CV0-004 Cloud Architecture and Design Practice Test 7 — 15 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 are the correct choice because they offer the largest discount (up to 90% off on-demand) for workloads that can tolerate interruptions and resume from checkpoints. The batch job's ability to be interrupted and restart from the last checkpoint aligns perfectly with spot instance behavior, where instances can be reclaimed by the cloud provider with a two-minute warning. This makes spot instances the most cost-effective option for this fault-tolerant, time-flexible workload.

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Reserved instances

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Dedicated hosts

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On-demand instances

Question 2

A company wants to connect its on-premises data center to a public cloud provider with a dedicated, high-bandwidth, low-latency connection. The connection must be private and not traverse the internet. Which connectivity option should be used?

Accepted Answer

Direct Connect or ExpressRoute. AWS Direct Connect and Azure ExpressRoute are dedicated private connectivity services that establish a physical cross-connect between the on-premises data center and the cloud provider's network via a colocation facility, bypassing the public internet entirely. They deliver high bandwidth (up to 100 Gbps with LAG) and consistent low latency, satisfying the private, non-internet requirement.

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Site-to-Site VPN

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Internet gateway

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VPC peering

Question 3

A company is designing a hybrid cloud architecture. They need to ensure high availability for a critical application. Which TWO of the following are best practices for achieving high availability in a hybrid cloud environment?

Accepted Answer

Implement an active-active architecture across on-premises and cloud. Using multiple availability zones within a region protects against data center failure. An active-active architecture ensures both on-premises and cloud are handling traffic, providing redundancy. Deploying in a single zone creates a single point of failure. Using only on-premises does not leverage cloud for HA. A single load balancer is a SPOF.

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Rely solely on on-premises infrastructure with cloud as a backup

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Use a single load balancer to route all traffic

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Deploy the application in a single availability zone to reduce complexity

Question 4

A cloud architect is reviewing costs for a production environment. The environment uses a mix of EC2 instances and RDS databases. Which THREE of the following are effective cost optimization strategies?

Accepted Answer

Use reserved instances for baseline capacity. Reserved instances provide discounts for steady-state usage. Storage lifecycle policies move data to cheaper tiers over time. Rightsizing ensures resources match workload requirements, reducing waste. Using all SSD even for cold data is expensive. Running instances 24/7 when not needed increases costs unnecessarily.

Answer

Use all SSD storage for all data to maximize performance

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Run all instances 24/7 to ensure availability

Question 5

A company wants to migrate its on-premises workloads to the cloud but must keep sensitive customer data on-premises due to regulatory compliance. Which cloud deployment model should they use?

Accepted Answer

Hybrid cloud. A hybrid cloud model combines on-premises infrastructure with public cloud services, allowing sensitive data to remain on-premises while other workloads leverage cloud scalability. This meets regulatory compliance by keeping data local while enabling cloud benefits for non-sensitive components.

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Public cloud

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Multi-cloud

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Private cloud

Question 6

A cloud architect is designing a web application that must remain available during a full region outage. They plan to deploy identical resources in two separate geographical regions. Which high availability architecture is described?

Accepted Answer

Active-active. Active-active is the correct architecture because it deploys identical resources in two or more regions simultaneously, with both regions actively serving traffic. This provides high availability and load distribution, and if one region fails, the other continues to handle requests without interruption. This is the only option that describes both regions actively running and serving users at the same time.

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Cold standby

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Active-passive

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Warm standby

Question 7

Which cloud service model provides the customer with the highest level of control over the operating system and middleware?

Accepted Answer

IaaS. IaaS provides virtualized computing resources where the customer manages the OS, middleware, and applications, offering the highest control among the three main service models.

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PaaS

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FaaS

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SaaS

Question 8

A company is running a stateless web application on a public cloud. They expect traffic to spike during certain hours. Which scaling strategy would be most cost-effective and efficient?

Accepted Answer

Horizontal scaling using auto-scaling groups based on CPU utilization. Horizontal scaling with auto-scaling groups based on CPU utilization is the most cost-effective and efficient strategy for a stateless web application with variable traffic. Auto-scaling groups automatically adjust the number of instances in response to real-time demand, ensuring you only pay for the capacity you need. Because the application is stateless, any instance can handle any request, making horizontal scaling seamless and highly available. This approach eliminates manual intervention and optimizes costs by scaling in during low-traffic periods.

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Using a larger instance type and scheduling scaling actions

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Pre-provisioning double capacity permanently

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Vertical scaling with manual adjustments before anticipated spikes

Question 9

A cloud architect is designing a VPC with three tiers: web, application, and database. Which subnet design provides the best security posture?

Accepted Answer

Web in public subnet, app and database in private subnets with appropriate routing. It follows the principle of least privilege and network segmentation. Placing the web tier in a public subnet allows it to receive internet traffic, while the application and database tiers reside in private subnets with no direct internet access. This design ensures that only the web tier is exposed, and the database is isolated, accessible only via the application tier through controlled routing, significantly reducing the attack surface.

Answer

Web and app in public subnets, database in private subnet

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All tiers in private subnets with a VPN

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All tiers in the same public subnet with security groups

Question 10

A company uses a public cloud PaaS service to run a custom application. They need to ensure the application can handle increased load without downtime. Which action should they take?

Accepted Answer

Configure auto-scaling for the PaaS service. In a PaaS environment, the cloud provider manages the underlying infrastructure, so the customer cannot manually upgrade VMs. Auto-scaling is a built-in feature of many PaaS services that automatically adjusts resources based on demand, ensuring the application can handle increased load without downtime. This is the most appropriate action.

Answer

Deploy a load balancer in front of the application

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Move to IaaS to gain more control over scaling

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Upgrade the underlying virtual machines manually

Question 11

Which storage type is most suitable for hosting a shared file system accessible by multiple virtual machines in a cloud environment?

Accepted Answer

File storage. File storage (option D) is the correct choice because it provides a hierarchical, shared file system that multiple virtual machines can mount simultaneously using standard protocols like NFS (Network File System) or SMB/CIFS. This allows concurrent read/write access with file-level locking, making it ideal for shared workloads such as home directories, content management, or collaboration tools in a cloud environment.

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Archive storage

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Object storage

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Block storage

Question 12

A cloud engineer is designing a disaster recovery plan with an RTO of 2 hours and RPO of 15 minutes. Which strategy best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Warm standby with continuous replication. A warm standby with continuous replication keeps a scaled-down but fully functional copy of the environment running in a secondary region, with data replicated continuously. This allows failover within minutes, easily meeting the 15-minute RPO, and the standby can be scaled up to full capacity within the 2-hour RTO. It balances cost and recovery speed better than the other options for these specific targets.

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Pilot light with hourly snapshots

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Cold standby with daily backups

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Active-active across regions

Question 13

A company uses AWS and Azure to run identical workloads for redundancy. They want to simplify management by using a single set of tools across both clouds. Which architectural approach should they consider?

Accepted Answer

Multi-cloud using a cloud-agnostic orchestration tool. Multi-cloud with a cloud-agnostic abstraction layer (e.g., using Terraform or Kubernetes) allows managing resources across providers with a unified toolset.

Answer

Use each provider's native management tools

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Single cloud migration to one provider

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Hybrid cloud using VPN between AWS and Azure

Question 14

A cloud architect is choosing a compute pricing model for a batch processing job that runs for 2 hours every night. The job can be interrupted. Which option is most cost-effective?

Accepted Answer

Spot instances. Spot instances are the most cost-effective option because the batch processing job is fault-tolerant (can be interrupted) and runs for a fixed, short duration (2 hours nightly). Spot instances offer significant discounts (often 60-90% off on-demand pricing) by leveraging unused cloud capacity, which can be reclaimed with a 2-minute warning. This aligns perfectly with the workload's tolerance for interruption and its predictable but non-critical schedule.

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Reserved instances for 1 year

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On-demand instances

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Dedicated hosts

Question 15

A company is migrating a legacy stateful application to the cloud. The application currently runs on a single server and stores session data locally. To enable horizontal scaling, which two design changes should the architect recommend? (Select TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Move session state to a shared database or cache. Option C is correct because moving session state to a shared database or cache (e.g., Redis, Memcached, or DynamoDB) externalizes the state so any instance behind the load balancer can serve any request, which is essential for horizontal scaling. Option E is correct because refactoring the application to be stateless removes local session dependencies entirely, allowing instances to be added or removed freely and making the tier truly horizontally scalable. Options A and D are incorrect because adding storage or using a larger instance are vertical scaling approaches that do not enable horizontal scaling and leave the stateful single-server bottleneck in place. Option B is incorrect because sticky sessions only pin a client to one instance, which preserves the stateful coupling, can cause uneven load, and does not solve the underlying need to share or eliminate session state.

Answer

Add more storage to the existing instance

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Implement sticky sessions on the load balancer

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Use a larger instance type for the application server