CV0-004 Practice Exam 4 — 20 Questions

Question 1

A company wants to implement a disaster recovery strategy with an RTO of 15 minutes and an RPO of 1 minute for a critical database. Which approach should be used?

Accepted Answer

Cross-region continuous replication with automatic failover. Continuous replication with automatic failover provides near-zero RPO and fast RTO.

Answer

Scheduled snapshots every hour

Answer

Daily snapshots copied to another region

Answer

Weekly full backups to tape stored offsite

Question 2

A company is performing a disaster recovery test for a critical application. The test reveals that the application's RTO of 1 hour is not being met due to slow database restoration. Which THREE actions could help improve the restoration time? (Select THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Implement continuous replication to a standby database. Pre-warming standby instances reduces launch time, using faster storage like Provisioned IOPS speeds up data access, and implementing continuous replication reduces the amount of data to restore.

Answer

Disable encryption on the database to reduce overhead

Answer

Increase the retention period of automated backups

Question 3

A company uses a multi-cloud environment with AWS and Azure. They want to centralize log collection and enable advanced querying for troubleshooting. Which combination of services should they use?

Accepted Answer

AWS CloudWatch Logs and Azure Log Analytics. AWS CloudWatch Logs and Azure Log Analytics are the centralized logging services for each cloud. They can be aggregated using third-party tools, but the question asks for the native services to use. CloudWatch Logs for AWS, Log Analytics for Azure. CloudTrail is for API auditing, not general log collection.

Answer

AWS CloudTrail and Azure Monitor

Answer

AWS S3 and Azure Blob Storage

Answer

AWS CloudWatch and Azure Application Insights

Question 4

A company is using Azure VMs and wants to centralize logs from multiple applications for security analysis. The logs must be retained for 2 years. Which Azure service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Azure Log Analytics. Azure Log Analytics (now part of Azure Monitor) provides centralized log management and configurable retention up to 2 years (or more with archive).

Answer

Azure Activity Log

Answer

Azure Application Insights

Answer

Azure Storage Analytics

Question 5

A cloud administrator wants to choose an auto-scaling policy that can respond to changing demand patterns. Which TWO policy types support dynamic adjustments based on real-time metrics? (Choose TWO)

Accepted Answer

Target tracking scaling. Target tracking and step scaling both adjust capacity dynamically based on real-time metrics.

Answer

Predictive scaling

Answer

Scheduled scaling

Answer

Simple scaling

Question 6

A company wants to track cloud spending by department and project. Which strategy should be implemented to enable cost attribution?

Accepted Answer

Implement a resource tagging strategy. Resource tagging allows filtering and grouping costs by tags like department or project.

Answer

Use a single account for all workloads

Answer

Enable detailed billing reports

Answer

Use AWS Organizations only

Question 7

An organization wants to reduce cloud costs by identifying underutilized EC2 instances. Which AWS service provides rightsizing recommendations?

Accepted Answer

AWS Compute Optimizer. AWS Compute Optimizer analyzes resource utilization and provides recommendations to optimize AWS resources. AWS Cost Explorer shows spending but not specific rightsizing recommendations.

Answer

AWS Budgets

Answer

AWS Trusted Advisor

Answer

AWS Cost Explorer

Question 8

A cloud administrator cannot deploy a new VM from a custom image. The deployment fails with an error stating 'Incompatible hypervisor version'. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The image was created on a newer hypervisor than the current host.. If the custom image was created on a newer version of the hypervisor, it may include features or configuration that are not supported by the older hypervisor version on the host, causing the 'Incompatible hypervisor version' error. Option B is incorrect because virtual hardware version typically relates to compatibility within the same hypervisor, but the error is specifically about hypervisor version mismatch. Option C is incorrect because a corrupt image would typically cause different errors (e.g., file read failure). Option D is incorrect because the error is about hypervisor compatibility, not storage backend support.

Answer

The VM's virtual hardware version is too old.

Answer

The image file is corrupt.

Answer

The storage backend does not support the image format.

Question 9

A cloud architect is designing a multi-account AWS environment and wants to deploy CloudFormation stacks consistently across many accounts. The architect needs a solution that can manage stack instances across multiple accounts and Regions from a single administrator account. Which AWS feature should be used?

Accepted Answer

Stack sets. AWS CloudFormation StackSets allow you to create, update, or delete stacks across multiple accounts and Regions from a single admin account.

Answer

Drift detection

Answer

Nested stacks

Answer

Change sets

Question 10

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

Accepted Answer

A network security group is blocking port 3306.. The intermittent slowness points to a network security group blocking port 3306, which is used by MySQL/MariaDB. When the NSG intermittently drops packets to this port, the application experiences timeouts and retries, causing sporadic slowdowns. This is a common issue in cloud environments where security rules are misconfigured or applied at the wrong priority level.

Answer

The database server is overloaded.

Answer

The database endpoint DNS record is incorrect.

Answer

The application has insufficient memory.

Question 11

An organization runs a batch processing job that runs for 2 hours every night. The job can tolerate interruptions and can resume from the last checkpoint. Which cloud purchasing option minimizes cost?

Accepted Answer

Spot instances. Spot instances (preemptible VMs) offer significant discounts and are suitable for fault-tolerant, interruptible workloads. Reserved instances are for steady-state usage. On-demand is more expensive. Dedicated hosts are for regulatory compliance or licensing.

Answer

Reserved instances

Answer

Dedicated hosts

Answer

On-demand instances

Question 12

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?

Accepted Answer

Check for existing snapshots and create a new snapshot.. Before applying patches that require a reboot, the administrator should first check for existing snapshots and create a new snapshot. This ensures a rollback point is available in case the patching process fails or causes instability. Snapshots capture the virtual machine's state, including disk and memory, allowing the administrator to revert to the pre-patch state without data loss.

Answer

Pause the virtual machine before applying patches.

Answer

Shut down the virtual machine and apply patches offline.

Answer

Migrate the virtual machine to a different host to avoid disruption.

Question 13

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?

Accepted Answer

Check the network bandwidth and I/O throttling limits.. When CPU and memory are well below capacity, performance degradation in a public cloud VM is often caused by resource throttling at the network or storage layer. Cloud providers enforce bandwidth caps and I/O limits per VM size, and hitting those limits can cause packet loss, queuing, and high latency even when compute resources are idle. Checking network bandwidth and I/O throttling limits is the correct next step to identify if the VM is being rate-limited.

Answer

Migrate the VM to a different availability zone.

Answer

Increase the VM's vCPU count.

Answer

Reboot the VM.

Question 14

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?

Accepted Answer

Implement a connection pooling mechanism in the application tier.. The performance issue is caused by the application opening a new database connection for each HTTP request and not closing them properly, which exhausts the maximum connections on RDS. Implementing a connection pooling mechanism in the application tier reuses existing connections, reduces connection overhead, and prevents connection exhaustion without requiring a larger instance or increasing the connection limit. This directly addresses the root cause—inefficient connection management—rather than treating symptoms like high CPU or connection limits.

Answer

Scale the RDS instance vertically to a larger instance class.

Answer

Increase the timeout for idle database connections.

Answer

Increase the maximum number of database connections on RDS.

Question 15

A developer wants to deploy a containerized application on a Kubernetes cluster using a package manager that simplifies deployment and management. Which tool should be used?

Accepted Answer

Helm. Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes. It uses charts to define, install, and upgrade complex Kubernetes applications.

Answer

Docker Compose

Answer

Terraform

Answer

Ansible

Question 16

A cloud administrator needs to protect a web application from common attacks such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). Which cloud service should be implemented?

Accepted Answer

Web Application Firewall (WAF). A Web Application Firewall (WAF) is specifically designed to filter and monitor HTTP traffic, blocking common web exploits like SQL injection and XSS. Cloud providers offer WAF services (e.g., AWS WAF, Azure WAF, Cloud Armor).

Answer

DDoS protection service

Answer

Network ACL

Answer

Security group

Question 17

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.)

Accepted Answer

CPU ready time. CPU ready time measures the time a virtual machine is ready to execute instructions but is waiting for the hypervisor to schedule physical CPU resources. High ready time directly indicates CPU contention, as the VM is being starved of CPU cycles by other VMs on the same host.

Answer

Swap file usage

Answer

Network latency

Question 18

A company is deploying a web application on GCP and needs to protect against OWASP Top 10 threats and DDoS attacks. Which THREE services should be combined to provide comprehensive protection?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Load Balancing. Cloud Load Balancing (A) is correct because it distributes incoming traffic across multiple backend instances, providing inherent DDoS resilience by absorbing and scaling with attack traffic. It also integrates directly with Cloud Armor to enforce OWASP Top 10 web application firewall (WAF) rules, such as SQL injection and XSS protections, at the edge before traffic reaches the application.

Answer

Cloud NAT

Answer

Cloud VPN

Question 19

A DevOps team is implementing a canary deployment for a microservice running on Amazon ECS. They want to gradually shift 10% of traffic to the new version and automatically roll back if error rates exceed 1% in 5 minutes. Which combination of services should they use?

Accepted Answer

AWS CodeDeploy with CloudWatch alarms. AWS CodeDeploy natively supports canary deployments for Amazon ECS, allowing you to specify a traffic shift percentage (e.g., 10%) and integrate with CloudWatch alarms to automatically trigger a rollback when error rates exceed a defined threshold (e.g., 1% over 5 minutes). This combination directly fulfills the gradual traffic shifting and automated rollback requirements without custom scripting.

Answer

AWS CloudFormation and SSM

Answer

AWS Lambda and Step Functions

Answer

AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Route 53

Question 20

A deployment of a new application version fails with a '503 Service Unavailable' error after a rolling update. The previous version was working. What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

New version missing a required dependency. A 503 Service Unavailable error during a rolling update typically indicates that the new application version cannot start or serve traffic. The most likely cause is a missing required dependency (e.g., a library, module, or runtime component) that the previous version did not need, causing the new pods or containers to fail readiness probes and be removed from the load balancer pool.

Answer

Database connection pool exhausted

Answer

DNS propagation delay

Answer

SSL certificate expired