CV0-004 Cloud Architecture and Design — 50 Questions

Question 1

A company wants to migrate its on-premises workload to the cloud and needs to maintain full control over the operating system, middleware, and applications. Which cloud service model should the company choose?

Accepted Answer

IaaS. IaaS provides virtualized computing resources (VMs, storage, networking) where the customer manages the OS and above, making it the right choice for full control.

Answer

PaaS

Answer

FaaS

Answer

SaaS

Question 2

Which cloud deployment model connects an on-premises data center to a public cloud using VPN or dedicated connections like AWS Direct Connect?

Accepted Answer

Hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud integrates on-premises and public cloud resources via private networking.

Answer

Private cloud

Answer

Multi-cloud

Answer

Public cloud

Question 3

A cloud architect is designing a highly available web application. The application must remain available even if an entire AWS Availability Zone fails. The architect decides to deploy identical application instances in two separate Availability Zones and distribute traffic equally. Which architecture is being implemented?

Accepted Answer

Active-active. Active-active architecture distributes traffic across all instances; if one zone fails, the other continues serving traffic.

Answer

Fault tolerance

Answer

Warm standby

Answer

Active-passive

Question 4

A company runs a stateless web application on virtual machines. To handle increased traffic, they add more virtual machines and distribute incoming requests among them. What is this scaling method called?

Accepted Answer

Horizontal scaling. Horizontal scaling adds more instances to handle load, as opposed to vertical scaling which increases the resources of a single instance.

Answer

Right-sizing

Answer

Vertical scaling

Answer

Auto-scaling

Question 5

A cloud engineer needs to store database backups that must be retained for seven years. The backups are rarely accessed. Which storage type is most cost-effective for this use case?

Accepted Answer

Archive storage. Archive storage (like Glacier or Azure Archive) is designed for long-term cold storage at low cost.

Answer

Object storage

Answer

Block storage

Answer

File storage

Question 6

A company uses AWS and Azure for redundancy. They deploy the same application on both clouds to avoid vendor lock-in and improve disaster recovery. Which cloud deployment model is this?

Accepted Answer

Multi-cloud. Multi-cloud uses multiple public cloud providers for redundancy and best-of-breed services.

Answer

Community cloud

Answer

Hybrid cloud

Answer

Private cloud

Question 7

Which of the following is a characteristic of serverless computing (FaaS)?

Accepted Answer

You are charged per execution or compute time. FaaS executes code in response to events and charges only for the compute time consumed.

Answer

You pay for allocated resources regardless of usage

Answer

You must manage the underlying servers

Answer

You have to provision capacity in advance

Question 8

A company wants to minimize cloud costs for a batch processing job that runs for a few hours each night and can be interrupted. Which pricing model is most appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Spot instances. Spot/preemptible instances offer significant discounts but can be terminated if capacity is needed elsewhere, suitable for fault-tolerant and interruptible workloads.

Answer

Dedicated hosts

Answer

On-demand instances

Answer

Reserved instances

Question 9

An organization is designing a VPC with public and private subnets. The web servers must be accessible from the internet, but database servers must not. The architecture also requires high availability across two Availability Zones. What is the minimum number of public subnets and private subnets needed?

Accepted Answer

Two public, two private. For high availability across two AZs, you need at least two public subnets (one per AZ) and two private subnets (one per AZ).

Answer

One public, two private

Answer

Two public, one private

Answer

One public, one private

Question 10

A company uses an auto-scaling group to handle variable web traffic. The scaling policy is based on CPU utilization. However, during a flash sale, the application experiences a sudden spike in traffic, and the auto-scaling group takes too long to launch new instances. Which design change would most effectively reduce the time to scale out?

Accepted Answer

Use scheduled scaling to pre-warm instances before the sale. Using a predictive scaling policy or scheduled scaling can anticipate traffic spikes and pre-warm instances, reducing launch delay. Alternatively, increasing the cooldown period would slow scaling. Lowering the threshold would cause earlier scaling but not necessarily reduce launch time. Using larger instances is vertical scaling, not addressing launch delay.

Answer

Use larger instance types to handle more traffic

Answer

Lower the CPU utilization threshold

Answer

Increase the cooldown period

Question 11

A company hosts a web application on AWS and wants to improve latency for global users. Which service should they use to cache static content at edge locations?

Accepted Answer

AWS CloudFront. A CDN (like CloudFront) caches content at edge locations to reduce latency for users worldwide.

Answer

Application Load Balancer

Answer

AWS Global Accelerator

Answer

Amazon Route 53

Question 12

A company needs to choose a disaster recovery strategy with an RTO of 4 hours and an RPO of 15 minutes. Which of the following is the most cost-effective approach that meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Pilot light. Pilot light keeps a minimal environment running and can be scaled up quickly; it offers a balance between cost and recovery time. Warm standby would be more expensive, cold standby would not meet RTO/RPO, and multi-site active-active is overkill.

Answer

Multi-site active-active

Answer

Warm standby

Answer

Cold standby

Question 13

A company is designing a hybrid cloud architecture connecting their on-premises data center to AWS. Which TWO options provide dedicated, private network connectivity? (Select TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Site-to-Site VPN. AWS Direct Connect provides dedicated private connection, and VPN over the internet can also be private if encrypted, but it's not dedicated. Site-to-Site VPN is a valid private connectivity option. Internet gateway is public, VPC peering is between VPCs, not on-premises.

Answer

Internet gateway

Answer

VPC peering

Answer

NAT gateway

Question 14

A cloud architect is evaluating a multi-cloud strategy to improve resilience. Which THREE factors should be considered when designing multi-cloud architecture? (Select THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Data transfer costs between clouds. Data transfer costs, consistent security policies, and application portability are key considerations. Vendor lock-in is reduced, not increased. Single API management is not typical for multi-cloud.

Answer

Increased vendor lock-in

Answer

Ability to manage all clouds with a single API

Question 15

A company is designing stateless application tiers to support horizontal scaling. Which TWO design principles support statelessness? (Select TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Persist all application state in a shared database. Storing session state in an external cache or database makes the application stateless. Local storage is stateful. Sticky sessions break statelessness. Using configuration files per instance is stateful.

Answer

Store configuration files on each instance locally

Answer

Use local instance storage for session data

Answer

Use sticky sessions (session affinity) on the load balancer

Question 16

A company wants to migrate its on-premises virtualized workloads to the cloud while maintaining control over the operating system and middleware. Which cloud service model should they choose?

Accepted Answer

IaaS. IaaS provides virtual machines, storage, and networking, allowing the customer to manage the OS and above. PaaS abstracts the OS, SaaS delivers complete applications, and FaaS is for functions.

Answer

SaaS

Answer

FaaS

Answer

PaaS

Question 17

A financial services firm requires low latency between on-premises resources and its public cloud VPC. They also need a dedicated, consistent network connection that bypasses the internet. Which connectivity option should they use?

Accepted Answer

Direct Connect / ExpressRoute. Direct Connect (AWS) or ExpressRoute (Azure) provides a dedicated private connection from on-premises to the cloud, offering lower latency and consistency compared to internet-based VPN.

Answer

Cloud CDN

Answer

Internet gateway

Answer

Site-to-Site VPN

Question 18

An e-commerce application experiences variable traffic with sudden spikes during flash sales. The application is designed to be stateless. Which scaling approach should the cloud architect implement to handle these spikes efficiently?

Accepted Answer

Horizontal auto-scaling based on CPU utilization. Horizontal scaling (adding more instances) combined with auto-scaling based on metrics like CPU utilization can dynamically handle traffic spikes. Stateless design enables seamless addition/removal of instances.

Answer

Vertical scaling on a single large instance

Answer

Using a load balancer with active-passive failover

Answer

Pre-provisioning a fixed cluster of instances

Question 19

A cloud architect is designing a multi-region application with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1 hour and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes. The application runs on virtual machines in a public cloud. Which disaster recovery strategy best meets these objectives?

Accepted Answer

Hot standby in a secondary region with synchronous replication. Hot standby involves running a fully functional standby environment that can take over within minutes, achieving low RTO and RPO. Active-active can also meet these but may be more complex and costly; warm standby typically has longer RTO; cold standby has hours.

Answer

Active-active across two regions with load balancing

Answer

Cold standby with daily backups

Answer

Warm standby with hourly snapshots

Question 20

A company wants to reduce cloud costs for a stateless batch processing workload that runs nightly for about 3 hours. The workload can tolerate interruptions. Which pricing model is most cost-effective?

Accepted Answer

Spot instances. Spot/preemptible instances offer significant discounts (up to 90%) but can be terminated by the provider. They are ideal for fault-tolerant, interruptible workloads like batch processing.

Answer

Reserved instances

Answer

Dedicated hosts

Answer

On-demand instances