SOA-C02 Practice Test 27 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company has an S3 bucket that stores critical financial data. The bucket versioning is enabled. A SysOps administrator needs to ensure that data can be recovered after accidental deletion by users. What is the MOST effective way to protect against accidental deletion?

Accepted Answer

Enable MFA Delete on the S3 bucket.. Option C is correct because MFA Delete adds an extra layer of protection, requiring multi-factor authentication to permanently delete objects. Option A is wrong because lifecycle policies automate transitions, not deletion prevention. Option B is wrong because bucket policies control access but do not prevent deletion by authorized users. Option D is wrong because cross-region replication provides disaster recovery, not protection against accidental deletion.

Answer

Configure a lifecycle policy to transition objects to Glacier after 30 days.

Answer

Apply a bucket policy that denies s3:DeleteObject for all users.

Answer

Replicate objects to another S3 bucket in a different AWS Region.

Question 2

A company has a production application running on Amazon ECS with Fargate launch type. The application uses an Application Load Balancer. The SysOps administrator notices that during deployments, the application experiences a brief period of downtime. Which combination of actions should the administrator take to achieve zero-downtime deployments?

Accepted Answer

Configure the ECS service to use a rolling update with a minimum healthy percent of 100 and a maximum percent of 200.. Option C is correct because configuring the ECS service to use rolling updates with a minimum healthy percent of 100 and a maximum percent of 200 ensures that new tasks are started before old ones are stopped, avoiding downtime. Option A is wrong because it limits the number of new tasks. Option B is wrong because it stops old tasks first. Option D is wrong because deregistration delay alone does not prevent downtime during deployment.

Answer

Configure the ECS service to use a rolling update with a minimum healthy percent of 0 and a maximum percent of 100.

Answer

Increase the deregistration delay on the ALB target group to 300 seconds.

Answer

Use a blue/green deployment with CodeDeploy and set the 'Minimum healthy percent' to 50.

Question 3

A company is running a web application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. The application stores session data on the local instance storage. Users are experiencing session loss during scaling events. What should a SysOps administrator do to maintain session persistence?

Accepted Answer

Move session data to an ElastiCache for Redis cluster.. Option B is correct because using ElastiCache for session state allows instances to be terminated and replaced without losing session data. Option A is wrong because sticky sessions (session affinity) can cause uneven load and do not protect against instance failure. Option C is wrong because EBS volumes are not shared across instances. Option D is wrong because increasing instance size does not solve the session loss issue.

Answer

Increase the EC2 instance size to reduce the frequency of scaling events.

Answer

Attach an Amazon EBS volume to each instance and store session data there.

Answer

Enable sticky sessions on the Application Load Balancer.

Question 4

Which THREE measures help protect an S3 bucket from accidental data loss? (Choose 3)

Accepted Answer

Enable MFA Delete on the bucket.. Options A, C, and E are correct. Versioning preserves multiple versions, MFA Delete adds protection, and cross-region replication provides a copy in another region. Option B is wrong because encryption does not prevent data loss. Option D is wrong because lifecycle policies can delete objects, increasing risk.

Answer

Create a lifecycle policy to transition objects to S3 Glacier.

Answer

Enable server-side encryption on the bucket.

Question 5

A company stores critical data in an S3 bucket. To ensure data durability and availability, the company wants to automatically replicate objects to a bucket in a different AWS Region. Which S3 feature should be used?

Accepted Answer

Configure S3 Cross-Region Replication.. Option B is correct because S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) automatically replicates objects to a bucket in another Region. Option A is wrong because S3 Standard provides high durability but not automatic cross-region replication. Option C is wrong because S3 One Zone-IA does not replicate to another region. Option D is wrong because S3 Versioning is needed for CRR but does not itself replicate objects.

Answer

Enable S3 Standard storage class on the bucket.

Answer

Use S3 One Zone-IA storage class.

Answer

Enable S3 Versioning on the bucket.

Question 6

A company has a production DynamoDB table with on-demand capacity. They need to ensure business continuity with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 5 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1 hour in case of a regional outage. What is the MOST cost-effective solution?

Accepted Answer

Enable DynamoDB global tables for the table.. Option A is correct because DynamoDB global tables provide cross-region replication with sub-second latency, meeting the 5-minute RPO, and failover can be automated within 1 hour. Option B is wrong because point-in-time recovery only protects against accidental writes/deletes, not regional outages. Option C is wrong because restoring a snapshot takes longer than 1 hour and data loss may exceed 5 minutes. Option D is wrong because cross-region read replicas are not available for DynamoDB.

Answer

Use AWS Backup to schedule daily backups and restore in another region.

Answer

Enable point-in-time recovery (PITR) on the table.

Answer

Configure cross-region read replicas for the table.

Question 7

Which TWO steps should a SysOps administrator take to ensure that an RDS for MySQL instance can withstand an Availability Zone failure? (Choose 2)

Accepted Answer

Enable Multi-AZ deployment.. Options A and D are correct. Multi-AZ creates a standby in another AZ, and automated backups with PITR allow recovery to a point in time. Option B is wrong because read replicas are for read scaling, not failover. Option C is wrong because provisioned IOPS improve performance, not availability. Option E is wrong because deletion protection prevents accidental deletion, not AZ failure.

Answer

Create a read replica in a different AZ.

Answer

Enable deletion protection on the DB instance.

Answer

Enable provisioned IOPS for the DB instance.

Question 8

A company has a fleet of EC2 instances that need to be patched monthly. The SysOps administrator must ensure that the patching process does not affect the availability of the application. Which strategy should the administrator use?

Accepted Answer

Use an Auto Scaling group with a rolling update strategy.. Option B is correct because using an Auto Scaling group with a rolling update will replace instances one at a time, ensuring that the application remains available. Option A is wrong because stopping all instances at once causes downtime. Option C is wrong because patching one instance manually is not automated and still risks downtime if the instance is needed. Option D is wrong because AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager can patch instances but without rolling update, it may cause downtime if all instances are patched simultaneously.

Answer

Patch one instance at a time manually by stopping and starting.

Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager to patch all instances at once.

Answer

Stop all instances, apply patches, then start them.

Question 9

A company runs a critical database on an RDS for PostgreSQL instance in a single Availability Zone. The database experiences high write latency. The SysOps Administrator needs to improve the database's reliability and performance without downtime. Which solution meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Modify the RDS instance to be Multi-AZ with a standby in another Availability Zone.. Option B is correct because enabling Multi-AZ provides high availability with automatic failover, and it can be modified without downtime. Option A is wrong because converting to Multi-AZ in a single AZ does not improve performance. Option C is wrong because creating a read replica does not improve write performance. Option D is wrong because increasing storage size might help performance but does not improve reliability.

Answer

Create a Multi-AZ deployment in the same Availability Zone.

Answer

Increase the allocated storage for the RDS instance.

Answer

Create a read replica in another Availability Zone and redirect read traffic.

Question 10

Refer to the exhibit. An IAM policy is attached to a group. A SysOps Administrator in that group tries to terminate an EC2 instance with the tag 'Environment=production'. The action fails. What is the most likely reason?

Accepted Answer

The instance does not have the tag 'Environment=production'.. Option A is correct because the policy allows termination only for instances with the tag 'Environment=production', but there might be an explicit deny elsewhere or the instance does not have the tag. Option B is wrong because the policy allows the action. Option C is wrong because the condition uses StringEquals, which is case-sensitive. Option D is wrong because the condition key is valid.

Answer

The condition key 'ec2:ResourceTag/Environment' is invalid.

Answer

The policy does not allow the ec2:TerminateInstances action.

Answer

The condition uses 'StringEquals' instead of 'StringLike'.

Question 11

A company runs a stateful web application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. Users report that their sessions are frequently lost during scaling events. What is the MOST effective solution to maintain session persistence?

Accepted Answer

Enable sticky sessions (session affinity) on the Application Load Balancer.. Option D is correct because enabling sticky sessions (session affinity) on the ALB ensures that a user's requests are routed to the same instance during a session. Option A is wrong because increasing the cooldown delay does not solve session loss during scale-in. Option B is wrong while helpful for state offloading, it does not address the immediate issue of session persistence; a full rewrite may be needed. Option C is wrong because a larger instance size does not prevent session loss when instances are terminated.

Answer

Increase the cooldown period for the Auto Scaling group.

Answer

Modify the application to store session data in an external data store such as ElastiCache or DynamoDB.

Answer

Use larger EC2 instance types to reduce the frequency of scaling.

Question 12

Refer to the exhibit. An IAM policy is attached to an IAM user. Which action can the user perform?

Accepted Answer

Stop an EC2 instance.. Option C is correct because the IAM policy allows ec2:StopInstances and does not deny it. The denial is only for ec2:TerminateInstances. Option A is wrong because StartInstances is allowed. Option B is wrong because Describe* actions are allowed. Option D is wrong because TerminateInstances is explicitly denied.

Answer

Start an EC2 instance.

Answer

Describe EC2 instances.

Answer

Terminate an EC2 instance.

Question 13

A company runs a web application on EC2 instances in a private subnet. The application needs to connect to an RDS database in a different VPC. The VPCs are peered. The SysOps Administrator is troubleshooting connectivity issues. The RDS security group allows inbound traffic from the EC2 security group, but connections still fail. What could be the issue?

Accepted Answer

The route tables in each VPC do not have routes to the peered VPC CIDR.. Option A is correct because VPC peering does not support transitive routing, so the EC2 instance cannot access the RDS if it is in a different region or if the route tables are not configured properly. Option B is wrong because security groups are stateful. Option C is wrong because network ACLs must allow outbound traffic, but the error description suggests routing issue. Option D is wrong because DNS resolution is not needed for direct IP connectivity.

Answer

The RDS instance does not have public DNS resolution enabled.

Answer

The network ACL for the private subnet is blocking inbound traffic.

Answer

The security group outbound rules on the EC2 instance are blocking traffic.

Question 14

A SysOps administrator is designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical application that runs on EC2 instances in a single region. The RTO is 1 hour, and the RPO is 15 minutes. The application data is stored on an Amazon EBS volume. Which approach meets these requirements at the lowest cost?

Accepted Answer

Take automated EBS snapshots every 15 minutes and copy them to the DR region. Use a pre-configured Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to launch EC2 instances from the latest snapshot.. Option B is correct because EBS Snapshots are incremental and can be copied to another region. Automating snapshot creation every 15 minutes meets the RPO, and restoring from a snapshot in the DR region can be done within an hour if the AMI is pre-staged. Option A is wrong because continuous replication can be expensive and may require additional infrastructure. Option C is wrong because RTO would likely exceed 1 hour due to full replication time. Option D is wrong because Multi-AZ does not protect against regional failure.

Answer

Deploy the application across multiple Availability Zones using an Auto Scaling group and an Application Load Balancer.

Answer

Use AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) for continuous replication to an EC2 instance in the DR region.

Answer

Use S3 Cross-Region Replication to replicate the EBS volume data to an S3 bucket in the DR region.

Question 15

A company runs a critical application on an EC2 instance that stores data on an EBS volume. The SysOps administrator needs to implement a backup strategy that provides the ability to restore the volume to a specific point in time within the last 24 hours, with a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than 15 minutes. Which solution meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Schedule EBS snapshots every hour and keep them for 24 hours.. Option C is correct because EBS Snapshots are point-in-time backups that can be used to create a new volume and attach it to an instance within minutes. Option A is wrong because automated backups are not available for EBS volumes. Option B is wrong because AWS Backup supports EBS snapshots but adds no advantage for RTO; snapshots still need to be restored. Option D is wrong because RAID 1 mirrors data but does not provide point-in-time recovery.

Answer

Configure a RAID 1 mirror of the EBS volume across two Availability Zones.

Answer

Enable automated backups on the EC2 instance.

Answer

Use AWS Backup to create backup plans for the EBS volume.