CLO-002 Practice Test 3 — 10 Questions

Question 1

A company is conducting a risk assessment and needs to determine the impact of a potential cloud service provider outage. Which document provides the provider's commitment to uptime?

Accepted Answer

Service Level Agreement (SLA). A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is the contractual document in which a cloud provider commits to specific uptime, availability, and performance metrics, along with remedies (service credits) if those commitments are missed. It is the authoritative source for assessing the impact of a provider outage on the customer's operations.

Answer

Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) report

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Acceptable Use Policy

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Privacy Policy

Question 2

A company is adopting a public cloud model and needs to ensure that its data is stored only in specific geographic regions to comply with local data protection laws. Which cloud governance practice should the company implement?

Accepted Answer

Data residency policies that restrict resource deployment to approved regions.. Data residency requirements are met by implementing governance policies that restrict where resources can be deployed. By defining approved regions and enforcing those restrictions through policy, the company ensures that data remains within the required geographic boundaries. Other options either do not address residency or actively conflict with it by distributing data globally.

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Use of a content delivery network (CDN) to cache data globally.

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Enabling automatic scaling across all available regions.

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Implementing a multi-region disaster recovery strategy.

Question 3

A company runs a three-tier application in AWS. During peak hours, users report slow page loads. CloudWatch metrics show the application load balancer is healthy, the web tier CPU is at 40 percent, and the database read replica latency is 20 ms, but the application tier shows high request queue depth and steady CPU near 95 percent. The team wants the fastest operational fix that preserves availability. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Scale out the application tier using an Auto Scaling group policy based on CPU utilization.. High sustained CPU on the application tier combined with growing queue depth indicates the tier lacks compute capacity, so horizontal scaling is the fastest way to add capacity without downtime. A target tracking Auto Scaling policy on CPU utilization adds instances automatically during peaks and removes them afterward. The database and web tiers show healthy metrics, so changes there would not address the actual bottleneck.

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Increase the database instance size to reduce query latency.

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Configure an Application Load Balancer health check with a shorter interval.

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Enable a larger instance type for the web tier to handle more concurrent connections.

Question 4

What is the primary difference between a 'Reserved Instance' and a 'Spot Instance'?

Accepted Answer

Spot instances can be reclaimed by the provider. Spot Instances use spare AWS capacity and can be interrupted with a two-minute warning whenever AWS needs the capacity back, making them unsuitable for workloads that cannot tolerate interruption. Reserved Instances, by contrast, are a billing commitment (1 or 3 years) that provides a capacity discount with no interruption risk. The defining difference is therefore that Spot instances can be reclaimed by the provider.

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Reserved instances are for short-term use

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Reserved instances are more expensive

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Spot instances provide better security

Question 5

What is the purpose of a VPC Endpoint?

Accepted Answer

To access cloud services privately. A VPC Endpoint is correct because it enables private connectivity from a VPC to supported cloud services (like S3, DynamoDB, or KMS) without traversing the public internet, keeping traffic on the provider's private network. This improves security by removing exposure to the internet and can reduce NAT gateway data-processing costs. It is the standard mechanism for private service access from within a VPC.

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To connect two VPCs

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To encrypt data transit

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To provide public access

Question 6

You are utilizing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates. You notice that a specific resource update is causing service downtime. Which deployment pattern should you adopt to verify updates in a controlled environment before rolling out to production?

Accepted Answer

Blue/Green deployment. Blue/Green deployment is the correct pattern because it maintains two identical environments (blue = current production, green = new version) and allows you to verify the update in the green environment before switching traffic over. This provides a controlled, low-risk way to test changes and enables instant rollback by switching traffic back to blue if issues arise. It directly addresses the requirement to verify updates in a controlled environment before production rollout.

Answer

Canary release

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In-place upgrade

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Rolling update

Question 7

You are troubleshooting a connectivity issue where an application in a private subnet cannot reach the internet to download updates. Which component is missing?

Accepted Answer

NAT Gateway. A NAT Gateway is required because resources in a private subnet have no route to the internet and cannot hold public IP addresses. The NAT Gateway resides in a public subnet and performs source NAT, allowing outbound-only traffic from private instances to reach the internet while blocking inbound connections. An Internet Gateway alone cannot serve private subnets because those subnets lack a route to it and their instances have no public IPs.

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Internet Gateway

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VPC Endpoint

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Route Table

Question 8

A small marketing agency is considering moving its project management software to a SaaS solution. The agency's IT manager wants to understand the financial implications. Which of the following best describes a key financial benefit of adopting SaaS compared to maintaining on-premises software?

Accepted Answer

Conversion of capital expenses to operational expenses. Moving to SaaS shifts costs from capital expenditures to operational expenditures. Instead of purchasing servers and licenses upfront, the agency pays a recurring subscription fee. This improves cash flow and allows for more predictable budgeting. It also reduces the need for IT staff to maintain hardware and software, freeing resources for other tasks.

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Complete transfer of data security responsibility to the vendor

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Elimination of all software licensing costs

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Guaranteed reduction in total cost of ownership

Question 9

You need to allow temporary access to a file stored in a private bucket for a third party. What is the most secure method?

Accepted Answer

Create a Pre-signed URL. A pre-signed URL embeds the signer's credentials and an expiry timestamp into a time-limited URL, granting temporary, scoped access to a single object without changing bucket permissions or creating identities. This is the most secure method because access automatically expires, is limited to the specific object and HTTP method, and can be revoked by rotating the signing key or deleting the object.

Answer

Create an IAM user for them

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Email the file

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Make the bucket public

Question 10

A company requires a highly available database that replicates data synchronously across availability zones. Which setting should be chosen?

Accepted Answer

Multi-AZ deployment. A Multi-AZ deployment is correct because it maintains a synchronous standby replica in a different availability zone, and the database endpoint automatically fails over to that standby if the primary fails. Synchronous replication guarantees zero data loss (RPO of zero) because the standby must acknowledge each write before the primary commits. This is the standard managed-database pattern for high availability with automatic failover in cloud platforms like AWS RDS.

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Auto Scaling

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Read replica

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Database snapshot