance? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Compute Optimizer to right-size instances.. AWS Compute Optimizer analyzes historical utilization metrics (CPU, memory, network, etc.) and provides right-sizing recommendations to match instance types to actual workload demands. By downsizing over-provisioned instances, you reduce costs without degrading performance, as the new instance type still meets the workload's peak requirements.

Answer

Use larger instance types to improve performance.

Answer

Enable detailed CloudWatch monitoring for all instances.

Answer

Enable termination protection on all instances.

Question 14

A team of developers is deploying a new microservice that uses Amazon DynamoDB as its data store. The SysOps administrator must ensure that the application can handle a sudden spike in read traffic without throttling. Which DynamoDB feature can be used to automatically handle increases in read capacity?

Accepted Answer

DynamoDB Auto Scaling. DynamoDB Auto Scaling is the correct feature because it automatically adjusts the provisioned read and write capacity based on actual traffic patterns, preventing throttling during sudden spikes. The SysOps administrator can define a target utilization percentage (e.g., 70%), and DynamoDB Auto Scaling uses the Application Auto Scaling service to increase capacity before requests are throttled, ensuring consistent performance without manual intervention.

Answer

DynamoDB Global Tables

Answer

DynamoDB Time to Live (TTL)

Answer

DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)

Question 15

A company uses AWS CloudFormation to deploy a multi-tier application. The template includes an AWS::RDS::DBInstance resource. The administrator wants to ensure that the database is not deleted when the stack is deleted. Which CloudFormation resource property should be set?

Accepted Answer

Set the 'DeletionPolicy' attribute to 'Retain' on the DBInstance resource.. The 'DeletionPolicy' attribute in AWS CloudFormation controls what happens to a resource when its stack is deleted. Setting 'DeletionPolicy' to 'Retain' on the AWS::RDS::DBInstance resource ensures the database is preserved and not deleted when the stack is deleted. This is the standard mechanism for preventing accidental deletion of critical resources during stack teardown.

Answer

Set the 'DeletionPolicy' attribute to 'Snapshot' on the DBInstance.

Answer

Set the 'RetainOnDeletion' property to 'true' on the DBInstance.

Answer

Set the 'DeletionProtection' property to 'true' on the DBInstance.