CV0-004 Practice Test 8 — 10 Questions

Question 1

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

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Dedicated hosts

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On-demand instances

Question 2

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.

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Shut down the virtual machine and apply patches offline.

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

Question 3

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.

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Increase the VM's vCPU count.

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Reboot the VM.

Question 4

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.

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Increase the timeout for idle database connections.

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Increase the maximum number of database connections on RDS.

Question 5

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

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Terraform

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Ansible

Question 6

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).

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DDoS protection service

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Network ACL

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Security group

Question 7

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 8

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

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Cloud VPN

Question 9

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.

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AWS CloudFormation and SSM

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AWS Lambda and Step Functions

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AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Route 53

Question 10

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

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DNS propagation delay

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SSL certificate expired