CV0-004 Cloud Architecture and Design Practice Test 2 — 15 Questions

Question 1

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 2

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 3

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 4

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 5

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 6

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 instances are the most cost-effective because they offer deep discounts (up to 90%) for interruptible workloads. The workload is stateless, runs for only 3 hours nightly, and can tolerate interruptions, making it an ideal fit for spot instances. Reserved instances require a long-term commitment and provide capacity for steady-state usage, resulting in paying for 24/7 capacity for a workload that only needs 3 hours daily.

Answer

Reserved instances

Answer

Dedicated hosts

Answer

On-demand instances

Question 7

Which cloud deployment model involves connecting an on-premises data center to a public cloud provider using a VPN or dedicated connection?

Accepted Answer

Hybrid cloud. A hybrid cloud combines on-premises infrastructure with public cloud resources, typically connected via VPN or dedicated circuits like AWS Direct Connect or Azure ExpressRoute.

Answer

Private cloud

Answer

Multi-cloud

Answer

Public cloud

Question 8

A healthcare organization must store patient imaging data that is accessed infrequently but must be retained for 7 years. They need the lowest-cost storage option while ensuring data can be retrieved within 12 hours if needed. Which storage class should they use?

Accepted Answer

Archive storage (Glacier / Azure Archive). Archive storage like Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive or Azure Archive is the lowest cost for long-term retention, with retrieval times ranging from minutes to 12 hours.

Answer

Object storage standard tier

Answer

Block storage with snapshots

Answer

File storage (EFS / Azure Files)

Question 9

A cloud architect is designing a VPC for a three-tier web application. The web servers must be accessible from the internet, the application servers should only be reachable from the web tier, and the database servers should not have any public IP addresses and should be isolated. Which subnet design meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Web tier in public subnet, app tier in private subnet, database tier in a separate private subnet with no internet gateway. A typical three-tier architecture uses public subnets for web servers (with internet gateway), private subnets for application servers (with NAT for outbound if needed), and isolated database subnets with no internet access. Security groups/NACLs enforce traffic rules.

Answer

Web tier in public subnet, app and database tiers in the same private subnet

Answer

All servers in private subnets with a NAT gateway for inbound traffic

Answer

All servers in the same public subnet with security groups

Question 10

A cloud administrator needs to provide a shared file system that can be accessed by multiple Linux-based virtual machines in the same VPC. Which storage type should be used?

Accepted Answer

File storage. File storage (e.g., Amazon EFS, Azure Files) provides a shared file system accessible via NFS or SMB, suitable for multiple VMs.

Answer

Object storage

Answer

Archive storage

Answer

Block storage

Question 11

A company is deploying a global web application that serves static content (images, CSS, JavaScript) to users worldwide. They want to reduce latency and offload traffic from the origin servers. Which service should they implement?

Accepted Answer

Content Delivery Network (CDN). A Content Delivery Network (CDN) caches static content at edge locations worldwide, reducing latency and offloading origin servers.

Answer

Auto-scaling group

Answer

VPN connection

Answer

Load balancer

Question 12

An organization maintains a private cloud using OpenStack and also uses AWS for additional capacity. They have a critical application that must remain available even if one cloud provider goes offline. The application is deployed in both environments with active load balancing. Which cloud deployment model best describes this architecture?

Accepted Answer

Hybrid cloud. The architecture uses both a private cloud (OpenStack) and a public cloud (AWS) with active load balancing to ensure availability even if one provider fails. This is the defining characteristic of a hybrid cloud, which integrates private and public cloud resources while maintaining orchestration between them.

Answer

Multi-cloud

Answer

Public cloud

Answer

Private cloud

Question 13

A cloud architect is deploying a web application across multiple availability zones within a single region to achieve high availability. The application requires that if one availability zone fails, traffic should automatically be rerouted to the remaining zones without manual intervention. Which configuration is required?

Accepted Answer

Active-active across availability zones with a load balancer. Deploying an active-active configuration across multiple availability zones with a load balancer ensures that traffic is automatically distributed to healthy instances. If one availability zone fails, the load balancer's health checks detect the failure and reroute traffic to the remaining zones without manual intervention, meeting the high availability requirement.

Answer

Active-passive with a standby instance in a different region

Answer

Vertical scaling of instances in a single availability zone

Answer

Cold standby with daily backups

Question 14

A cloud architect is designing a solution for a financial analytics application that requires consistent, low-latency block storage for a database. The database will be deployed on a virtual machine in a public cloud. Which TWO storage types are appropriate for this requirement? (Select TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Block storage (EBS / Azure Disk). Block storage (e.g., Amazon EBS, Azure Disk) is designed for low-latency, consistent performance for databases running on VMs. Instance store provides temporary block-level storage physically attached to the host, offering very low latency but is ephemeral. Object storage is not suitable for databases due to latency.

Answer

File storage (EFS / Azure Files)

Answer

Archive storage

Answer

Object storage

Question 15

A company is migrating its on-premises application to a public cloud. The application consists of a web server, an application server, and a database. They want to minimize management overhead while ensuring the application can scale automatically. Which THREE cloud service models should they consider for each component to achieve this goal? (Select THREE.)

Accepted Answer

PaaS for database. For web server: PaaS (e.g., AWS Elastic Beanstalk) can manage the runtime and scaling. For application server: PaaS also works. For database: PaaS (e.g., Amazon RDS) provides managed database with auto-scaling. IaaS would require more management of OS and scaling. SaaS is complete application, not appropriate for custom components. FaaS could be used but is more granular.

Answer

SaaS for database

Answer

IaaS for web server