Operations and Support

A cloud administrator notices that a virtual machine running a critical application is using 95% CPU consistently. The application is single-threaded and performance is degraded. Which action should the administrator take to resolve the issue?

A cloud engineer needs to ensure that a web application can scale out automatically during traffic spikes. Which design best practice should be implemented?

A company uses a hybrid cloud model with an on-premises data center and a public cloud. The network team reports that traffic between the cloud and on-premises is experiencing high latency and packet loss. The cloud administrator verifies that the VPN connection is up. What is the most likely cause?

Which TWO metrics should be monitored to determine if a cloud database is experiencing a memory bottleneck?

A cloud administrator is troubleshooting an application that fails to connect to a database. The application and database are in the same VPC. Which THREE steps should the administrator take to diagnose the issue?

A cloud administrator is planning a migration of on-premises workloads to the cloud. Which TWO factors should be considered when selecting the appropriate cloud service model (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)?

A company experienced a security breach where an attacker gained access to an S3 bucket containing sensitive data. The investigation reveals that the bucket policy allowed public access. Which THREE measures should be implemented to prevent future occurrences?

An organization uses a cloud-based load balancer to distribute traffic to a web application across multiple availability zones. Users report that the application is intermittently unavailable. The cloud administrator finds that the load balancer health checks are failing on instances in one availability zone. What is the most likely cause?

A cloud administrator needs to automate the patching of operating systems on a fleet of EC2 instances. Which AWS service should be used?

A company runs a containerized application on a Kubernetes cluster. The application logs indicate occasional 'CrashLoopBackOff' errors. The developer says the application works fine locally. What is the most likely cause in the cloud environment?

A cloud engineer is designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical application. The application requires a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 hour. Which replication strategy should be used?

A cloud administrator runs the `iostat` command on a Linux VM experiencing slow performance. Based on the exhibit, what is the most likely bottleneck?

A user reports being unable to upload files to an S3 bucket named 'my-bucket'. The IAM policy attached to the user is shown in the exhibit. What is the most likely reason for the failure?

A cloud administrator launches a new EC2 instance with a userdata script that installs a web server. The instance launches but the web server is not running. The administrator checks the cloud-init logs and sees the warning shown in the exhibit. What is the most likely cause?

A company operates a multi-tier web application on AWS. The web tier runs on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application tier runs on EC2 instances that connect to an RDS MySQL database. Recently, users have reported slow page load times. The cloud administrator investigates and finds the following: CPU utilization on web and app tier instances is below 50%, memory usage is normal, but the RDS instance's CPU utilization is consistently above 80% and the number of database connections is at the maximum. The administrator also notices that the application code opens a new database connection for each HTTP request and does not close them properly. Which action should the administrator take to resolve the performance issue?

A cloud administrator manages a hybrid cloud environment where on-premises servers connect to a VPC in AWS via a VPN connection. The on-premises network uses IP range 10.0.0.0/16. The VPC uses 172.16.0.0/16. The VPN is established and the tunnel status is UP. However, on-premises hosts cannot ping EC2 instances in the VPC. The administrator logs into an EC2 instance and can ping the on-premises VPN gateway IP. The security groups and network ACLs are configured to allow all traffic. The route tables in the VPC have a route to the on-premises network via the virtual private gateway. The on-premises firewall logs show that packets from the VPC are being dropped. What is the most likely cause?

A cloud administrator notices that a virtual machine is running out of memory and causing performance issues. The VM is part of a production web application. Which of the following actions should the administrator take FIRST to resolve the issue without impacting availability?

A cloud administrator is troubleshooting an issue where users from the 192.0.2.0/24 network cannot access objects in an S3 bucket. The bucket policy is shown in the exhibit. What is the most likely cause of the issue?

A cloud engineer is deploying a new application that requires high availability. The solution must include automated failover and load balancing. Which TWO of the following should the engineer implement?

A cloud engineer notices that a virtual machine (VM) in a public cloud environment is consistently running at 90% CPU during business hours. The VM hosts a customer-facing web application. Which of the following is the BEST initial troubleshooting step?

A company is designing a disaster recovery (DR) plan for a critical application hosted in a public cloud. The application requires a recovery time objective (RTO) of 1 hour and a recovery point objective (RPO) of 15 minutes. Which of the following DR strategies BEST meets these requirements?

A cloud administrator is troubleshooting a performance issue where an application running on a VM in a private cloud is experiencing high latency. The VM is connected to a virtual switch that uses SR-IOV. The administrator suspects network bottlenecks. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause of the latency?

Which TWO of the following are best practices when configuring a cloud-based virtual private cloud (VPC) for a multi-tier application?

Which THREE of the following are common causes of cloud resource provisioning failures?

A cloud engineer is troubleshooting a web application that is not responding. The engineer examines the serial console output of the web-server instance and finds the error shown in the exhibit. What is the MOST likely cause of this issue?

A cloud engineer deploys the Kubernetes manifest shown in the exhibit. After deployment, the frontend pods are in CrashLoopBackOff state. The engineer checks the logs and finds 'OOMKilled' errors. Which of the following changes would resolve the issue?

A cloud administrator is managing a hybrid cloud environment where on-premises servers connect to a public cloud VPC via a site-to-site VPN. Users report intermittent connectivity issues to cloud resources. The administrator examines the VPN tunnel logs and sees 'Phase 2 negotiation failed' errors. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause?

A cloud operations team receives an alert that the CPU usage of a VM has exceeded 90% for the past 30 minutes. The VM is part of an auto-scaling group configured to scale out when CPU exceeds 80% for 5 minutes. However, no new instances have been launched. What is the MOST likely reason the auto-scaling failed to trigger?

A cloud engineer notices that a virtual machine running a critical application is experiencing high CPU usage. The engineer needs to resolve the issue without affecting other VMs on the same host. Which of the following actions should the engineer take first?

A company runs a web application on three virtual machines behind a load balancer. During a traffic spike, one VM becomes unresponsive. The load balancer continues sending traffic to it, causing errors. Which configuration change would prevent this issue in the future?

A cloud administrator is troubleshooting connectivity issues between two virtual networks in a public cloud. The networks are in the same region but different VPCs. Both VPCs have route tables and security groups configured. Instances in VPC A cannot ping instances in VPC B. Which of the following is the most likely cause?

A company uses a cloud-based backup solution for its virtual machines. The backup policy specifies daily backups with a retention of 30 days. The backup administrator notices that backups are failing with an error indicating insufficient storage space in the backup repository. Which of the following is the most likely reason for this issue?

A cloud administrator is deploying a new application that requires low latency between two virtual machines. The VMs are in the same cloud region but in different availability zones. The administrator notices higher latency than expected. Which of the following is the most effective way to reduce latency?

A company is migrating its on-premises database to a cloud-based managed database service. The database is currently 500 GB and is expected to grow by 10% monthly. Which TWO factors should the company consider when selecting the storage type?

A cloud engineer is troubleshooting a performance issue with a web application that uses a cloud load balancer and multiple backend instances. Users report intermittent slow responses. The engineer reviews metrics and finds that CPU utilization on backend instances stays below 50% but network throughput is near the instance limit. Which THREE actions should the engineer take to improve performance?

A cloud administrator is trying to attach an EBS volume to an EC2 instance for a database migration. The attachment fails with the error shown in the exhibit. The volume contains critical data. Which of the following is the MOST appropriate action to take?

A cloud administrator receives an alert that a virtual machine is unresponsive. The hypervisor shows the VM status as 'running'. Which of the following should the administrator check FIRST to diagnose the issue?

An organization is migrating a legacy application to a public cloud. The application requires a static IP address that does not change after a VM is stopped. Which of the following should the cloud architect use to meet this requirement?

A company uses a cloud-based load balancer to distribute traffic to a fleet of web servers. Users report intermittent timeouts. The administrator reviews the load balancer logs and notices that one backend server has a significantly higher error rate than the others. Which of the following is the BEST course of action?

Which TWO of the following are best practices for securing an API gateway in a cloud environment?

A load balancer log entry shows the above for a request. What is the MOST likely cause of the 504 error?

A company runs a critical application on a single VM in a public cloud. The VM uses a 500 GB managed disk. The company takes daily snapshots of the disk for backup. The operations team notices that the snapshot creation time has increased from 5 minutes to over an hour over the past month. The VM's disk usage has remained stable at around 200 GB. The VM runs a database that writes logs to a separate data disk (100 GB) which is not snapshotted. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause of the increasing snapshot time?

A cloud administrator is troubleshooting a performance issue in a virtualized environment. Which TWO metrics should be monitored to identify CPU contention on the hypervisor?

A cloud administrator runs the command shown in the exhibit on a storage node in a hyper-converged cluster. The node is experiencing intermittent I/O errors and degraded performance. Based on the SMART data, what is the most likely cause of the issue?

A cloud administrator for a large e-commerce company receives an alert that the response time of the production web application has increased by 300% in the last hour. The application is deployed on a Kubernetes cluster with three worker nodes, each running multiple pods. The administrator checks the Kubernetes dashboard and notices that one of the worker nodes has a CPU utilization of 95%, while the other two nodes are at 40%. The pods on the overloaded node are experiencing resource throttling. The application uses a deployment with a replica count of 6, and all pods are currently running. The administrator needs to resolve the performance issue quickly and prevent future occurrences. Which of the following actions should the administrator take FIRST?

Arrange the steps to deploy a new virtual machine in a public cloud environment (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) in the correct order.

Order the steps to perform a disaster recovery failover to a secondary cloud region.

Arrange the steps to configure auto-scaling for a group of virtual machines based on CPU utilization.

Match each acronym to its definition.

Match each compute service to its description.

Match each security control to its purpose.

A company uses a cloud load balancer to distribute traffic to a group of web servers. After a recent update, some users report being redirected to a maintenance page when the application is actually available. What is the most likely cause?

A storage administrator needs to ensure data durability for a critical database. Which approach provides the highest durability?

A DevOps engineer is designing a CI/CD pipeline for a microservices application. The team wants to isolate each build job to avoid interference. Which cloud concept should be utilized?

A cloud administrator receives an alert that the CPU usage on a virtual machine has spiked to 100% for 10 minutes. The VM hosts a critical application. What is the best first step?

A company wants to automate the deployment of cloud resources using code. Which tool is BEST suited for this purpose?

A financial services company is subject to strict compliance requirements. They need to ensure that all cloud storage objects are written to a write-once-read-many (WORM) state for a defined retention period. Which feature should be enabled?

A developer deployed a new version of a cloud function, but the function is returning 500 errors. The previous version worked fine. What is the most likely cause?

A company wants to ensure high availability for a stateless web application. Which architecture should be recommended?

A systems administrator is troubleshooting a network connectivity issue between two peered VPCs in different regions. The VPC peering connection is established and the route tables are configured. However, instances cannot communicate. What should be checked NEXT?

A cloud architect is designing a disaster recovery plan. Which TWO strategies ensure minimal data loss?

A cloud security team is investigating a potential data breach. Which THREE actions should be taken immediately?

A developer is using a cloud provider's CLI to manage resources. Which TWO commands are commonly used to troubleshoot instance connectivity?

Refer to the exhibit. A cloud load balancer is returning 502 Bad Gateway errors to clients. What is the most likely cause?

Refer to the exhibit. What action should the administrator take to bring the environment into compliance?

Refer to the exhibit. The auto scaling group is fluctuating between 2 and 3 instances every few minutes. What is the most likely cause?

A cloud administrator notices that a load balancer is marking all instances as unhealthy. The health check is configured to check a specific URL path. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause?

A company uses an automated patching solution that reboots instances after applying patches. After a recent patching cycle, several web servers failed to rejoin the load balancer pool. The administrator checks the application logs and finds that the web service failed to start because a required dependency was removed during patching. Which of the following should the administrator implement to prevent this issue in the future?

A cloud operations team is troubleshooting a performance issue with a database that is running on a virtual machine. The database is experiencing high latency during peak hours. Metrics show that CPU and memory usage are below 50%, but disk I/O latency spikes. The database is hosted on a cloud provider's virtual machine with premium SSDs. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause of the disk I/O latency?

An administrator is configuring a backup policy for a critical application database. The policy must allow point-in-time recovery up to the last 5 minutes. The database is updated continuously throughout the day. Which of the following backup strategies BEST meets the requirement?

A company uses a configuration management tool to enforce desired state on cloud servers. During an audit, it is discovered that some servers have deviated from the baseline configuration. The administrator runs a report and finds that the configuration management agent was not running on those servers. Which of the following is the BEST solution to ensure continuous compliance?

A cloud operations team is investigating a security breach where an unauthorized user accessed a storage bucket containing sensitive data. The logs show that the access occurred using valid access keys from an IP address outside the company's network. The administrator checks the IAM policies and finds that the keys belong to a service account that has read access to the bucket. Which of the following actions would be MOST effective in preventing a recurrence?

A cloud administrator is setting up monitoring for a web application. The application must be highly available across multiple availability zones. Which of the following metrics should be monitored to ensure that the application meets its service level agreement (SLA) for uptime?

A company uses a cloud-based logging service to aggregate logs from multiple servers. Suddenly, the logging service stops receiving logs from several servers. The administrator checks the logging agent status on those servers and finds that the agents are running but not sending data. The network connectivity between the servers and the logging service is verified as working. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause?

An organization is deploying a multi-tier application in the cloud. The web tier uses auto scaling, and the database tier uses a managed database service. During a load test, the web tier scales up correctly, but the database performance degrades significantly, causing timeout errors. The administrator reviews the database metrics and finds that CPU and memory are normal, but the number of connections is high. Which of the following is the BEST action to resolve the issue?

A cloud administrator is designing a backup strategy for a virtual machine running a critical application. The application stores data on a separate data disk. Which TWO of the following practices should the administrator include to ensure a reliable backup?

A company is experiencing intermittent connectivity issues between its on-premises data center and a public cloud environment over a VPN connection. Which TWO of the following should the administrator check to troubleshoot the problem?

A cloud operations team needs to implement a monitoring solution for a microservices architecture. The solution must provide centralized logging, metrics, and alerting, and must be able to correlate data from multiple services. Which THREE of the following components should the team include?

An Azure administrator runs the command and gets the output shown. The virtual machine 'web-01' is not accessible over the network. Which of the following is the MOST likely reason?

A cloud engineer deployed the infrastructure shown. The load balancer's health checks are failing for the EC2 instance. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause?

An application log shows the entries above. The application is a web server running on a virtual machine in a cloud environment. The database is a managed cloud database service. Which of the following is the MOST likely root cause of the failure?

A company is experiencing latency issues when accessing a cloud-based application. The cloud administrator runs a traceroute and notices high latency at the ISP's edge router. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause?

A cloud administrator needs to deploy a web application in a public cloud. The application must automatically scale out based on CPU utilization and scale in during low demand. Which of the following is the BEST approach?

An organization is migrating a legacy application to the cloud. The application writes logs to a local file system. The cloud architect recommends using a centralized logging service. Which of the following BEST explains why this change is important?

A cloud administrator receives an alert that a virtual machine's disk usage is at 95%. The VM hosts a database. Which of the following troubleshooting steps should the administrator take FIRST?

A company deploys a multi-tier application in a public cloud. The web tier uses an auto scaling group across multiple availability zones. The database tier runs on a single large VM. The application experiences intermittent slowdowns during peak load. Which of the following is the BEST long-term solution?

A cloud administrator needs to ensure that application logs are retained for three years to comply with regulatory requirements. Which of the following is the MOST cost-effective solution?

An organization uses a cloud-based monitoring service to track CPU utilization across a fleet of virtual machines. The administrator notices that one VM consistently shows 100% CPU utilization at the same time each day. Which of the following should the administrator do NEXT?

A cloud administrator is troubleshooting an application that fails to connect to a database. The database server is in a private subnet, and the application server is in a public subnet. The security group for the database allows inbound traffic on port 3306 from the application's security group. Which of the following is the MOST likely reason the connection fails?

A cloud administrator needs to apply a critical security patch to a virtual machine that is part of a production application. The application must remain available during patching. Which of the following is the BEST approach?

Which TWO of the following are best practices for securing access to a cloud management console?

Which TWO of the following are common causes of performance degradation in a cloud-based application?

Which THREE of the following are valid methods to automate the deployment of cloud resources?

A cloud administrator is troubleshooting a performance issue where a virtual machine running a database is experiencing high latency. The hypervisor shows the VM has been allocated 4 vCPUs and 16 GB of RAM, but the host server has 32 GB of RAM and 16 cores. Which of the following is most likely the cause of the latency?

A cloud administrator needs to automate the process of patching multiple virtual machines in a private cloud. Which of the following is the best tool for this purpose?

During a disaster recovery test, a cloud administrator finds that the replicated VMs in the secondary site fail to start because they are assigned to a resource pool that does not exist in the secondary site. Which of the following should the administrator have done to prevent this issue?

A cloud administrator notices that a cloud-based application is running slowly. The administrator checks the cloud monitoring dashboard and sees that CPU utilization is at 95% for the application server. Which of the following should the administrator do first?

A company uses a hybrid cloud model and experiences intermittent connectivity issues between the on-premises network and the public cloud VPC. The administrator has verified that the VPN connection is established. Which of the following should the administrator check next?

A cloud administrator is migrating a legacy application to a public cloud IaaS environment. The application requires a static IP address for licensing. Which of the following should the administrator configure to meet this requirement?

An organization's cloud environment has a policy that all administrative access must be logged and recorded. Which of the following is the best method to enforce this policy?

A cloud administrator is tasked with ensuring that a cloud database is backed up daily. The backup must be stored off-site for disaster recovery. Which of the following is the most cost-effective solution?

A cloud administrator receives an alert that a virtual machine has unexpectedly shut down. The administrator checks the hypervisor logs and finds an entry "Out of memory: killed process" in the VM's OS logs. Which of the following is the most likely cause?

A cloud administrator is troubleshooting a performance issue in a virtualized environment. Which TWO metrics should the administrator monitor to identify CPU contention? (Choose two.)

Which THREE are common causes of network latency in a cloud environment? (Choose three.)

A cloud administrator is planning a migration of on-premises workloads to a public cloud. Which THREE factors should the administrator consider to ensure minimal downtime? (Choose three.)

Refer to the exhibit. A cloud administrator runs this command on a VM. Which of the following is most likely causing the high 'wa' value?

Refer to the exhibit. An administrator created this policy and attached it to a user. When the user attempts to terminate an instance from an IP address outside the 10.0.0.0/8 range, what will happen?

Refer to the exhibit. A cloud administrator sees this log after a nightly backup job. Which of the following is the most likely cause of the timeout?

A company deployed a web application on an EC2 instance in a public subnet. The instance passes status checks and has a public IP address. The security group allows HTTP (80) from 0.0.0.0/0. Users report that the website is not accessible. What should the administrator check next?

A cloud administrator is troubleshooting a connectivity issue between two virtual machines in the same VPC but different subnets. Both VMs have security groups that allow all traffic from the VPC CIDR. What should the administrator check first?

A company uses a cloud load balancer to distribute traffic to web servers. The load balancer health checks are failing for all instances. The instances are running and can be accessed directly via their private IPs from within the VPC. What is the most likely cause?

A cloud administrator is designing a multi-tier application. The database tier must not be directly accessible from the internet, but the web tier must be able to connect to it. Which of the following should the administrator implement?

A company is migrating a legacy application that requires static public IP addresses for licensing. The cloud provider assigns public IPs dynamically by default. Which solution should the administrator recommend while minimizing cost?

A cloud administrator notices that a scheduled backup job for a virtual machine has been failing with the error "insufficient storage space". The VM has 100 GB OS disk. The backup solution creates snapshots. What is the most likely cause?

A cloud administrator sets up a monitoring alarm to trigger when CPU utilization exceeds 90% for 5 minutes. The alarm uses a period of 5 minutes and an evaluation period of 1. The alarm does not trigger even though CPU spikes above 90% for several minutes. What is the most likely cause?

A company uses a cloud storage service with versioning enabled. An employee accidentally deleted a critical file. The administrator attempts to restore the file from the version history, but the file does not appear in the list of versions. What is the most likely reason?

A cloud administrator is reviewing a security audit report that shows an instance has been sending outbound traffic to a known malicious IP address. The instance hosts a production application. Which action should the administrator take first?

A cloud administrator is troubleshooting a connectivity issue between a web server and a database server in the same VPC but different subnets. The security group for the database server allows inbound traffic from the web server's security group. However, the web server cannot establish a TCP connection to the database. What are two possible causes? (Choose two.)

A company is migrating to the cloud and needs to ensure high availability for a web application. The solution must tolerate the failure of an entire Availability Zone. Which three actions should the administrator take? (Choose three.)

A cloud administrator is investigating a performance issue with a cloud-based application. The application's response time has increased significantly. Monitoring shows low CPU and memory, but high network latency. Which two actions should the administrator take? (Choose two.)

Refer to the exhibit. A cloud administrator is troubleshooting why an EC2 instance in subnet-12345678 cannot be reached from the internet. The instance has a public IP and the security group allows all inbound traffic. Based on the exhibit, what is the most likely cause?

Refer to the exhibit. A cloud administrator deployed a Compute Engine instance in the default VPC. The instance has a public IP but cannot be accessed via SSH from the internet. The firewall rules allow ingress on port 22 from 0.0.0.0/0. What is the most likely cause?

Refer to the exhibit. A cloud administrator is trying to retrieve a secret from a cloud secrets manager using a script with an access key and secret key. The script returns the error shown. The keys were newly created. What is the most likely cause?

A cloud administrator notices that a virtual machine has been running for 180 days without a reboot. The administrator needs to install critical security patches that require a reboot. Which of the following actions should the administrator take FIRST?

A cloud engineer is tasked with automating the deployment of a new web application. Which of the following tools is BEST suited for managing infrastructure as code in a hybrid cloud environment?

A company's cloud environment has experienced a sudden spike in network traffic, causing a critical application to become unresponsive. Which of the following is the FIRST step the cloud administrator should take to address this issue?

A cloud administrator is designing a backup strategy for a critical database that must achieve a recovery point objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a recovery time objective (RTO) of 30 minutes. The database has a high write throughput. Which of the following backup methods BEST meets these requirements?

A cloud administrator receives an alert that the CPU utilization on a production web server has exceeded 90% for the past hour. The administrator checks the metrics and sees that the request rate has increased. Which of the following is the MOST appropriate action to resolve the issue in the short term?

A cloud engineer is troubleshooting a connectivity issue between two virtual networks in different regions. The engineer has verified that the virtual networks are peered and the routing tables are correct. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause of the issue?

A company uses a multi-cloud strategy with both AWS and Azure. The cloud operations team needs to centrally monitor all cloud resources and receive alerts when resource usage exceeds predefined thresholds. Which of the following solutions should the team implement?

A cloud administrator is responsible for ensuring the availability of a critical application that runs on a virtual machine. The administrator needs to implement a solution that can automatically restart the virtual machine if it becomes unresponsive due to an operating system crash. Which of the following should the administrator configure?

A cloud operations team notices that a production database is experiencing intermittent slow queries. The database is running on a virtual machine with 4 vCPUs and 16 GB of memory. The slow queries coincide with high CPU usage. Which of the following is the MOST effective long-term solution?

Which TWO of the following are best practices for managing cloud costs? (Select TWO.)

Which TWO of the following are key components of a disaster recovery plan in the cloud? (Select TWO.)

A cloud administrator is troubleshooting a performance issue in a virtualized environment. Which THREE of the following metrics should the administrator analyze to identify potential resource contention? (Select THREE.)

A cloud administrator notices that a virtual machine in a public cloud is running slower than expected. The VM is part of a production web application. The administrator has verified that the VM's CPU and memory utilization are below 50%. What should the administrator check next?

A company is migrating its on-premises workloads to a public cloud. The security team requires that all data in transit between the cloud resources and on-premises be encrypted. Which solution should the cloud architect recommend?

A cloud operations team is investigating why a batch processing job that runs nightly in a cloud environment has been failing intermittently. The job processes data from an external API and writes results to a database. The error logs show "Connection timed out" when calling the external API. However, manual calls from the same cloud environment succeed. What is the most likely cause?

A cloud administrator is tasked with reducing costs for a development environment that runs 24/7. The environment consists of several virtual machines and a load balancer. Which action would most effectively reduce costs without affecting developer access during business hours?

A company uses a cloud-based object storage service to store backups. The backups must be retained for seven years to meet compliance requirements. Which storage tier should be used to minimize cost while meeting the retention requirement?

A cloud operations team is troubleshooting a performance issue with a web application hosted on a cloud platform. The application uses an auto-scaling group behind a load balancer. Users report slow response times during peak hours. Monitoring shows high CPU utilization on all instances. Which of the following should the team do first to improve performance?

An organization requires that all cloud resources be tagged with the cost center and environment (e.g., production, development). A compliance checker runs weekly to report untagged resources. The cloud administrator notices that newly created resources are often missing tags. What is the most effective long-term solution?

A cloud administrator is configuring a new virtual private cloud (VPC) for a three-tier application. The web tier must be accessible from the internet, the application tier should only be accessible from the web tier, and the database tier should only be accessible from the application tier. Which network architecture should be used?

A company recently migrated its database to a cloud-managed database service. After the migration, the application team reports that some queries are returning stale data. The database is configured with read replicas. What is the most likely reason for the stale data?

A cloud administrator is deploying a new application in a cloud environment. The application requires high availability and fault tolerance. Which two design principles should the administrator implement? (Select TWO).

A cloud operations team is analyzing a security incident in which an unauthorized user accessed a storage bucket. The bucket was configured with public access. Which three best practices should the team implement to prevent such incidents in the future? (Select THREE).

A cloud architect is designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical application. The application runs on virtual machines in a public cloud. The recovery time objective (RTO) is 1 hour, and the recovery point objective (RPO) is 15 minutes. Which three strategies should the architect implement? (Select THREE).

Refer to the exhibit. A cloud administrator runs the command to inspect an instance and notices that it is running, but the web application hosted on it is unreachable from the internet. The instance is in a public subnet with an internet gateway attached to the VPC. Which of the following is the most likely cause?

Refer to the exhibit. A cloud administrator applies the bucket policy shown. After applying, users report that they can no longer access the prod-backup bucket using their applications. The applications use the AWS SDK with default configuration. What is the most likely reason?

Refer to the exhibit. An application in a cloud environment logs multiple database connection errors. The database is a managed MySQL instance in the same VPC. The timeouts and connection refused errors occur intermittently. Which of the following is the most likely cause?

A cloud administrator notices that a cloud-based web application is experiencing intermittent latency during peak hours. The application runs on an auto-scaling group of virtual machines behind a load balancer. Which of the following should the administrator investigate FIRST to resolve the issue?

A company is migrating its on-premises database to a cloud-managed database service. The database contains sensitive financial data. Which of the following is the MOST important security configuration to implement after migration?

An organization has a hybrid cloud environment with resources in both a private cloud and a public cloud. The operations team reports that the cloud management platform cannot collect monitoring data from the public cloud instances. The security team recently updated firewall rules. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause?

A cloud engineer needs to deploy a stateless application across multiple availability zones. The application must scale horizontally based on CPU utilization. Which of the following is the BEST configuration?

A company uses a cloud object storage service to store backup data. The cloud provider charges for storage and retrieval. The operations team wants to minimize costs while ensuring data is available within 24 hours of a restore request. Which storage tier should they use?

A cloud administrator is troubleshooting a connectivity issue between two virtual networks in different cloud regions. The networks are connected via a VPN gateway. The administrator can ping resources in one network but not the other. Which of the following should the administrator check FIRST?

A cloud engineer is tasked with automating the deployment of a three-tier application. The engineer wants to ensure that the database tier is not directly accessible from the internet but can be reached by the application tier. Which of the following should be implemented?

A company experiences a cloud service outage that affects multiple customers. The cloud provider publishes a post-incident report identifying the root cause. As a cloud administrator, which of the following actions should be taken to prevent recurrence?

A cloud administrator is managing a fleet of virtual machines that run a batch processing job. The job is memory-intensive and runs once a day. The administrator wants to optimize cost without affecting performance. Which of the following is the BEST approach?

Refer to the exhibit. A cloud engineer is reviewing logs from an EC2 instance. Which of the following is the MOST likely root cause of the application failure?

Which TWO of the following are benefits of using a content delivery network (CDN) with cloud-hosted applications? (Choose two.)

Which THREE of the following are recommended practices for securing cloud API access? (Choose three.)

Which THREE of the following are common causes of VM migration failures in a cloud environment? (Choose three.)

Your organization operates a three-tier web application hosted on a public cloud platform. The application tier consists of an auto-scaling group of virtual machines running a custom web service. The database tier is a managed MySQL service. Recently, users have reported slow response times during business hours, especially when the application performs write operations. Reviewing the monitoring dashboards shows that the CPU utilization on the application instances averages 80% and the database connection pool is consistently maxed out at 200 connections. The auto-scaling group is configured to add instances when CPU exceeds 70% for 5 minutes, but scaling events are not triggering as expected. The application team has confirmed that there are no code changes in the last week. You check the CloudWatch alarms and see no metric alarms for CPU. What is the MOST likely reason the auto-scaling group is not scaling out?

A company recently migrated its on-premises backup server to a cloud virtual machine running Windows Server with a dedicated data disk for backups. The backup software is configured to write to a folder on the data disk. After two weeks, the backup jobs start failing with 'disk full' errors. The cloud engineer logs into the VM and verifies that the data disk has 500 GB of total space and the backup folder shows only 300 GB used. However, the operating system reports the disk as 100% full. The engineer also notices that the recycle bin on the data disk appears to be empty. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause of the discrepancy?

A cloud administrator notices that a web application is experiencing intermittent latency spikes. The application runs on a load-balanced set of virtual machines in a public cloud. Which of the following should the administrator investigate FIRST?

A company uses a hybrid cloud model with on-premises servers and a public cloud. The IT team wants to ensure that critical data is backed up daily and retained for 30 days. The backup solution must be cost-effective. Which of the following backup strategies BEST meets these requirements?

A cloud engineer is troubleshooting an issue where a virtual machine (VM) in a VPC cannot communicate with an on-premises database server through a site-to-site VPN. The VPN tunnel status shows 'UP' and the on-premises firewall logs show packets from the VM's public IP (but the VM is in a private subnet with no public IP). What is the MOST likely cause?

A systems administrator needs to apply a critical security patch to a set of application servers running in a cloud environment. The administrator wants to minimize downtime and ensure that if the patch causes issues, the servers can be rolled back quickly. Which of the following is the BEST approach?

A cloud administrator is reviewing cost reports and notices that a development environment is incurring high costs due to idle compute resources. The environment is used only during business hours on weekdays. Which of the following actions would MOST effectively reduce costs?

An organization uses a cloud management platform (CMP) to orchestrate resources across multiple cloud providers. The CMP has a policy that automatically terminates any VM that exceeds 85% CPU utilization for more than 15 minutes. The operations team receives complaints that some VMs are being terminated while performing legitimate batch processing jobs. What should the operations team do to resolve this issue?

A company is migrating its on-premises data center to the cloud. The current backup solution uses a tape library. The company wants to implement a cloud-based backup strategy that ensures data durability and rapid restoration. Which of the following is the BEST option?

Which TWO of the following are best practices for managing cloud storage in a multi-account environment? (Choose two.)

Which THREE of the following are common causes of application performance degradation in a cloud environment? (Choose three.)

Which TWO of the following are valid methods for migrating on-premises virtual machines to a public cloud? (Choose two.)

A cloud administrator manages a multi-tier web application running on AWS. The application consists of a load balancer, web servers in an auto scaling group, and a MySQL RDS database. Recently, users have reported slow page load times during peak hours. The cloud administrator has checked the load balancer metrics and found that response times are high, but CPU utilization on the web servers is below 60%. The RDS instance shows high read IOPS and a high number of database connections. The administrator suspects the database is the bottleneck. Which of the following actions should the administrator take FIRST to resolve the performance issue?

A company has a hybrid cloud environment with an on-premises data center and Microsoft Azure. The on-premises infrastructure includes a VPN gateway connected to an Azure virtual network via site-to-site VPN. The network team reports that traffic from on-premises to Azure is experiencing high latency and packet loss. The VPN tunnel status shows as connected. The team has verified that the on-premises firewall is not dropping packets. The Azure administrator checks the virtual network gateway metrics and sees high inbound packet drops and a high number of VPN tunnel rekeys. What is the MOST likely cause of the issue?

A cloud operations team uses a configuration management tool (e.g., Chef, Puppet) to manage a fleet of Linux servers in a public cloud. After a recent update, the team notices that some servers are failing to apply the new configuration. The logs on the failing servers show connection timeouts to the configuration management server. Other servers in the same subnet and security group apply configurations successfully. The configuration management server is reachable from the admin's workstation. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause of the issue?

A company is using a cloud provider's object storage for archival data. The data is rarely accessed but must be retained for 7 years for compliance. The current storage class is Standard, and the monthly bill is increasing. The cloud administrator wants to minimize costs while meeting compliance requirements. The data must be accessible within 24 hours if needed. Which of the following actions should the administrator take?

A cloud engineer is tasked with setting up a disaster recovery (DR) plan for a critical application that runs on virtual machines in a private cloud. The DR site is a public cloud. The application requires low recovery time objective (RTO) of less than 15 minutes and recovery point objective (RPO) of less than 5 minutes. Which of the following replication strategies BEST meets these requirements?

A cloud administrator wants to ensure that patches are applied to cloud workloads with minimal risk. Which TWO practices should the administrator follow? (Choose two.)

A company uses a hybrid cloud model with an on-premises data center connected to a public cloud via a VPN. Users report intermittent connectivity issues to cloud applications. Which THREE components should the administrator check to isolate the problem? (Choose three.)

A cloud administrator notices that a virtual machine (VM) hosting a web application is consistently running at 95% CPU utilization during business hours. End users complain that the application is slow. The application is stateless and can scale horizontally. The VM is part of an auto-scaling group configured with a target tracking scaling policy based on average CPU utilization. The administrator checks CloudWatch metrics and sees that the CPU utilization has been above the target of 70% for the last two hours, but no new instances have been launched. What should the administrator do FIRST to resolve the issue?

An organization uses a cloud-based backup service to back up its critical database every night. The backup job has been failing for the past three days with an error message indicating 'insufficient storage space in the backup repository.' The administrator checks the backup repository and finds that it is 80% full. The database is 2 TB in size, and the backup policy retains 7 daily backups. The administrator estimates that each full backup is approximately 500 GB after deduplication. The company's RPO requirement is 24 hours. What should the administrator do to resolve the backup failure without violating the RPO?

A financial services company has a disaster recovery (DR) plan for its cloud infrastructure that includes a secondary region 500 miles away. The plan uses synchronous replication for the primary database. During a scheduled DR test, the administrator triggers a failover to the secondary region. The application comes up, but the database is missing the last three minutes of transactions. The RPO requirement is 5 seconds. The administrator finds that the network latency between regions is 40 milliseconds. What is the most likely cause of the data loss, and what should the administrator do?

A cloud operations team uses a configuration management tool to apply patches to hundreds of Linux servers. Recently, the automation script that applies security patches has been failing with an error: 'Package not found.' The administrator verifies that the patch repository URL is correct and that the servers have internet access. The script runs every Sunday at 2:00 AM and the failures started two weeks ago. The failed patches are all for the latest kernel update. What should the administrator check FIRST?

A company has a cloud-based application that uses an auto-scaling group across multiple Availability Zones (AZs). The application experiences periodic spikes in traffic. The auto-scaling policy uses a step scaling policy based on CPU utilization. The operations team notices that during a traffic spike, new instances are launched but take over five minutes to become healthy and begin serving traffic. During this time, existing instances are overloaded and some requests fail. The team wants to reduce the time it takes for new instances to handle traffic. Which action would be most effective?

A cloud administrator receives an alert that a storage bucket containing sensitive customer data has been accessed from an unknown IP address at 3:00 AM. The bucket policy is configured to allow access only from the corporate VPN CIDR block (10.0.0.0/8). The administrator checks the access logs and sees that the request originated from 203.0.113.50, which is not within the allowed range. The bucket policy also includes a condition that restricts access to Secure Transport (SSL). What is the most likely reason the request succeeded despite the policy?

A cloud administrator is troubleshooting a performance issue with a relational database hosted on a cloud provider. The application team reports that queries are taking much longer than usual. The administrator checks the database monitoring dashboard and sees that the queries per second are within normal ranges, but the average query latency has doubled. The database is running on a VM with 4 vCPUs and 16 GB RAM. The storage type is SSD-backed General Purpose (GP2) with provisioned 3000 IOPS. The administrator notices that the Disk I/O Wait metric is consistently above 20%. What should the administrator do to improve query performance?

A company has a policy that all cloud resources must be tagged with 'CostCenter' and 'Project' tags. The cloud operations team uses a monitoring tool to alert when untagged resources are created. The team receives an alert for a new EC2 instance that lacks the required tags. The instance was launched two hours ago by a DevOps engineer who is on leave. The instance is critical for production. What should the administrator do to resolve the compliance violation?

A cloud administrator is troubleshooting an issue where a virtual machine (VM) cannot connect to the internet. Which TWO of the following are valid first steps to diagnose the problem?

A cloud application is intermittently slow. Based on the exhibit, which of the following is the most likely cause?

A company uses AWS for its production environment. The company has deployed a web application behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) with a target group containing two EC2 instances in different Availability Zones. The application is stateless and stores session data in an external Redis cluster. Recently, users report that they are occasionally logged out during a session. The load balancer health checks pass for both instances. The application logs show no errors. Which of the following is the most likely cause of the issue?