CV0-004 Cloud Architecture and Design Practice Test 4 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A cloud architect is designing a stateless containerized API for a retail company on AWS. Traffic is unpredictable but never drops to zero, and the company requires the lowest possible cost per request while avoiding capacity planning. The containers must start within seconds and scale independently of the underlying host. Which compute architecture should the architect recommend?

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

Accepted Answer

Deploy the containers on Amazon ECS with the Fargate launch type behind an Application Load Balancer.. Fargate removes server management while billing only for the vCPU and memory each task consumes, so it fits a workload that must always be available but has unpredictable volume. Tasks launch in seconds and ECS service auto scaling adjusts desired count from CloudWatch metrics, giving host-independent scaling without capacity planning. Spot-backed EC2, a single instance, or Lambda each fail at least one stated requirement.

Answer

Deploy the containers on a single large Amazon EC2 instance running Docker with an Elastic IP address.

Answer

Deploy the containers on Amazon ECS with the EC2 launch type using a managed Auto Scaling group of Spot Instances.

Answer

Deploy the containers on AWS Lambda functions packaged as container images with provisioned concurrency enabled.

Question 2

A financial services company runs a containerized trading platform on Amazon EKS. The platform must meet a strict Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 5 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes for its persistent state, which is stored in Amazon EBS volumes. The architect must design a cross-Region disaster recovery solution that minimizes data loss and recovery time. Which approach BEST satisfies these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Replicate data with AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery from the primary Region to the DR Region, maintaining a staging area that continuously replicates block-level changes and can launch recovery instances within minutes.. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery provides continuous block-level replication into a staging area in the DR Region and can launch recovery instances within minutes, meeting both the aggressive RPO and RTO. Snapshot-based approaches and object replication introduce delays and do not restore stateful EBS-backed workloads fast enough.

Answer

Configure Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication for the application data and mount the replicated bucket to the DR cluster using the Mountpoint for Amazon S3 CSI driver.

Answer

Schedule AWS Backup jobs to create EBS snapshots every 5 minutes in the primary Region and copy them to the DR Region, then use AWS Backup restore to rebuild volumes during failover.

Answer

Use Amazon EBS Multi-Attach to attach the same io1 volumes to nodes in both Regions, allowing the DR cluster to read the live data without replication.

Question 3

A cloud engineer is designing a hybrid cloud environment where an on-premises data center connects to Azure. The engineer needs to ensure that traffic between the on-premises network and Azure virtual machines is encrypted and does not traverse the public internet. The solution must be highly available and support a bandwidth of up to 1 Gbps. Which Azure connectivity option should be used?

Accepted Answer

Azure ExpressRoute with two circuits in different peering locations. Azure ExpressRoute with two circuits in different peering locations provides a private, dedicated connection that avoids the public internet, ensuring encrypted traffic and high availability. It supports high bandwidth, meeting the 1 Gbps requirement, and provides redundancy for fault tolerance.

Answer

Azure ExpressRoute with a single circuit

Answer

Azure VPN Gateway with active-active configuration

Answer

Azure Virtual WAN with VPN and ExpressRoute

Question 4

A cloud architect is designing a disaster recovery strategy for a critical application running on AWS. The application uses an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database and Amazon EC2 instances. The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is 15 minutes, and the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is 1 minute. The architect needs to implement a solution that meets these objectives with minimal data loss and downtime. Which TWO actions should the architect take? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Enable Multi-AZ deployment for the RDS database. To meet an RTO of 15 minutes and an RPO of 1 minute, the architect should enable Multi-AZ for RDS, which provides automatic failover with synchronous replication, and deploy EC2 instances across multiple AZs behind an ALB for high availability. These actions ensure rapid recovery and minimal data loss. Automated backups, cross-region read replicas, and Storage Gateway do not meet both objectives with the required speed and data freshness.

Answer

Create a read replica of the RDS database in another region

Answer

Use AWS Storage Gateway to replicate on-premises data to AWS

Answer

Configure RDS automated backups with a retention period of 1 day

Question 5

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 runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Which two design actions should the architect take to achieve this goal? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Deploy the EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones within the same AWS Region.. To survive an Availability Zone failure, the architect must deploy EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones and enable cross-zone load balancing on the ALB so that traffic is distributed evenly across all healthy targets. The other options either concentrate resources in a single Availability Zone, use an unsuitable placement strategy, or fail to utilize redundant capacity, all of which undermine high availability.

Answer

Configure the ALB with a single target group that contains instances from only one Availability Zone.

Answer

Place all EC2 instances in a single placement group with a spread strategy across multiple Availability Zones.

Answer

Configure the ALB to route traffic only to instances in the primary Availability Zone during normal operation.

Question 6

A healthcare company runs a patient portal in Microsoft Azure. Regulatory policy requires that all data, including backups and replicas, remain inside the company's Azure region, and that encryption keys be generated and held in a hardware security module the company controls. The team wants to use Azure Storage for the portal data. Which configuration combination meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Azure Blob Storage with zone-redundant storage, customer-managed keys stored in Azure Key Vault Managed HSM, and infrastructure encryption enabled.. Data residency and hardware-backed key control are separate requirements that must both be satisfied. Zone-redundant storage replicates synchronously across availability zones inside one region, keeping every copy local while adding resilience. Managed HSM provides a single-tenant, validated hardware boundary where the company generates and owns keys, and customer-managed keys bind that key to the storage account's envelope encryption. Any geo-redundant option or software key store breaks one of the two constraints.

Answer

Azure Files with read-access geo-redundant storage and customer-managed keys stored in Azure Key Vault standard tier.

Answer

Azure Blob Storage with locally redundant storage, customer-provided keys passed on each request, and Azure Disk Encryption on the storage nodes.

Answer

Azure Blob Storage with locally redundant storage, Microsoft-managed keys, and geo-zone-redundant storage for backups.

Question 7

A cloud architect is designing a disaster recovery plan for a stateful order-processing system. Leadership accepts a recovery point objective of 15 minutes and a recovery time objective of 4 hours, but wants to minimize ongoing cost. Which strategy best matches these objectives?

Accepted Answer

Use a pilot light approach with continuous asynchronous replication to a second region and automated infrastructure provisioning on failover.. A pilot light balances the two objectives against cost: continuous asynchronous replication keeps data loss inside the 15-minute recovery point objective, while a minimal always-on core plus automated provisioning rebuilds capacity well within four hours. Active-active and warm standby both satisfy the targets but cost substantially more, and nightly backups cannot meet the 15-minute recovery point objective at all.

Answer

Use a warm standby in a second region with asynchronous replication and a scaled-down but fully functional copy of the application.

Answer

Perform nightly database backups to object storage in a second region and restore them only after a disaster is declared.

Answer

Maintain a fully active duplicate stack in a second region with synchronous database replication and automatic failover.

Question 8

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 the highest level of control among cloud service models, giving the customer direct management of the operating system, middleware, runtime, and applications while the provider manages the underlying virtualization, servers, storage, and networking. Because the company explicitly requires full control over OS, middleware, and applications, IaaS is the only model that grants this level of responsibility. AWS EC2, Azure VMs, and GCP Compute Engine are canonical IaaS examples.

Answer

PaaS

Answer

FaaS

Answer

SaaS

Question 9

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. A hybrid cloud deployment model combines on-premises infrastructure with public cloud services, connected via VPN or dedicated connections like AWS Direct Connect. This allows workloads to span both environments, providing flexibility and scalability. It is the standard term for such integrated architectures.

Answer

Private cloud

Answer

Multi-cloud

Answer

Public cloud

Question 10

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. An active-active architecture runs identical application instances in multiple Availability Zones simultaneously, with traffic distributed across all of them. Because both AZs are actively serving requests, the failure of one AZ results in the remaining AZ seamlessly absorbing the full load, maintaining availability. This is the defining characteristic described in the scenario — identical instances in two AZs with equal traffic distribution.

Answer

Fault tolerance

Answer

Warm standby

Answer

Active-passive

Question 11

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 (scaling out) adds more instances — in this case, more virtual machines — and distributes incoming requests among them, typically via a load balancer. This increases capacity by adding parallel resources rather than making a single resource larger. The scenario explicitly describes adding more VMs and distributing requests, which is the definition of horizontal scaling.

Answer

Right-sizing

Answer

Vertical scaling

Answer

Auto-scaling

Question 12

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 (also called cold or archival tier) is purpose-built for data that is rarely accessed and must be retained for long periods, offering the lowest per-gigabyte storage cost among storage classes. It trades off higher retrieval costs and longer retrieval times (minutes to hours) for minimal storage cost, which is exactly the profile of seven-year database backups that are rarely accessed. Object storage is a storage architecture, not a cost tier, and standard object storage tiers are more expensive than archive.

Answer

Object storage

Answer

Block storage

Answer

File storage

Question 13

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 14

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

Accepted Answer

You are charged per execution or compute time. Serverless computing (FaaS) abstracts all infrastructure management and bills based on actual consumption — typically per invocation and per GB-second of compute time. This means you pay only when your function executes, not for idle capacity. This consumption-based model is the defining economic characteristic of FaaS platforms like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions.

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 15

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 instances are ideal for batch processing jobs that can tolerate interruptions because they offer significant cost savings (up to 90% off on-demand) by utilizing spare cloud capacity. Since the job runs for a few hours each night and can be interrupted, spot instances provide the most cost-effective solution. They can be terminated by the cloud provider if capacity is needed, but for interruptible workloads, this is acceptable.

Answer

Dedicated hosts

Answer

On-demand instances

Answer

Reserved instances