auto scaling

A production Amazon RDS database already has automated backups enabled. At 10:45 UTC, the team discovers that a faulty migration corrupted rows in a table at 10:30 UTC. The business wants the database restored to exactly the state it had at 10:30 UTC with minimal risk. Which two actions should the team take? Select two.

You deploy a Web ACL with an AWS WAF rate-based rule intended to limit abusive traffic to your API. After the deployment, attackers still reach the backend service. ALB access logs show requests arrive at the ALB, but WAF logs indicate the Web ACL is not evaluating those requests. Which change most likely fixes the issue?

A startup runs a 24/7 web tier on Amazon EC2 with a stable baseline of 8 instances and a nightly analytics batch job that can resume from checkpoints if interrupted. The company wants to minimize monthly compute cost without hurting the always-on web tier. Which two actions should it take? Select two.

A payments platform requires disaster recovery across Regions. Requirements: RPO of 15 minutes and RTO of about 1 hour. The business cannot afford full duplicate capacity in both Regions all the time, but the team wants automated readiness so failover is mostly operationally guided rather than a slow rebuild. Which DR strategy is the best fit?

A team runs a stateless web app on Amazon EC2 behind an Application Load Balancer. During traffic spikes, new EC2 instances take several minutes to finish bootstrapping before they can receive traffic. Which Auto Scaling configuration most directly reduces the time until additional capacity is available?

A solutions architect is designing a cost-optimized data storage solution for a large dataset that is accessed infrequently but must be retained for compliance for 7 years. Which three actions should the architect take to minimize costs? (Choose three.)

Your company has an internal service hosted behind a Network Load Balancer (NLB) in VPC 10.0.0.0/16. A consumer team in a different VPC (10.1.0.0/16) must call the service without using the public internet. You want private connectivity using AWS PrivateLink. Which configuration best enables least-privilege access while keeping the traffic private?

A image sharing application uses CloudFront in front of an S3 origin. Which two settings help keep users from bypassing CloudFront and accessing the bucket directly?

An EC2 instance in a private subnet must access an S3 bucket that contains regulated exports for a customer analytics portal. The security team requires access to be allowed only when traffic comes through a specific VPC endpoint. What should the architect add to the bucket policy? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A company is designing a high-performance database architecture for an e-commerce platform that experiences rapid spikes in read traffic during flash sales. The database must handle millions of reads per second with sub-millisecond latency. The data is key-value in nature, with a small number of attributes per item. Which three options should be included in the architecture? (Choose three.)

In AWS Organizations, a Service Control Policy (SCP) denies kms:Decrypt on a production CMK for all principals in the Finance OU. A developer in the Finance OU created/updated an IAM policy that allows secrets access, but the application still fails with AccessDenied due to the SCP. You must enable only the Finance OU to decrypt that specific CMK while keeping the SCP restrictions for other OUs. What is the correct remediation?

Based on the exhibit, a public API is behind CloudFront. A single client IP is sending bursts of requests that are overwhelming the origin, and the team wants AWS to automatically mitigate the abuse at the edge without changing the application code. What should the team do?

A team serves static assets from an S3 origin through CloudFront. Cache hit ratio is low. Analytics show that requests include an Authorization header (even though the assets are public) and the cache key currently varies on that header, causing CloudFront to treat the same asset as different cache entries. What is the best change to improve cache hit ratio without breaking access controls?

A SOC analyst needs an immutable, centralized audit record of configuration and API changes across multiple AWS accounts. Recently, an operator changed an IAM role trust policy, and investigators must determine exactly which principal made the change and which parameters were used. Your current setup sends application logs to CloudWatch Logs, but there is no organization-level API audit logging. Which approach best satisfies the requirement?

A company runs a stateless web API on Amazon EC2 behind an Application Load Balancer. The team notices that during business hours, the ALB starts queueing requests and the average request latency rises. They want to scale out quickly and reliably based on demand, not CPU alone. Which Auto Scaling approach best matches this requirement?

Based on the exhibit, the team wants to improve application performance without changing the code. Which EC2 instance family should they choose next?

An application in Account B (IAM role arn:aws:iam::account-b:role/app-read) reads objects from an S3 bucket in Account A. The bucket uses SSE-KMS with a customer-managed KMS key in Account A. Object reads consistently fail with an error that includes "AccessDenied" and "kms:Decrypt". The IAM permissions in Account B for kms:Decrypt are correct, but the requests still fail. Which change will most directly fix the failure?

Your order-processing system uses EventBridge rules to send events to a Lambda function that updates order status. Over the last week, some events fail with a transient database timeout, and the Lambda retries intermittently but then the events are lost (no alerts after failures). You want at-least-once processing, bounded retries, and a way to inspect unprocessable events for later reprocessing. Which architecture change best meets these requirements?

A retail company lets developers deploy ECS services but they must never be able to modify IAM. The team currently uses an IAM user per developer with an admin-like policy, and several access keys have been leaked. You are asked to redesign access so that: (1) developers authenticate with temporary credentials, (2) they can create/update ECS services and related autoscaling resources, and (3) IAM changes are impossible even if a developer tries to attach new policies. Which design best meets all requirements?

A inventory service exposes a static website from S3 and CloudFront. Users should still receive cached pages if the S3 origin has a short outage. Which feature helps most? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A team stores important documents in Amazon S3. They want to recover earlier versions if someone overwrites or deletes a file by mistake. What should they enable?

Based on the exhibit, a web application must stay available if one Availability Zone fails. What is the best change to improve resilience?

Based on the exhibit, a CI pipeline assumes a shared deployment role in Account A. The role can access several artifact prefixes, but this pipeline must only upload to teamA/prod/ and decrypt using a single KMS key for this execution. Changing the shared role would affect other pipelines. Which approach should the pipeline use?

A company runs EC2 instances in private subnets and needs to access Amazon S3 objects without using a NAT gateway. They want the traffic to stay within AWS private networking as much as possible (no internet egress). Which VPC endpoint type should they create for Amazon S3?

An S3 bucket stores user-uploaded images. Access patterns are unpredictable: some objects are never read again, while others are occasionally retrieved months later. The team wants to reduce storage cost without having to manually track access frequency or run periodic analyses. Which S3 storage and lifecycle approach is the best fit?

A retail API runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer and stores orders in an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database. A test that stopped one Availability Zone caused the API to return errors because all application servers were in the same AZ and the database was single-AZ. Which two changes should the architect make to continue serving traffic during a single-AZ failure? Select two.

Match the disaster recovery strategy to the recovery posture it best fits for a Regional outage.

A CI/CD pipeline needs to deploy to your production environment. Security requires that the pipeline uses temporary credentials (not long-lived access keys) and only has permissions to read a specific set of parameters from AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store and write application logs to CloudWatch Logs. What is the best AWS approach?

Based on the exhibit, a workload in Account B must assume a role in Account A. Security requires that only the specific role arn:aws:iam::444455556666:role/PipelineExecRole can assume it, and only when the caller supplies the external ID acct-b-prod-7788. Which change best satisfies the requirement with the least privilege?

In an AWS Organizations environment, developers create IAM roles using an automation tool. The security team wants to guarantee that even if a developer attaches an overly permissive inline policy, the role cannot exceed a fixed set of allowed actions. The team already uses permission boundaries on each role. The tool’s role-creation API call succeeds, but one developer’s new role can still delete production S3 buckets. What is the most likely reason, and what should be corrected?

A batch analytics job has unpredictable DynamoDB traffic with long idle periods and occasional spikes. Which capacity mode should minimize operational overhead and avoid paying for idle provisioned capacity?

A team uses an S3 bucket to store important customer-generated exports. They need protection against accidental overwrites and also want copies of the data in another AWS Region for disaster recovery. Which S3 configuration best satisfies both requirements?

A SaaS company uses an S3 bucket for database backups created daily. Backups are rarely restored; the company’s documented RTO is 24 hours, and the compliance policy requires backups be kept for 90 days. The team currently stores all backups in S3 Standard, which is costly. Which single lifecycle policy change is most cost-optimized while still meeting the 24-hour RTO and 90-day retention?

Your company needs a high-throughput, low-latency TCP service using a custom binary protocol. Requirements: preserve the original client source IP for rate limiting, keep latency minimal, and use TCP health checks. The current setup uses an Application Load Balancer and performance is inconsistent. Which load balancer choice best meets these requirements?

A company runs a stateless application tier behind an Application Load Balancer. Match each observed scaling pattern on the left to the best Auto Scaling strategy or metric on the right.

An administrator needs the ability to read and update infrastructure for a specific AWS account, but only when using MFA. The security team wants to eliminate long-lived administrator access keys and ensure that even if someone obtains temporary session credentials, actions are only allowed with MFA present. Which IAM design best meets these requirements?

A high-volume telemetry pipeline writes streaming click events that must be processed by multiple independent consumers. Which service is most appropriate?

A system uses multiple AWS Lambda functions behind different event sources. One Lambda occasionally spikes and causes other Lambdas to be throttled due to shared concurrency limits. Which setting best helps ensure the important Lambda keeps capacity during spikes?

A CI/CD system creates an IAM role (CICDRole) used for deployments. Your organization uses IAM permission boundaries to prevent developers from granting themselves higher privileges. After an incident, you discover that CICDRole can perform unintended IAM actions because the role’s identity policy includes broad permissions. Which change most directly ensures permission boundaries continue to restrict CICDRole regardless of what is later added to the role’s identity policies?

A company runs an application in private subnets (no inbound internet). The application must access Amazon S3 and AWS Secrets Manager endpoints without routing through the public internet and without exposing the instances to NAT gateways due to cost. Security requirements also state that only the required VPC traffic should be allowed to reach AWS services. Which architecture best satisfies these requirements?

CloudWatch metrics show your EC2 instances have average CPU utilization around 10% with stable performance over several weeks. The application does not require additional headroom right now. What is the most effective cost-optimization action?

A customer portal must recover from a regional outage within a few hours. The business wants lower ongoing cost than a fully active second Region and does not want to rebuild everything from scratch during the outage. Which two DR patterns best fit that goal? Select two.

A global video platform serves mostly static images and JavaScript files from an S3 origin. Users in distant countries report slow load times. What should improve performance most? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A claims portal uses Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. Application credentials must not be stored on the EC2 instances, and authentication should use short-lived credentials. What should the architect recommend?

A DynamoDB table stores device status items. The partition key is deviceId, and the partition distribution is healthy (no single partition dominates). However, during peak periods the application experiences high read latency because many clients repeatedly request the latest status for the same devices. Which action best improves read latency without changing the DynamoDB partitioning model?

A containerized service fleet running on EC2 instances needs to share user-uploaded files and access them with low latency. The workload is bursty: sometimes dozens of instances concurrently read the same directory for short periods, and then traffic drops. Which Amazon EFS configuration best matches these performance needs?

A customer-facing application has a relational data model and needs frequent complex queries (joins and aggregations), but it also experiences a significant read-heavy workload. Which design choice best improves read performance while keeping relational features?

Based on the exhibit, an automation pipeline in several member accounts creates IAM roles for application deployments. Security says no future role may exceed the approved boundary arn:aws:iam::123456789012:policy/DeployBoundary, even if someone later attaches AdministratorAccess. What should you implement to enforce this across the organization?

A marketing site serves versioned JavaScript and CSS files from Amazon S3 through CloudFront. The origin bill is rising because CloudFront keeps fetching the same files too often, and the application never changes a file at the same URL once it is published. Which two changes should you make? Select two.

A solutions architect is designing a highly available and resilient architecture for a critical internal application that processes financial transactions. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances inside an Auto Scaling group. The database layer uses an Amazon Aurora MySQL cluster. The company requires that if an entire AWS Availability Zone (AZ) fails, the application must remain operational with minimal impact and automatically recover without manual intervention. Which combination of architectural decisions will meet these requirements? (Choose four.)

A company hosts an internal HTTP API on an internal Network Load Balancer (NLB) in VPC A. A partner team in a separate AWS account needs access, but their VPC CIDR overlaps with VPC A, so VPC peering is not feasible. Security requirements state the API must remain non-public (no internet-facing ALB/NLB) and access must use AWS private networking. Which architecture best meets these requirements?

A DynamoDB table for a travel booking site has a partition key based only on the current date. Write throttling occurs during business hours. What is the best design change? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A platform team lets application teams create IAM roles in member accounts through Infrastructure as Code. Security says every new role must stay within a centrally approved permission ceiling, even if someone later attaches broader managed policies or inline policies. Which control should be used to enforce that maximum permission set?

Based on the exhibit, users must access private PDF reports only through CloudFront. Direct requests to the S3 object URL must fail, and the bucket should not be publicly readable. Which solution is the best fit?

A risk simulation workload generates analytics files that are accessed unpredictably. Some files become hot again months later. The team wants automatic storage cost optimisation without retrieval delays. What should be used? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A claims workflow uses an RDS MySQL database and must remain available during an Availability Zone failure with minimal application changes. What should the architect enable?

Your EC2 instances run in private subnets with no NAT gateway. The instances use the AWS SDK to call STS AssumeRole to obtain temporary credentials for other services. Application logs show errors like: "EndpointConnectionError: Could not connect to https://sts.<region>.amazonaws.com". Which change most directly resolves this while keeping instances private?

A developer accidentally corrupts part of a production Amazon RDS database, and the issue is discovered 45 minutes later. The team needs to restore the database to the state immediately before the change. Which two actions should be part of the recovery plan? Select two.

A development team expects their EC2 utilization to average about 40% of capacity across the next year. They want to lower costs but need flexibility to change instance families and sizes as requirements evolve (for example, moving from compute-optimized to memory-optimized instances). Which AWS purchasing commitment best meets the goal of reducing cost while keeping flexibility?

Based on the exhibit, an application role in Account B can reach an S3 bucket in Account A, but reads fail with AccessDenied on KMS. The bucket objects use SSE-KMS with a customer managed key in Account A. What change is required so the application can decrypt the objects while keeping the access restricted?

A retail analytics table stores events in Amazon DynamoDB with partition key tenantId and sort key eventTime. During a promotion, one tenant generates most writes and repeatedly polls the same latest-status items, causing throttling on a single partition key and high latency on reads. The business can tolerate read results that are a few seconds stale. Which two changes will most effectively reduce throttling and latency? Select two.

A media company serves versioned JavaScript and CSS files from Amazon S3 through CloudFront. After each release, the cache hit ratio drops sharply because the same distribution also fronts a personalized API path, and the current cache policy forwards cookies, all query strings, and several headers to every origin request. The static assets already use content-hashed filenames. Which two changes will most directly improve cache hit ratio for the static assets without changing the application behavior? Select two.

Company A runs an internal app in account A. The app needs to upload objects to an S3 bucket in account B. When the app calls S3, it receives AccessDenied for s3:PutObject. The team already created an IAM role in account B named UploadRole with a policy allowing s3:PutObject. They did not yet set up any trust relationship. Which change most directly fixes the access problem with least privilege?

Based on the exhibit, the database must fail over automatically if the primary Availability Zone goes down. Which solution should the architect choose?

A global application experiences frequent writes and must survive a full Regional outage with near-zero data loss. The product team also requires that users can continue to write during the incident using the closest Region. Which approach is most aligned with these requirements?

A log archive serves infrequently accessed user documents that must be available immediately when requested. Which S3 storage class is likely the best cost fit?

A company stores user uploads in an S3 bucket. Objects are accessed rarely after upload, but when an object is accessed, it must be retrievable quickly (minutes to a few hours). Objects must be retained for at least 18 months. The team wants to reduce storage cost while meeting these requirements. Which lifecycle configuration best fits these requirements?

Developers for a e-learning platform need temporary elevated access to production resources for troubleshooting. The security team wants approvals, expiry, and audit logging. Which approach is best?

A third-party payroll vendor in another AWS account must assume a role in your account to write a daily settlement file to Amazon S3. You want to prevent confused-deputy attacks and make every assumed session traceable in CloudTrail back to an individual vendor user. Which three trust-policy or session controls should be used? Select three.

A SaaS vendor will access your AWS resources by assuming an IAM role in your account. You want to prevent confused-deputy attacks and ensure the vendor can only assume the role using an agreed external identifier. Your role trust policy currently allows sts:AssumeRole from the vendor’s principal, but it does not include any external ID protection. Which change is the best next step?

A media archive needs low-latency full-text search across product descriptions and filtered attributes. Which managed service is most suitable? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

Based on the exhibit, which storage choice best matches the workload requirements?

A photo studio stores original project archives in Amazon S3. Objects are read heavily for 14 days after upload, occasionally during the next 11 months, and almost never after one year. The team wants the lowest storage cost while keeping retrieval within minutes during the first year. Which three actions are best? Select three.

A order processing API must ensure that only encrypted EBS volumes can be created in the account. What is the strongest preventive control?

A claims workflow uses Amazon SQS. Poison messages are repeatedly failing and blocking useful retries. What should the architect configure? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

Based on the exhibit, which design change is the best way to reduce the observed read latency for this DynamoDB-backed service?

A data lake stores raw files in a single Amazon S3 bucket that is shared by three internal analytics teams. Each team should access only its own prefix, and the company wants to eliminate ACL management because objects come from multiple producers. Which three changes should the architect make? Select three.

A latency-sensitive video platform uploads large files to S3 from users around the world. Which two features can improve upload performance? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A compute workload uses temporary scratch space for intermediate results (reproducible), and it can tolerate data loss if the instance is terminated. The workload benefits from very high local I/O throughput. Which storage option is the best fit for the scratch data?

A global mobile game backend serves mostly static images and JavaScript files from an S3 origin. Users in distant countries report slow load times. What should improve performance most? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

An application in account A needs to use an encrypted EBS volume whose snapshots were copied from account B. The EBS volume is encrypted with a customer-managed KMS key in account B. After attaching the volume, the instance fails to mount it and logs show KMS access errors (kms:Decrypt) for the instance role. The instance role in account A already has an IAM policy allowing kms:Decrypt on that key ARN, but the mount still fails. What must be updated in account B to allow the mount to succeed?

A high-volume analytics dashboard writes streaming click events that must be processed by multiple independent consumers. Which service is most appropriate?

Your company currently uses an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in front of a service that receives a large number of TCP and UDP packets (including UDP-based telemetry). During load tests, you need to support both TCP and UDP traffic at high throughput while keeping stable IP endpoints for a downstream firewall allowlist. Which change best meets these requirements?

A mobile app reads the same product catalog items repeatedly throughout the day. The DynamoDB table is already properly keyed, but read latency is still a problem during sales events. The team can tolerate eventually consistent reads and wants the least disruptive change. What should they add?

A media company runs a nightly batch job that processes video thumbnails. The batch can be interrupted at any time, and workers can resume automatically from checkpoints (a termination does not corrupt progress). The business goal is the lowest possible compute cost, and occasional interruptions are acceptable as long as the job continues automatically. Which approach is most cost-optimized?

A data engineering team runs a nightly ETL job on EC2. The job can be checkpointed every 5 minutes and can be retried from the last checkpoint if the instance terminates. The job runtime varies from 2 to 4 hours, and the team has no need for a specific instance type, as long as it completes before 7:00 AM local time. They currently run the job on On-Demand EC2, leading to high monthly compute cost. Which change best reduces cost while maintaining the business deadline?

Based on the exhibit, which change best reduces latency during peak traffic without overprovisioning the fleet?

A patient portal must process every event at least once, but duplicate processing is acceptable if the consumer handles idempotency. Which eventing approach is most suitable? The team wants the control to be enforceable during normal operations.

A company has a steady, predictable workload that must run continuously (24/7) in a single AWS Region. The team wants the lowest cost option available for this steady usage, but also expects they may choose different EC2 instance families in the future (without re-buying compute discounts). Which AWS purchase option best meets these goals?

Match each database availability event to the AWS failover behavior that best describes it.

Order the steps to create a static website using Amazon S3 and CloudFront.

An application runs on EC2 instances in private subnets in a VPC. There is no NAT gateway. The instances need to download objects from S3 over HTTPS and also call DynamoDB. The security group outbound rules allow TCP 443 to the VPC endpoint addresses. After deployment, the app times out when connecting to S3, but it can reach DynamoDB. Which single change is most likely to restore S3 connectivity?

A web service runs on an Auto Scaling group (ASG). The team updates configuration (AMIs, environment variables) in a Launch Template and wants new instances created during scale-out to use the latest Launch Template version. What should the architect do?

A worker service consumes messages from an Amazon SQS queue. Some messages are malformed and always fail validation. The worker retries, but it keeps reprocessing the same bad messages and consumes processing capacity that should be used for valid work. What is the best solution to prevent “poison messages” from blocking progress?

A company runs its customer-facing web app on EC2 behind an Application Load Balancer. The database is Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The requirement is that if a single Availability Zone fails, the database must automatically fail over within the same AWS Region with minimal application changes. Which database setup best meets this requirement?

A company is deploying a stateless web application on Amazon ECS with Fargate. The application must be resilient to individual task failures and Availability Zone failures. Which three steps should the company take to achieve this resilience? (Choose three.)

A company keeps daily database backups in an S3 bucket. They may restore from backups during the first 30 days if there is an issue. After 30 days, backups are rarely restored, but must be retained for 2 years. Which lifecycle strategy most cost-effectively meets these requirements?

A media company runs a 24/7 ingestion API on EC2 behind an Application Load Balancer and a nightly transcoding job that can resume from checkpoints. The API fleet runs at roughly 65 percent CPU all day, while the batch workers sit idle most of the time. The company wants to cut compute cost without risking the API. Which two changes should they make? Select two.

A partner company needs read-only access to reports in an S3 bucket for a customer analytics portal. The partner has its own AWS account. What is the most secure scalable access pattern?

A startup has a stable production web service that runs continuously (24/7) on AWS. They have consistent compute requirements for the next 1 year, but the instance size and family might change as they optimize performance. To reduce cost while maintaining flexibility across instance types, which purchasing option should they consider?

Company A runs an internal app in account A. The app needs to upload objects to an S3 bucket in account B. When the app calls S3, it receives AccessDenied for s3:PutObject. The team already created an IAM role in account B named UploadRole with a policy allowing s3:PutObject. They did not yet set up any trust relationship. Which change most directly fixes the access problem with least privilege?

A distributed analytics engine runs 12 EC2 instances in one Availability Zone. The nodes exchange thousands of tiny messages per second and must keep jitter as low as possible. The current design launches the instances across multiple placement groups and uses general-purpose burstable instances. Which two changes will most directly lower east-west network latency and variability? Select two.

A media processing service runs ECS tasks in multiple Availability Zones. Each task must read and write the same shared filesystem with low latency because tasks stream intermediate artifacts to other tasks. The team currently mounts an EBS volume per task, and cross-AZ tasks frequently cannot see each other’s files. Which option best resolves the shared filesystem requirement while supporting high-performing access?

A team wants detective controls to investigate suspected exfiltration from an S3 bucket. They need to know when objects are accessed (GetObject) and also when new encrypted objects are written. They already enabled AWS CloudTrail for management events, but their investigation shows no visibility into object-level reads/writes in the logs they review. Which CloudTrail configuration change most directly provides the missing object-level visibility?

A high-frequency trading analytics service runs on several EC2 instances in the same Availability Zone. The application exchanges small messages between nodes and is sensitive to microsecond-level network latency. Which design best meets the requirement?

A marketing site has EC2 instances that are oversized based on CPU, memory, and network utilisation. Which AWS service should identify rightsizing recommendations?

Based on the exhibit, the company stores application logs in Amazon S3 for 400 days. The logs are read heavily for the first 30 days, occasionally for the next 90 days, and very rarely after that. Retrieval after day 120 can take up to several hours, but the data must remain available until day 400. Which lifecycle policy is the most cost-effective fit?

Company A stores encrypted log files in its S3 bucket using SSE-KMS with a customer-managed KMS key. A partner application in Company B uploads objects into Company A's bucket using an IAM role in Company B. Uploads fail with an error indicating KMS access is denied (kms:Encrypt not authorized). Neither the partner IAM policy nor the S3 bucket policy currently mentions KMS. What is the most secure and correct change to allow cross-account uploads to succeed?

A legacy market-data service runs on EC2 and exposes a custom TCP protocol. Clients must connect over TCP with very low latency, and the team wants static IP addresses at the load-balancing layer. Which AWS service is the best fit?

A company processes product-image uploads in bursts. Each transform takes up to ten minutes, and every job can be retried safely from the beginning. The current EC2 worker fleet is idle most of the day. Which two changes most reduce cost and idle capacity? Select two.

A company stores compliance reports in Amazon S3. Objects are written once and rarely accessed. They need to keep the data for 3 years. When retrieval is needed for an audit, the reports can be restored within hours (not minutes). What storage class should the company use for new objects, assuming minimal operational overhead?

A batch analytics job runs for several hours each night and can be interrupted and restarted. Which EC2 purchasing option should minimize cost? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

An application runs on EC2 instances in private subnets behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Security groups allow inbound HTTPS (443) from the ALB’s security group to the instance security group, and outbound from instances is set to allow ephemeral ports. Despite this, clients see connection timeouts. After reviewing network ACLs, you find the NACL associated with the instance subnet has an inbound allow for destination port 443, but it does not have a corresponding outbound allow for ephemeral ports. What is the most likely reason the traffic fails, and what should be updated?

Based on the exhibit, a company wants EC2 instances in private subnets to access Amazon S3 without using a NAT gateway, and bucket access must be allowed only when requests come through the approved VPC endpoint. Which design is the most appropriate?

A media company stores daily financial exports in Amazon S3. The files must be protected against accidental overwrite or deletion, and the business also wants a second copy in another Region for recovery after a regional outage. Which two actions should the architect take? Select two.

A serverless order-ingestion API writes directly to a database. During traffic spikes, the database occasionally throttles, Lambda retries create duplicate order records, and some requests time out. Which two changes best improve buffering and safe retry behavior? Select two.

An engineering team deploys a stateless web API on EC2 using an Auto Scaling group and an Application Load Balancer (ALB). During a recent test, they noticed that when one Availability Zone was unavailable, traffic failed until new instances were manually launched. Which change most directly improves automatic failover for the compute layer within a single Region?

Account B has an IAM role that includes kms:Decrypt for a specific KMS key ARN in account A. However, when the role tries to read an S3 object encrypted with that CMK, the application fails with AccessDenied: not authorized to perform kms:Decrypt. CloudTrail shows the KMS API call is denied by key policy. What is the most secure and correct fix?

A regional web application for a inventory service must fail over automatically to a secondary Region if the primary endpoint becomes unhealthy. Which two services or features are required? The team wants the control to be enforceable during normal operations.

A media company uses CloudFront in front of an S3 bucket origin for video thumbnails. They want to prevent users from bypassing CloudFront and accessing the S3 bucket directly, while still allowing CloudFront to fetch objects. What is the best option?

A payments platform requires disaster recovery across Regions. Requirements: RPO of 15 minutes and RTO of about 1 hour. The business cannot afford full duplicate capacity in both Regions all the time, but the team wants automated readiness so failover is mostly operationally guided rather than a slow rebuild. Which DR strategy is the best fit?

An ECS service runs on EC2 capacity. During peak traffic, tasks frequently wait for available container instances. The team wants faster scale-out for the underlying EC2 capacity when tasks increase. What is the best first architectural step?

A SaaS application is deployed in us-east-1 and us-west-2 behind separate ALBs. The business wants DNS to send new clients to the primary Region when it is healthy and automatically fail over to the secondary Region when the primary endpoint is unhealthy. Which two Route 53 settings are required? Select two.

A media company has users around the world uploading 1 to 5 GB files directly to a single Amazon S3 bucket. Upload times are slow from distant regions, but the app must keep using S3 as the destination. What should the architects enable to improve upload performance?

Developers for a B2B file exchange site need temporary elevated access to production resources for troubleshooting. The security team wants approvals, expiry, and audit logging. Which approach is best?

A company uses Amazon RDS for a PostgreSQL database powering a customer-facing application. The application’s availability depends on fast database failover with minimal manual intervention. The RDS instance currently runs as a single-AZ deployment in one DB subnet group. Which change most directly meets the goal?

Based on the exhibit, which AWS feature should the team use to minimize network latency between EC2 instances that exchange messages very frequently?

A media processing pipeline uses EBS-backed storage for an application that performs sustained random I/O with low latency requirements. During peak processing windows, the team sees increased read latency and occasional timeouts at the application layer. They need predictable, high IOPS performance rather than best-effort throughput. Which EBS configuration choice is most appropriate?

A media company is designing a high-performance architecture to serve video content to users worldwide. The solution must minimize latency for end users and reduce the load on the origin servers. The video files are stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. Which three options should be combined to meet these requirements? (Choose three.)

A serverless checkout API uses AWS Lambda behind API Gateway. Every weekday at 09:00 UTC, marketing triggers a predictable surge. The first few minutes after each surge show cold-start latency, but traffic volume is forecastable and the business wants stable p95 latency. Which two changes should the team implement? Select two.

A trading dashboard stores uploaded documents in S3. The business requires a copy in another AWS Region for disaster recovery. What should be configured?

A retail analytics app uses Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. Read traffic is growing, and the database CPU spikes mainly due to SELECT-heavy workloads. Writes are less frequent, and the app can tolerate eventually consistent reads for the reports. What is the most appropriate AWS-native way to improve read performance with minimal application changes?

A public API for a customer analytics portal is deployed on API Gateway. Clients must authenticate with standards-based tokens issued by an external OpenID Connect provider. Which authorization mechanism should be used?

A company’s private workload in a VPC uploads objects to an S3 bucket. Security requires that S3 requests are allowed only when they traverse a specific S3 Gateway VPC Endpoint (vpce-0abc123example). Which change best enforces this restriction at the S3 bucket level?

A SaaS platform serves an API using two regional deployments: us-east-1 (primary) and us-west-2 (secondary). Each region has its own ALB. The business requires automated DNS-based failover when the primary region becomes unhealthy, and they do not want manual DNS changes during incidents. Which Route 53 configuration is the best match?

A partner integration sends a custom binary TCP protocol to a service running on EC2 instances in private subnets. The partners require static endpoint IPs for allowlisting, and the application must see the original client source IP for rate limiting. Which two changes best fit the protocol and network requirements? Select two.

A SaaS company uses an S3 bucket for database backups created daily. Backups are rarely restored; the company’s documented RTO is 24 hours, and the compliance policy requires backups be kept for 90 days. The team currently stores all backups in S3 Standard, which is costly. Which single lifecycle policy change is most cost-optimized while still meeting the 24-hour RTO and 90-day retention?

A distributed system needs extremely low network latency between a set of EC2 instances running the same workload. The team wants the instances to be placed as close together as AWS allows to reduce round-trip time. Which placement strategy should the architect use?

A internal reporting portal has old unattached EBS volumes and many stale snapshots. Which two actions reduce storage cost without affecting running instances? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A backup process restores a 2 TB production database from an EBS snapshot onto a new volume. During the first hours after restore, the application sees slow reads whenever previously unused blocks are accessed. What is the best way to avoid this performance issue in future restores?

A high-volume telemetry pipeline writes streaming click events that must be processed by multiple independent consumers. Which service is most appropriate? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A payments API requires point-in-time recovery and accidental-delete protection for a DynamoDB table. Which two settings should the architect enable? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A trading dashboard uses Aurora MySQL. The company wants fast cross-Region disaster recovery with low RPO. Which architecture should be considered?

An events service publishes critical notifications using Amazon SNS. Three independent downstream systems (A, B, and C) subscribe to the topic. Downstream system B sometimes fails to process certain messages (for example, it times out or returns an error while handling the message), and you want: 1) failures in B to be isolated so A and C keep processing unaffected, and 2) messages that B cannot successfully process after retries to be sent to a DLQ for B. Which design best meets these requirements?

A stateless web API runs on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The Auto Scaling group (ASG) currently uses subnets from only one Availability Zone, even though the ALB spans two Availability Zones. During maintenance of that single AZ, the ALB remains up but clients see timeouts because there are no healthy targets. Which change most directly improves resilience against an AZ failure?

A marketing site runs on x86 EC2 instances and uses open-source software with no architecture-specific licensing restriction. What should be evaluated to reduce compute cost? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A company runs an application in private subnets (no inbound internet). The application must access Amazon S3 and AWS Secrets Manager endpoints without routing through the public internet and without exposing the instances to NAT gateways due to cost. Security requirements also state that only the required VPC traffic should be allowed to reach AWS services. Which architecture best satisfies these requirements?

A CI/CD pipeline needs to deploy to your production environment. Security requires that the pipeline uses temporary credentials (not long-lived access keys) and only has permissions to read a specific set of parameters from AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store and write application logs to CloudWatch Logs. What is the best AWS approach?

A media platform stores originals in an S3 bucket. The application must: (1) prevent any public access to the bucket, (2) allow authenticated users to upload and download objects using presigned URLs, and (3) enforce that all requests use HTTPS and only touch objects under the user-specific prefix (for example, s3://media-originals/user-123/*). The bucket currently allows uploads but sometimes returns 403 AccessDenied for presigned URLs. Which change is the best fix while meeting the security requirements?

A retail API uses EC2 instances behind an ALB. CPU is consistently high during peak traffic, and request latency rises. What should be configured?

You run a web application on an EC2 Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). During scheduled traffic spikes, new instances launch but customers occasionally see 5xx errors for the first few minutes after scale-out. Operational logs show instances need ~4 minutes to warm up (load caches and initialize dependencies). ALB target health becomes healthy only after this warm-up. Which change most directly improves performance during spikes by reducing the time to serve traffic after scaling?

A telemetry pipeline uses RDS MySQL and receives many read-only reporting queries that slow down the primary database. What should the architect add?

A company serves public JavaScript and CSS files from S3 using CloudFront. After a frontend change, customers report a low CloudFront cache hit ratio. Requests now include an Authorization header, but these assets do not require authentication. The CloudFront distribution is configured such that Authorization is included in the cache key. Which change best maximizes cache reuse?

A microservice runs in private subnets and must read exactly one AWS Secrets Manager secret using its IAM task role: arn:aws:secretsmanager:us-east-1:111122223333:secret:prod/db-pass-AbCdEf Security requires that every Secrets Manager API call comes only through a specific Interface VPC Endpoint (vpce-0a1b2c3d4e5f6g7h), and must not be reachable over any other network path. Which IAM policy change best enforces this requirement?

An order lookup API repeatedly reads the same few items from DynamoDB. The application can tolerate slightly stale data for a few seconds, and the team wants the lowest-latency design with minimal application changes. Which two changes should they make? Select two.

Based on the exhibit, a static asset distribution site uses Amazon CloudFront with an S3 origin. The assets are versioned by filename, but the cache hit ratio remains low after each release. Which CloudFront change is the best way to improve cache reuse without changing the origin objects?

Based on the exhibit, what is the best change to improve read performance without increasing write latency on the primary database?

A web application runs on an Auto Scaling group (ASG) behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The ASG is currently attached to subnets in only two Availability Zones (AZs). During a planned maintenance window, one AZ becomes unavailable for about 25 minutes. Monitoring shows that targets in the remaining AZ go healthy, and the ALB/target group health checks report normal. However, users still experience intermittent connection failures and slower responses during the AZ outage. What change will most directly improve resilience against an AZ loss while keeping the same ALB-based design?

A solutions architect is designing an S3 bucket for a claims portal. The objects must never be publicly accessible, even if a developer later adds an overly broad bucket policy. What should the architect configure? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

Based on the exhibit, a partner account uploads encrypted objects to a central S3 bucket and later reads them back. The S3 permissions are correct, but the requests still fail. What change is required so the partner workload can use the customer-managed KMS key safely?

A risk simulation workload uses CloudWatch Logs heavily. Retaining all debug logs forever is increasing costs. What should be configured?

A nightly video rendering pipeline runs on Linux EC2 instances and is compatible with ARM64. The jobs are CPU-bound, checkpoint frequently, and can resume if interrupted. The business wants the best throughput per dollar for the batch window. Which two changes should the team make? Select two.

A company is migrating its on-premises workloads to AWS and wants to optimize costs. Which three strategies should the company implement to achieve a cost-optimized architecture? (Choose three.)

A company runs an application on EC2 instances in private subnets. The instances must access Amazon S3, and the team currently routes all outbound traffic to the internet through a NAT Gateway. Monthly NAT Gateway charges increased significantly, even though the application only needs to call S3 (not access other public internet services). Which change will most directly reduce NAT Gateway charges while keeping S3 access working?

A web application for a healthcare document service is behind an Application Load Balancer. The application must be protected from common SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks with minimum operational overhead. What should the architect deploy? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A central security account stores encrypted log files in S3 using a customer managed AWS KMS key. A partner account already has S3 bucket access through an assumed role and now must also be able to encrypt and decrypt objects that use the same KMS key. Which two actions are required? Select two.

An S3 bucket in account A uses default server-side encryption with an AWS KMS customer-managed key (CMK) in account A. A team created an IAM role in account B that is allowed by IAM policy to perform s3:GetObject on the bucket. When the account B role tries to read objects, it fails with: AccessDeniedException: 'User is not authorized to perform kms:Decrypt'. Which change is most likely to fix the issue?

A read-heavy media archive repeatedly queries the same product catalogue data from DynamoDB with millisecond latency requirements. Which service can reduce read latency and table load? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A company is encrypting sensitive S3 data for a claims portal with AWS KMS. Which two controls help prevent accidental use of the KMS key by unauthorized principals?

A serverless API built with AWS Lambda serves latency-sensitive requests. The team observes intermittent slow responses during traffic ramp-ups and expects some users to hit the API immediately after a period of inactivity. Which configuration best reduces cold-start latency during these ramp-ups?

A ticket booking system runs on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The design must tolerate the failure of one Availability Zone. What should the Auto Scaling group configuration include? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A solutions architect is designing an S3 bucket for a order processing API. The objects must never be publicly accessible, even if a developer later adds an overly broad bucket policy. What should the architect configure?

A analytics dashboard uses RDS MySQL and receives many read-only reporting queries that slow down the primary database. What should the architect add? The team wants the control to be enforceable during normal operations.

A retail platform needs disaster recovery across AWS Regions. The business requirement is: RTO up to 6 hours, RPO up to 1 hour, and they want the ability to start serving quickly during a Region outage but do not want to run full production capacity continuously. Which DR strategy best fits these requirements?

A caching layer uses Amazon ElastiCache for Redis in front of a stateless web service. The service must continue to read cached responses during maintenance events and should automatically fail over to another node if one AZ becomes impaired. Which design change best satisfies this requirement?

A financial services company must store audit logs in S3 for 7 years and ensure that no one — including the AWS account root user — can delete or overwrite the logs during the retention period. Which S3 Object Lock configuration should a solutions architect use?

Based on the exhibit, which Amazon EFS performance mode is the best fit for this workload?

Your EC2 instances run in private subnets with no NAT gateway. The instances use the AWS SDK to call STS AssumeRole to obtain temporary credentials for other services. Application logs show errors like: "EndpointConnectionError: Could not connect to https://sts.<region>.amazonaws.com". Which change most directly resolves this while keeping instances private?

An order-processing worker consumes messages from Amazon SQS. Occasionally, the worker times out after successfully creating a payment record but before deleting the message, which causes duplicate charges during retries. Some messages also fail validation repeatedly because required fields are missing. Which two changes should the team make? Select two.

A marketing team runs a report-generation process that must execute once per day at 02:00 UTC. It usually completes in 10315 minutes, but sometimes takes up to 45 minutes due to varying data volumes. They currently run the workload on an EC2 instance that is always on, which wastes money during off-hours. The team wants to minimize operational overhead and pay mainly for actual execution time. What is the best architecture choice?

Your application uses ElastiCache Redis as a cache for user profiles stored in DynamoDB. You must ensure that when a profile is updated, subsequent reads see the latest value quickly. Which cache strategy is generally the best fit for this requirement?

Based on the exhibit, which change will most improve the CloudFront cache hit ratio for the static assets while still serving the same files to all users?

A analytics dashboard uses an Application Load Balancer in one Region. Global users need lower network latency to the application without caching dynamic responses. What should be considered? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A company runs a stateful analytics workload on EC2 instances that use EBS volumes. The data must be restorable in another Region after a major outage, with frequent point-in-time recovery. Which approach provides the most suitable replication mechanism for the EBS-backed data?

A DynamoDB table for a travel booking site has a partition key based only on the current date. Write throttling occurs during business hours. What is the best design change? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A company hosts an internal HTTP API on an internal Network Load Balancer (NLB) in VPC A. A partner team in a separate AWS account needs access, but their VPC CIDR overlaps with VPC A, so VPC peering is not feasible. Security requirements state the API must remain non-public (no internet-facing ALB/NLB) and access must use AWS private networking. Which architecture best meets these requirements?

Based on the exhibit, the platform team wants developers to create application roles for Lambda and ECS, but no developer-created role may ever exceed the approved permission set. Which change best meets this requirement?

A SaaS vendor has a steady 24/7 control plane on ECS and several small event-driven tasks that currently run on a separate always-on service. Management wants the billing discount that applies across both ECS and Lambda usage without committing to a specific instance family. Which two actions are best? Select two.

Based on the exhibit, which storage design best supports the application servers' shared working directory requirement?

A web application runs on an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group (ASG) behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The ALB is configured to use at least two Availability Zones (AZs), but the ASG currently uses subnets in only one AZ. If that AZ becomes unavailable, the application stops serving requests. Which change most directly improves resilience to an AZ outage?

A test environment runs on x86 EC2 instances and uses open-source software with no architecture-specific licensing restriction. What should be evaluated to reduce compute cost? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A company is running a production web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The workload has predictable traffic spikes during business hours and low traffic at night. The current architecture uses On-Demand EC2 instances, leading to high costs. The company wants to reduce costs without sacrificing availability or performance. Which three of the following strategies would help achieve this goal? (Choose three.)

A DynamoDB table for a retail API has a partition key based only on the current date. Write throttling occurs during business hours. What is the best design change?

A trading dashboard stores uploaded documents in S3. The business requires a copy in another AWS Region for disaster recovery. What should be configured? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

An order-quote Lambda function is invoked directly by API Gateway. Traffic is predictable during the business day, and the first request after scaling from zero causes unacceptable latency. The team wants to keep the current architecture and reduce cold-start impact. Which configuration should they use?

A serverless checkout API runs on AWS Lambda behind API Gateway. Traffic spikes are predictable every weekday at 09:00 UTC, and p95 latency jumps for the first few minutes after each deployment because execution environments are cold. The team wants to reduce this startup impact without changing the API contract. Which changes should they make? Select three.

A website serves mostly cacheable images, CSS, and JavaScript from an ALB. Users in Europe and Asia report slower page loads, and the ALB receives far more requests than expected. The team also wants text assets compressed automatically. Which change is the best first step?

A containerized service on Amazon ECS connects to a database with a password that must never be stored in plaintext or hardcoded in the image. The application reads the password at startup and occasionally reconnects later, so it needs to retrieve the current secret when needed. Which three actions should the architect take? Select three.

Based on the exhibit, an application runs on Amazon Aurora MySQL. The writer instance is frequently near 85% CPU while the reader instance is under 20% CPU. Application traces show that most of the database traffic is read-only SELECT queries, but the code currently sends all queries to the writer endpoint. What should the solutions architect recommend to improve performance with the smallest functional change?

A product catalog system uses a relational database for orders and a simple key-value profile store for shopping carts. Traffic is unpredictable, and the company wants to avoid paying for large idle database instances. Which two choices are best? Select two.

A DynamoDB-backed event processing system experiences throttling during a promotion. All events are written and read using the same partition key value (tenantId = "ACME"). The workload is time-ordered per tenant, and the application can tolerate slight reordering across partitions. Which design change will most directly increase throughput and reduce hot-partition throttling?

A web application runs on an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). After each deployment, new instances take about 2 minutes to download artifacts and become ready to accept requests on the target port. In the last deployment, the ALB started marking targets unhealthy before the app was ready, and the Auto Scaling group then replaced those instances repeatedly, causing a prolonged outage. Which change best improves resilience during instance start-up without reducing actual availability once the application is healthy?

An order processing workflow uses Amazon SQS as the decoupling layer between a producer and a consumer Lambda function. The consumer intermittently fails due to a downstream dependency. The team has observed that certain “poison” messages keep being retried repeatedly and prevent other messages from being processed efficiently. Which SQS configuration most directly addresses this issue?

An application stores user-uploaded binaries in S3. Access is unpredictable for the first month, then most objects become cold. The team wants the cheapest approach that avoids manually guessing access patterns. Which two actions are best? Select two.

A mobile game backend uses Amazon Aurora. The workload has many short-lived database connections from Lambda functions, causing connection storms. What should be added?

A private application in two private subnets must download objects from S3 and read parameters from Systems Manager Parameter Store without routing traffic through the public internet. Which two components should the architect use? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A media company runs a 24/7 recommendation engine on EC2 in one AWS Region. The workload is interruption-intolerant, and the team expects steady usage but may change instance families and sizes during planned optimizations. Compared to the current On-Demand setup, they want the lowest cost while avoiding the rigidity of locking to a specific instance type. What should the solutions architect recommend?

A company hosts an application on EC2 instances in private subnets. The instances must (1) read objects from Amazon S3 and (2) retrieve secrets from AWS Secrets Manager. The team currently sends all outbound traffic through a NAT gateway to reach both services. They want to reduce monthly cost while keeping traffic private (no internet egress) and without changing application logic. Which change is the most cost-effective?

A company stores customer invoices in an Amazon S3 bucket. The application must keep the bucket private, ACLs should not be used, and customers should receive temporary download links for individual invoices. Which three changes should the architect make? Select three.

A mobile banking backend stores audit logs in S3. The compliance team requires that logs cannot be overwritten or deleted for seven years. What should be configured? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A warehouse integration service must use shared file storage across Linux EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones. The storage must remain available during an AZ failure. Which service should be used? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A new feature stores user events in DynamoDB. Each event must be fetched by user_id and sorted by event_time. The team expects many different users and wants to avoid a single hot partition. Which partition key design is best?

A company runs the same public API in two regions (Region A and Region B), each fronted by an ALB. They want Route 53 to automatically route clients to the Region B API when Region A becomes unhealthy, with minimal configuration effort. Which Route 53 approach should they use?

A company uses IAM permission boundaries to prevent developers from escalating privileges. The security team created a permission boundary that allows only read-only actions on most AWS services, but teams can still manage their own resources. A developer can create an IAM role with broad permissions, and the boundary does not appear to be restricting it. Which corrective action best aligns with how permission boundaries work?

Based on the exhibit, the security team needs to detect and alert on both successful and failed attempts to change S3 bucket policies and KMS key policies across the organization. Which solution best meets that requirement?

You have an S3 bucket that stores customer-specific private files. You want to serve these files through CloudFront, where clients must use signed cookies (or signed URLs) to access the content. In addition, you need to block common web exploits and rate-limit suspicious traffic at the edge. Which design best meets these requirements?

Based on the exhibit, which design change is the best way to reduce the observed read latency for this DynamoDB-backed service?

Based on the exhibit, a public API is behind CloudFront and is experiencing bursts of requests from the same client IP, causing upstream saturation. The team wants AWS to automatically block that IP when the request rate becomes excessive while keeping enforcement as close to the client as possible. Which control should they add?

A company stores private customer documents in an S3 bucket. They want only CloudFront to be able to read objects from the bucket (no direct S3 URL access), even if the bucket name and object key are known. Which configuration best meets this requirement?

A media platform runs a CPU-heavy thumbnail generation workload on an EC2 Auto Scaling group using t3.large instances. During peak traffic, p95 processing time increases significantly even though average CPU remains around 40–50%. CloudWatch also shows CPU credit depletion behavior. Which change will most directly improve performance predictability for this workload?

A DevOps team is designing a high-performance CI/CD pipeline to build and test code changes. The pipeline needs to scale to handle hundreds of concurrent builds, with fast build times and minimal idle compute cost. The builds are containerized and require consistent, reproducible environments. Which three options should be used to meet these requirements? (Choose three.)

A SOC analyst needs an immutable, centralized audit record of configuration and API changes across multiple AWS accounts. Recently, an operator changed an IAM role trust policy, and investigators must determine exactly which principal made the change and which parameters were used. Your current setup sends application logs to CloudWatch Logs, but there is no organization-level API audit logging. Which approach best satisfies the requirement?

A fintech startup uses AWS to run a web API and a PostgreSQL database. They must meet an RPO of 15 minutes and an RTO of 2 hours for a Region-wide disaster. Budget allows running a small, always-on set of infrastructure in a secondary Region, but not full production capacity. The team wants a DR approach that is regularly testable without large manual effort. Which disaster recovery strategy is the best fit?

Based on the exhibit, which EBS volume type should the team use to meet the performance need at lower cost than overprovisioning capacity?

An application runs on EC2 instances in private subnets behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Security groups allow inbound HTTPS (443) from the ALB’s security group to the instance security group, and outbound from instances is set to allow ephemeral ports. Despite this, clients see connection timeouts. After reviewing network ACLs, you find the NACL associated with the instance subnet has an inbound allow for destination port 443, but it does not have a corresponding outbound allow for ephemeral ports. What is the most likely reason the traffic fails, and what should be updated?

A CI pipeline in account A uploads build artifacts to an S3 bucket (arn:aws:s3:::build-artifacts-prod) under the prefix teamA/. The pipeline must not be able to list other prefixes, and it must only upload objects under teamA/. Which IAM policy design best enforces least privilege for this requirement?

A payments API uses Amazon SQS. Poison messages are repeatedly failing and blocking useful retries. What should the architect configure? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A log archive serves infrequently accessed user documents that must be available immediately when requested. Which S3 storage class is likely the best cost fit? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A startup has three sandbox accounts and one production account. The CTO wants lower cost and operational overhead while keeping central purchasing and spend visibility. Which two actions are best? Select two.

Based on the exhibit, what change best reduces Lambda cold-start impact for a predictable user-upload workflow?

An ECS service runs on EC2 capacity. During peak traffic, tasks frequently wait for available container instances. The team wants faster scale-out for the underlying EC2 capacity when tasks increase. What is the best first architectural step?

A startup runs an HTTP/2 API that also supports WebSocket connections. They need path-based routing to separate microservices (for example, /api/* to Service A and /metrics/* to Service B) and want TLS terminated at the load balancer. Which AWS option best meets these requirements while maintaining high request performance?

A patient portal receives bursts of orders that sometimes overwhelm a downstream fulfilment service. The architecture must absorb spikes and retry processing without losing requests. Which service should be placed between the web tier and fulfilment workers? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

An Auto Scaling group for a background worker runs EC2 instances continuously. Over the last 30 days, CloudWatch shows sustained CPU utilization around 6% with no memory pressure, and queue processing latency meets all SLAs. The team wants to lower monthly cost with minimal risk. What is the best next action?

A regional web application for a content publishing system must fail over automatically to a secondary Region if the primary endpoint becomes unhealthy. Which two services or features are required? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

An internal team runs a report-generation job once per day. It typically finishes in a few minutes, and even on its slowest days it still completes in under 15 minutes. The team wants to reduce operational overhead and pay primarily for actual runtime instead of keeping servers running 24/7. Which AWS approach best matches these goals?

A media company stores original uploads in an S3 bucket. They must recover from accidental overwrites/deletes and also recover quickly from a full Region outage. The required RPO is about 1 hour. Which configuration best meets these requirements?

A team runs a latency-sensitive service on EC2 and needs consistent, low-latency block storage for a database. The application requires predictable performance and should be fast for random reads/writes. Which EBS volume type is the best choice?

An e-commerce application uses Aurora MySQL. Writes are modest, but the product-detail page generates many read-only queries and the writer instance CPU is high. The application can tolerate a small amount of replication lag on those reads. What should the team do?

A company hosts a B2B file exchange site on EC2. Administrators must connect without opening SSH or RDP ports to the internet. What should the architect use? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A order processing API stores audit logs in S3. The compliance team requires that logs cannot be overwritten or deleted for seven years. What should be configured? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A dev sandbox currently uses two NAT gateways in each of three Availability Zones, but only one private subnet per AZ needs outbound internet access. What should the architect review first? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A startup runs two EC2-based workloads in the same AWS Region. Its customer-facing API is always on, and its nightly video transcoding fleet can restart jobs from checkpoints if an instance is interrupted. The finance team wants the lowest monthly compute cost without changing the application design. Which two actions should the team take? Select two.

A read-heavy document portal repeatedly queries the same product catalogue data from DynamoDB with millisecond latency requirements. Which service can reduce read latency and table load? The team wants the control to be enforceable during normal operations.

An EC2 workload runs in one region on a single instance type. For the last month, CloudWatch metrics show average CPU utilization of 12% and no sustained memory pressure. The team wants to reduce cost while maintaining the current performance level. What is the best first step?

A media company runs a batch job that processes image thumbnails. The job can be restarted from checkpoints and does not have user-facing SLAs. The batch capacity can tolerate interruptions. Which EC2 purchasing option is the best cost optimization choice?

A workload runs in private subnets and must reach Amazon S3 and AWS Secrets Manager without using the internet or a NAT gateway. The team wants to keep the traffic on AWS private networking and avoid public IPs. Which two changes should the architect make? Select two.

Based on the exhibit, the application should continue serving requests if one Availability Zone fails. Which change best improves resilience with the least operational complexity?

A team runs an Amazon NLB in a VPC with targets registered in multiple Availability Zones (AZs). Their bill shows high inter-AZ data transfer charges. They want to reduce unnecessary cross-AZ traffic costs while still maintaining healthy targets per AZ. What change is most likely to reduce inter-AZ charges?

A test environment stores logs in S3. Logs are queried for 30 days, rarely accessed for one year, and then retained for compliance. What should reduce storage cost? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A web API runs on an Auto Scaling group (ASG) behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). During traffic spikes, users experience request timeouts even though CPU stays below 40%. After investigation, you find the ASG often has too few healthy targets to handle the current request rate. Which change will best improve responsiveness during spikes?

A media company uploads raw video thumbnails to an S3 bucket every hour. The application needs these thumbnails for active browsing for the first 7 days. After day 7, access becomes rare. Requirements: - Objects must remain available in S3 for at least 180 days total. - After day 7, the team can tolerate retrieval latency in the range of minutes to hours. - They want to minimize storage cost while keeping the ability to read objects (no application changes required). Which storage strategy is the most cost-optimized fit?

Multiple teams share one AWS Organization. Finance wants chargeback by project, alerts before overspend, and monthly views by account without manually opening each account. Which three actions best fit? Select three.

A SaaS vendor needs temporary access to an S3 bucket in your AWS account to read customer exports. The vendor will assume an IAM role you created. During integration testing, the vendor reports that their AssumeRole requests succeed, but your security team is concerned about the possibility of confused-deputy attacks. Which trust policy approach most directly mitigates this risk?

A retailer runs a reporting-heavy relational app on Amazon RDS MySQL. Peak dashboard traffic lasts only three hours each day, but the database is sized for the peak all day. The business wants lower cost without rewriting the application. Which three actions are best? Select three.

A Lambda-based travel booking site has unpredictable traffic spikes and users see latency caused by cold starts. The function must respond consistently during expected campaign windows. What should be configured?

A team wants a web application to keep serving traffic if one Availability Zone fails. Match each architecture element to the resilience behavior it provides.

A site serves static assets (JS/CSS) through CloudFront from an S3 origin. After a recent frontend change, CloudFront shows a cache hit ratio below 20%. In CloudFront access logs, requests to the same asset URL path differ by a query parameter named rnd (a random value appended by the app on every request). The origin content is identical regardless of rnd. What is the best CloudFront configuration change to restore effective caching?

A line-of-business application runs on EC2 instances 24/7 with predictable usage for the next year. The application will stay in the same Region, and the team does not want to manage capacity interruptions. Which two purchase options can reduce cost compared with pure On-Demand pricing? Select two.

A microservice runs in private subnets with no NAT gateway. It must retrieve a secret from AWS Secrets Manager. Security requires that traffic to Secrets Manager stays within AWS’s private network (no public internet egress). The IAM role already grants secretsmanager:GetSecretValue for the needed secret. What is the best network setup to meet the requirement?

A company is designing a high-performance web application that serves static and dynamic content to a global user base. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The static assets are stored in an S3 bucket. Which three architecture decisions will improve performance and reduce latency for users? (Choose three.)

A production log archive runs continuously on EC2 with predictable usage for the next three years. The team wants a discount while retaining some instance-family flexibility. What should they buy?

A media company runs a fleet of EC2 instances using Auto Scaling across multiple instance families (for example, m-series and c-series) in a single region. The business wants to commit to steady usage for one year to reduce cost, but the application team must retain flexibility to switch instance families and scale up/down as demand changes. They need the cost-reduction approach that best matches this flexibility. Which option is the best fit?

A company is designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical application hosted on AWS. The application runs on EC2 instances with data stored in Amazon EBS volumes and Amazon S3. The recovery time objective (RTO) is 15 minutes, and the recovery point objective (RPO) is 1 hour. Which three strategies would help meet these objectives? (Choose three.)

A Multi-AZ Amazon RDS database experiences incorrect writes at 10:15 UTC due to a buggy release. The team detects the problem at 10:25 UTC. They want to restore the data to a known-good point around 10:15 UTC, and validate the recovered data, without taking the current production instance offline during the recovery process. What is the most appropriate AWS action?

An application uses Amazon Aurora MySQL. CloudWatch shows the writer instance near 85% CPU while the only reader instance averages 15% CPU. Trace logs show that all SELECT statements still target the writer endpoint. The workload is read-heavy, and the application already tolerates eventual consistency for reads. Which two changes will best increase total read throughput without a schema redesign? Select two.

A mobile game backend uses Amazon Aurora. The workload has many short-lived database connections from Lambda functions, causing connection storms. What should be added? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A security analyst needs to let an external vendor (AWS account 555566667777) read data from a set of internal resources in your AWS account. You created an IAM role called VendorReadRole with a policy that allows the required API calls. However, when the vendor tries to access, CloudTrail shows the call fails at AssumeRole with: "Not authorized to perform: sts:AssumeRole". What is the most appropriate fix?

A marketing team uses CloudFront with an S3 origin to serve a single-page web app. After a release, CloudFront cache hit ratio dropped sharply. The app requests the same static JS and CSS assets, but each request includes a unique tracking query parameter (for example, ?utm_source=campaign123, campaign456, etc.). You want CloudFront to cache those assets efficiently even when the tracking query parameter changes. What should you do?

A team wants to remove a bastion host used for administrative access to EC2 instances in private subnets. The instances should be reachable only for occasional troubleshooting by engineers who authenticate with AWS SSO. What is the best secure alternative within AWS, assuming the instances already have an instance profile attached?

Based on the exhibit, which Route 53 configuration should be used so traffic automatically returns to the secondary Region only when the primary Region becomes unhealthy?

A travel booking site uses EC2 instances behind an ALB. CPU is consistently high during peak traffic, and request latency rises. What should be configured?

A company is designing a multi-Region disaster recovery (DR) strategy for a stateless web application running on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application uses an Amazon RDS for MySQL database as its data store. The architecture must provide rapid failover with the lowest possible Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Which of the following design choices will help achieve these objectives? (Choose four.)

Based on the exhibit, a single EC2 instance hosts a latency-sensitive cache that performs sustained random reads and writes to persistent block storage. The current EBS volume is a general-purpose SSD, but BurstBalance is repeatedly depleted and p95 I/O latency has risen above 20 ms. The workload needs more than 16,000 sustained IOPS. Which change is the best fix?

Multiple EC2 instances in different Availability Zones need concurrent read/write access to the same shared files. The files are actively modified by several application servers, and low-latency metadata operations matter more than extremely high aggregate throughput. Which two changes should the team make? Select two.

Based on the exhibit, a workload in private subnets must reach only Amazon S3 and AWS Secrets Manager. The team wants to eliminate internet exposure for those calls and reduce NAT gateway charges. What change should be made?

A company serves mostly static images and JavaScript files from an origin in one AWS Region. They want to reduce origin load and improve global performance. Which change most directly increases cache-hit ratio for static assets while avoiding stale content?

A company stores application logs in an S3 bucket. They retain logs for 180 days. Compliance requires that the logs be immutable once written, but the business only reviews logs about once per month. Currently, the team stores everything in S3 Standard, and their monthly S3 bill is too high. They want to reduce storage cost without changing the requirement to keep logs for 180 days. Which lifecycle approach best meets the goal?

A inventory service uses Lambda functions that call an unreliable third-party API. Failed events must be retained for later investigation after retries are exhausted. What should be configured? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

An order system receives events and uses a Lambda function to write each order into a database. During traffic spikes, the database sometimes throttles, and Lambda retries lead to occasional message loss in the event flow. The team wants buffering, automatic retries, and a way to isolate messages that repeatedly fail so they can be inspected later. What design change best meets this need?

A web application runs in private subnets with no NAT gateway. It needs to retrieve credentials from AWS Secrets Manager at runtime. After a recent network hardening change, the application logs timeout errors when calling Secrets Manager. Which change will most directly enable private connectivity to Secrets Manager while keeping the subnets NAT-free?

A company runs a customer portal on an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL cluster. The application currently connects directly to the writer instance endpoint and keeps long-lived connections open. During a maintenance failover, writes fail until clients are restarted. The team wants the application to reconnect to the correct Aurora endpoint automatically and reduce user-visible write interruptions. Which change is most likely to achieve this?

A media processing pipeline runs batch jobs on EC2. The jobs can tolerate interruptions because they checkpoint progress to durable storage and can restart. The total workload is variable week-to-week, and there is no need to guarantee capacity at specific times. To reduce compute cost while maintaining correctness, what EC2 purchase option and approach is the best fit?

A marketing site stores logs in S3. Logs are queried for 30 days, rarely accessed for one year, and then retained for compliance. What should reduce storage cost? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A DynamoDB table uses this schema: partition key = customerId, sort key = timestamp. During a marketing campaign, one customer generates extremely high read traffic and the application sees ProvisionedThroughputExceeded errors even though the table’s total capacity is sufficient. What change most directly improves read distribution across partitions?

A security requirement states: all uploads to an S3 bucket must (1) use TLS in transit and (2) use server-side encryption with AWS KMS (SSE-KMS) using the CMK key id 'abcd-1234'; otherwise the upload should be rejected. A developer reports that uploads are succeeding even though clients are sometimes using non-encrypted requests. Which bucket policy approach most directly enforces both controls?

A fleet of test servers is rebuilt every week from AMIs. EBS volumes are often left behind after termination, and the team creates daily snapshots of every volume even when nothing changes. Which three actions most reduce storage cost while preserving recovery options? Select three.

A document portal requires consistent high IOPS for a transactional database on EC2. Which EBS volume type is most suitable?

An internal team runs a report-generation job once per day. It typically finishes in a few minutes, and even on its slowest days it still completes in under 15 minutes. The team wants to reduce operational overhead and pay primarily for actual runtime instead of keeping servers running 24/7. Which AWS approach best matches these goals?

A global video platform serves mostly static images and JavaScript files from an S3 origin. Users in distant countries report slow load times. What should improve performance most?

A startup runs an API on Amazon EC2. The instance must read items from one DynamoDB table and upload logs to one S3 bucket. Platform engineers also need a way to create new application roles, but those roles must never exceed a predefined set of permissions. Which three actions should the architect take? Select three.

A healthcare document service stores audit logs in S3. The compliance team requires that logs cannot be overwritten or deleted for seven years. What should be configured?

A media processing workflow in private subnets downloads large amounts of data from S3 through a NAT gateway. NAT data processing charges are high. What should the architect use to reduce cost? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

Your ecommerce app runs behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) and uses an RDS database for orders. During an AZ impairment in us-east-1, customers report that checkout takes several minutes to recover. The current design places EC2 instances only in private subnets of AZ-a, while the ALB spans multiple subnets. The RDS DB instance is Multi-AZ. Management wants automatic recovery within the same Region. Which change best addresses the issue with minimal operational overhead?

Your CI system assumes an IAM role RoleForDeploy using STS AssumeRole and includes a session tag called Project=blue. The role’s permissions policy uses an ABAC condition like aws:PrincipalTag/Project to allow access only to resources tagged with the same project. AssumeRole succeeds, but deployments fail with AccessDenied. CloudTrail shows the role was assumed, yet the effective session does not contain the Project tag. Which change most directly fixes this issue?

A Lambda function for a mobile banking backend needs to read a database password. The password must rotate automatically every 30 days and should not be stored in environment variables. Which service should be used? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

Based on the exhibit, what change should the team make to achieve the lowest possible network latency for the distributed workload?

Your media processing pipeline writes original uploads to an S3 bucket and later generates derivative files. An operator accidentally deletes a subset of original uploads in production. You need to (1) restore the deleted objects with minimal data loss and (2) protect against both regional disasters and future operator mistakes. The company requires recovery even if objects are deleted and later overwritten. What is the most effective change to meet these requirements?

Your mobile app writes events to a single DynamoDB table with partition key = customerId and sort key = eventTime. During a promotional campaign, one tenant ("ACME") generates far more traffic than others. CloudWatch shows sustained throttling (ProvisionedThroughputExceeded) and elevated p99 latency only for that tenant. The workload pattern cannot be changed to a completely different schema, but you can change how items are partitioned. Which design change is most likely to reduce the hot-partition throttling while keeping efficient reads for ACME?

An Aurora PostgreSQL cluster is experiencing high read latency because 85% of traffic consists of read-only queries. The write workload must stay on the writer instance, and the team wants to offload reads without changing the application’s core query patterns. What is the best architectural option?

An event ingestion service writes to a DynamoDB table where the partition key is tenantId and the sort key is eventTime. During a campaign, one tenant generates a disproportionate share of traffic, causing write throttling and increased latency for that tenant’s writes. You can change the data model and application queries, but you must still efficiently retrieve events for a tenant for the last 10 minutes. Which change best improves write throughput by reducing hot partitions?

Your team hosts a private web app on an S3 bucket and serves it through CloudFront using a modern Origin Access Control (OAC). After deployment, users receive HTTP 403 from CloudFront with the S3 origin error "AccessDenied". Which S3 bucket policy change best aligns with CloudFront OAC so the distribution can fetch objects privately?