CV0-004 Cloud Architecture and Design Practice Test 11 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A cloud architect is designing a containerized microservices platform for a retail company. The company requires that individual services scale independently, that failed containers be replaced automatically without manual intervention, and that the platform abstract away the underlying compute hosts. The operations team has limited experience with cluster management. Which cloud-native orchestration approach BEST meets these requirements?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Deploy the microservices to a managed Kubernetes service and define Deployments and Horizontal Pod Autoscalers.. A managed Kubernetes service supplies the orchestration features the scenario demands: scheduling across hosts, self-healing of failed containers via controllers, and per-service scaling through Horizontal Pod Autoscalers. It also removes control-plane administration from a team lacking deep cluster skills. The other approaches either fail to abstract hosts, prevent independent scaling, or impose execution-model limits.

Answer

Deploy each microservice on a dedicated virtual machine with an autoscaling group per service.

Answer

Package all microservices into a single monolithic container and run it on one large virtual machine.

Answer

Use serverless functions for every service and rely on the provider to manage all scaling and placement.

Question 2

A cloud engineer is deploying a containerized microservices application on Google Kubernetes Engine. The team wants each pod to authenticate to Google Cloud APIs without embedding long-lived service account keys, and they want per-workload identity that can be granted least-privilege IAM roles. Which approach should the engineer implement?

Accepted Answer

Enable Workload Identity and bind a Kubernetes service account to a Google service account. Workload Identity is the GKE-native mechanism that lets pods impersonate a Google service account through short-lived federated tokens, eliminating static key files and enabling per-workload IAM bindings. The alternatives either reintroduce long-lived credentials or collapse identity to the node level, neither of which provides keyless, least-privilege access for individual microservices.

Answer

Create a service account key JSON file and mount it as a Kubernetes Secret in each pod

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Grant the Compute Engine default service account broad roles and let all pods share it

Answer

Store the service account credentials in Secret Manager and inject them at pod startup

Question 3

A cloud architect is designing a system that requires a durable, highly available object storage solution for storing backups and media files. The data must be accessible from anywhere via HTTP/HTTPS. Which AWS service should be used?

Accepted Answer

Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is the correct choice because it is a durable, highly available object storage service that supports HTTP/HTTPS access and is designed for backups and media files. EBS, EFS, and RDS serve different storage needs: block, file, and database respectively, and do not meet the object storage and accessibility requirements.

Answer

Amazon EFS

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Amazon RDS

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Amazon EBS

Question 4

A cloud administrator is deploying a web application on Azure. The application requires a shared, highly available file storage that can be mounted simultaneously by multiple virtual machines across different availability zones. Which Azure storage solution should the administrator choose?

Accepted Answer

Azure Files. Azure Files is the correct choice because it provides fully managed file shares that can be mounted by multiple VMs simultaneously using standard protocols like SMB and NFS. It supports high availability and can be configured with zone-redundant storage to ensure accessibility across availability zones, meeting the requirement for shared, highly available file storage.

Answer

Azure Queue Storage

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Azure Blob Storage

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Azure Managed Disks

Question 5

A cloud architect is designing a multi-tier application that must be resilient to the failure of a single availability zone. The application consists of a web tier, an application tier, and a database tier. Which TWO design decisions will help achieve this resilience? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Deploy the web and application tiers across multiple availability zones and use a load balancer to distribute traffic.. To be resilient to a single availability zone failure, both the stateless tiers and the stateful database tier must be distributed. Deploying the web and application tiers across multiple zones behind a load balancer ensures continued service if one zone fails. Configuring the database with a multi-AZ standby replica provides automatic failover for the data layer. Together, these decisions eliminate single points of failure across all tiers.

Answer

Use a single, large database instance in one availability zone with frequent snapshots.

Answer

Place all tiers in a single availability zone to reduce network latency between components.

Answer

Store all session state on the local disk of each web server to improve performance.

Question 6

A cloud architect is designing a microservices-based application that requires inter-service communication. The services must be loosely coupled, and the architecture must handle service failures gracefully. Which communication pattern is most appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Asynchronous messaging using a message queue or pub/sub system.. Asynchronous messaging decouples services and allows them to operate independently, with messages buffered during failures. This ensures that a service outage does not immediately impact others, providing resilience and loose coupling, which are critical for microservices architectures.

Answer

Remote procedure calls (RPC) with timeouts.

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Shared database with direct reads and writes.

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Synchronous HTTP/REST calls between services.

Question 7

A cloud architect is designing a highly available architecture on AWS for a web application that must survive the failure of an entire Availability Zone. The application uses an Application Load Balancer, web servers, and an Amazon RDS database. Which TWO design actions should the architect take? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Deploy the web servers in an Auto Scaling group that spans at least two Availability Zones.. To survive an Availability Zone failure, the web tier must be distributed across multiple AZs using an Auto Scaling group, and the database tier must use a Multi-AZ deployment for automatic failover. These two actions together provide high availability for both compute and data layers.

Answer

Configure the Application Load Balancer to route traffic only to a single Availability Zone to reduce latency.

Answer

Place the RDS database in a single Availability Zone and rely on automated backups for failover.

Answer

Use Amazon S3 to store the database files and point the application to the S3 bucket.

Question 8

A cloud architect is designing a solution that requires a shared, POSIX-compliant file system that can be mounted concurrently by hundreds of Linux EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones in the same AWS Region. The workload is read-heavy, and the file system must scale storage capacity automatically as data grows. Which AWS service should the architect choose?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS). Amazon EFS is the correct choice because it is a managed NFS file system that supports POSIX semantics, can be mounted by many Linux instances simultaneously across multiple Availability Zones, and elastically scales storage capacity. The other services either provide block storage, Windows-oriented SMB file storage, or hybrid gateway functionality that does not meet the cross-AZ shared file system requirement.

Answer

AWS Storage Gateway in File Gateway mode

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Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) with Multi-Attach enabled

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Amazon FSx for Windows File Server

Question 9

A company runs a customer-facing web application on Azure virtual machines. During a regional outage, the operations team needs to bring up the same environment in a secondary Azure region. The team wants an automated, repeatable deployment that includes virtual networks, load balancers, and VM configurations. Which Azure capability should the team use to meet this goal?

Accepted Answer

Azure Resource Manager templates (ARM templates). Because the requirement is automated, repeatable deployment of a full resource set into another region, an infrastructure-as-code mechanism is required. ARM templates express the environment declaratively and can be redeployed with region parameters, whereas the other services provide monitoring, recommendations, or cost governance and cannot provision the environment.

Answer

Azure Cost Management budgets

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Azure Monitor alert rules

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Azure Advisor recommendations

Question 10

A cloud engineer is configuring object storage for a media company that stores video archives accessed a few times per year but must retain them for seven years for compliance. Retrieval latency of several hours is acceptable, and cost must be minimized. Which storage tier characteristic should the engineer select?

Accepted Answer

An archive tier with long retrieval times and the lowest storage cost.. Archive-class object storage is purpose-built for data retained for years but read only occasionally, trading retrieval latency for the lowest storage cost per gigabyte. Since the media company accepts hours of retrieval delay and emphasizes cost, the archive tier satisfies both the compliance retention period and the budget constraint better than any frequently accessed or block-based option.

Answer

A local SSD volume attached to a virtual machine that stores the archives.

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A standard tier with millisecond access and no retrieval fee.

Answer

A high-performance tier with low latency and frequent-access pricing.

Question 11

A company is migrating a legacy application to Google Cloud. The application requires a relational database with automatic failover and replication across multiple zones within a region. Which Google Cloud service should the company use?

Accepted Answer

Cloud SQL with high availability configuration. Cloud SQL with high availability configuration is the correct choice because it provides a relational database with automatic failover and synchronous replication to a standby instance in a different zone. This matches the requirement for multi-zone replication within a region for a legacy relational application.

Answer

Cloud Spanner

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Firestore

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Cloud Bigtable

Question 12

A company is migrating a legacy application to the cloud. The application uses a fixed IP address that is hard-coded in several clients. The company needs to ensure the IP address remains the same even if the underlying virtual machine is replaced. Which cloud networking feature should be used?

Accepted Answer

An elastic IP address that can be associated with a different virtual machine.. An elastic IP address is a static public IP that can be reassigned to another virtual machine. This allows the application to keep the same public endpoint even when the underlying instance is replaced, which is essential when clients have the IP hard-coded. DHCP reservations and static private IPs are limited to private networks and do not provide a movable public address.

Answer

A content delivery network (CDN) distribution with a custom domain.

Answer

A dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) reservation.

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A static private IP address assigned manually to the virtual machine.

Question 13

A cloud administrator is deploying a microservices application on Kubernetes in a public cloud. The services must be able to discover each other dynamically and route traffic without hardcoded IP addresses. Which Kubernetes resource should the administrator use to provide a stable network endpoint for a set of pods?

Accepted Answer

Service. A Kubernetes Service is the correct resource for providing a stable network endpoint and enabling dynamic service discovery. It abstracts pod IPs and offers load balancing, which is essential for microservices communication without hardcoded addresses.

Answer

ConfigMap

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NetworkPolicy

Answer

Ingress

Question 14

A cloud engineer is deploying a stateful application on Amazon EC2 that requires a persistent block storage volume with the highest possible IOPS and lowest latency for a database. The database will run on a single instance in one Availability Zone, and the engineer needs to choose the appropriate Amazon EBS volume type. Which volume type should the engineer select?

Accepted Answer

Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2 Block Express). Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2 Block Express) delivers the highest IOPS and lowest latency among EBS volume types, making it the correct choice for a performance-critical single-instance database. The other options are either throughput-oriented HDDs for sequential workloads or a general-purpose SSD that, while cost-effective, does not provide the extreme performance required in this scenario.

Answer

Amazon EBS Cold HDD (sc1)

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Amazon EBS General Purpose SSD (gp3)

Answer

Amazon EBS Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)

Question 15

A cloud architect is designing a highly available three-tier application on AWS. The web tier must survive the loss of a single Availability Zone, and the database tier must support automatic failover with minimal administrative intervention. Which TWO design decisions should the architect implement? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Use a Multi-AZ deployment for Amazon RDS so a standby is maintained in a second Availability Zone. Zone-level resilience for the web tier comes from distributing instances across zones behind a load balancer, and database resilience with automatic failover comes from a Multi-AZ standby that is promoted without manual steps. The remaining choices either concentrate risk in one zone, rely on slow manual restoration, or depend on human intervention during an outage.

Answer

Configure Amazon RDS as a Single-AZ instance with automated snapshots every hour

Answer

Attach an Elastic IP address to each web server instance and update DNS manually during an outage

Answer

Place all web servers in a single Availability Zone and use larger instance types