Design High-Performing Architectures

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 architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

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

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

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.)

A development team is building a new application that stores session state in a relational database. The application experiences unpredictable read traffic, and the team wants a fully managed database that can scale read capacity automatically and provide a reader endpoint that distributes connections across multiple replicas. Which AWS service should a solutions architect recommend?

A Lambda-based retail API 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? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

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 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 architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

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 team wants the control to be enforceable during normal operations.

A financial services company runs a high-traffic REST API on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The API retrieves user session data from an Amazon DynamoDB table for every request. During peak hours, DynamoDB read capacity is exhausted, causing throttling and increased latency. The workload is read-heavy and the session data is accessed frequently but changes infrequently. The solutions architect needs to reduce DynamoDB read load and improve API response times with minimal application changes. Which solution meets these requirements?

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 design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

Based on the exhibit, a batch-processing service runs on Amazon EC2. The workload is Linux-based, can run on ARM64, and is CPU-bound during its nightly processing window. The team wants the best throughput per dollar without changing the application logic. Which EC2 instance family should the solutions architect recommend?

A media analytics company ingests a continuous stream of JSON clickstream events, roughly 20,000 records per second, into an Amazon Kinesis Data Streams stream with 32 shards. Downstream consumers must be able to re-read the same records up to 7 days later to rebuild a reporting index. Which combination of settings should the team use to maximize the number of records each consumer can read per second while preserving this replay capability?

An Aurora PostgreSQL application has an OLTP writer and a reporting dashboard that issues many read-only queries. The writer is healthy, but read latency rises noticeably during reporting windows. Which two changes should you make? Select two.

Based on the exhibit, a media company serves versioned JavaScript and CSS files from an Amazon S3 origin through CloudFront. After a frontend release, the cache hit ratio dropped sharply even though the file names are versioned. The application team says the browser requests include the same Authorization header on every asset request because the frontend and API share one domain. What should the solutions architect do to improve CloudFront cache hit ratio without changing the application authentication model for the API?

A DynamoDB-backed multi-tenant app experiences throttling during a promotion. Most writes and reads target tenant "ACME" and use the same partition key value, causing a hot partition. Which design change most directly improves performance?

A production application writes to an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL cluster. Users report that during business-hour reporting runs, write latency increases. The application team wants to keep the writer focused on OLTP writes while still providing low-latency reads for reporting queries. What architectural approach should the solutions architect recommend?

A telemetry pipeline uses RDS MySQL and receives many read-only reporting queries that slow down the primary database. What should the architect add? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application experiences variable traffic patterns, with sudden spikes during marketing campaigns. The operations team wants to ensure that the application can scale out quickly to handle the spikes and scale in when traffic decreases, while minimizing costs. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?

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

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.

A company is deploying a new web application on AWS. The application will serve static content (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images) and dynamic API requests. The company expects a global user base and wants to minimize latency for all users. The static content is stored in an Amazon S3 bucket, and the dynamic APIs are hosted on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Which service should the company use to accelerate both static and dynamic content delivery?

A genomics research team stores about 400 TB of compressed sequence files in Amazon S3 and runs a distributed analysis on Amazon EC2 instances in the same Region. The analysis reads each file sequentially and writes intermediate results to local instance storage. The team reports that the S3 GET requests are a bottleneck and wants to improve read throughput while keeping data durable. (Choose two.)

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

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?

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

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 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 startup runs a read-heavy product catalogue API on Amazon DynamoDB. The table uses on-demand capacity mode, and the team notices that repeated queries for the same popular items return consistently, causing high read request charges. The application can tolerate data that is a few seconds stale. Which change reduces read costs while keeping latency low?

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 design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

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 travel booking site uses EC2 instances behind an ALB. CPU is consistently high during peak traffic, and request latency rises. What should be configured? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

An application repeatedly reads the same DynamoDB items with very low latency requirements. The application can tolerate slightly stale data (for example, within a few seconds). You want to improve read latency without changing the existing DynamoDB table schema. Which service is the best choice?

A DynamoDB-backed multi-tenant app experiences throttling. Most write traffic for tenant 'ACME' targets a single logical stream of events (you write items for ACME in near-real time). The table currently uses partition key = tenantId and sort key = eventTimestamp. CloudWatch shows partition-level throttling concentrated in the ACME partition. What design change most directly improves write throughput for the hottest tenant while still enabling efficient queries for recent events for that tenant?

Based on the exhibit, a serverless API on AWS Lambda experiences a predictable cold-start penalty every weekday at 09:00 UTC when a marketing campaign begins. The team wants the first requests to stay fast while minimizing extra cost during quiet periods. What is the best approach?

A data processing application runs on a single EC2 instance and needs persistent block storage with sustained low-latency random read/write performance (high IOPS). Which storage choice is most appropriate?

A retail company is deploying a read-heavy product catalog on Amazon Aurora MySQL. The primary instance is heavily loaded with read traffic, and the team wants to offload reads to Aurora Replicas while keeping the application resilient to replica failures. The application connects using a single endpoint. Which two actions should the team take to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

A latency-sensitive video platform uploads large files to S3 from users around the world. Which two features can improve upload performance?

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.

A high-volume analytics dashboard writes streaming click events that must be processed by multiple independent consumers. Which service is most appropriate? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A document portal needs low-latency full-text search across product descriptions and filtered attributes. Which managed service is most suitable?

An API team runs an AWS Lambda function behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). During predictable hourly traffic spikes, p95 response latency increases due to occasional cold starts. The team wants stable latency during those spikes without permanently overprovisioning resources for all functions. Which configuration is the most appropriate way to reduce cold starts for this Lambda function?

Your web application runs on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). During traffic spikes, p95 response time increases, but average CPU utilization remains below 40%. The current Auto Scaling policy scales based on average CPU%. What should you change to improve performance during spikes?

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.

A solutions architect is designing a high-performance computing (HPC) workload that requires a shared file system with high throughput and low latency for thousands of compute instances. The workload also requires a caching layer to accelerate repeated reads of the same data. Which two AWS services should be combined to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

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 startup runs a stateless web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Traffic is steady during the day but drops to almost zero overnight, and the team wants to reduce compute cost without manual intervention or a service interruption. Which action should the team take?

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.

A logistics company runs a REST API on Amazon ECS using the Fargate launch type behind an Application Load Balancer. The API's response times are acceptable, but the operations team wants to reduce the number of database calls per request by caching frequently accessed reference data in memory inside the tasks. The data changes infrequently and slight staleness is acceptable. Which approach best meets these requirements?

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

A web application uses an Amazon Aurora DB cluster. The workload is becoming read-heavy, and the application team wants to increase read throughput without changing the database schema. They can adjust the application to route reads differently. What should they do?

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 media company serves video thumbnails from an Amazon S3 bucket in us-east-1 to viewers across Europe and Asia. The thumbnails are immutable after upload and are requested repeatedly by the same users. The company wants to reduce latency for the global audience and reduce data transfer costs, and it does not want to modify application code. Which solution meets these requirements with the LEAST operational effort?

A retail company runs a read-heavy product catalog on Amazon RDS for MySQL. During flash sales, read replicas lag behind the primary and the application serves stale prices. The team wants to scale read traffic while ensuring the application reads the most current data for price lookups. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?

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 service performs many repeated read requests for the same DynamoDB items. The reads are latency-sensitive, but the application can tolerate slightly stale data. Which AWS service is the best fit to reduce read latency?

A Lambda function behind an API needs consistent low latency. Traffic normally drops to near zero, then spikes several times per hour. During spikes, the p95 latency often spikes above 800 ms due to cold starts. The team wants to keep using Lambda (no containers) but minimize cold start impact during predictable spikes. What is the best AWS configuration to meet this goal?

A gaming company uses Amazon DynamoDB to store player session data. The table has a partition key of PlayerID and a sort key of SessionStartTime. The company needs to retrieve all sessions for a specific player within a date range, sorted by session start time. The table is large and the company wants to minimize read latency. Which approach should they use?

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 genomics company stores 400 TB of compressed reference data in Amazon S3. Researchers in an on-premises lab must run high-throughput reads of this data over a 10 Gbps AWS Direct Connect connection. The team observes that reads are slower than expected and wants to maximize throughput per S3 request while minimizing request costs. Which S3 feature should they implement?

Based on the exhibit, a DynamoDB-backed event processing system is throttling during a promotion. The table uses tenantId as the partition key and eventTime as the sort key. One tenant accounts for most of the write traffic, and the application must preserve fast lookups for that tenant without relying on a single hot partition. What change is the best fix?

A solutions architect is designing a high-performance architecture for a real-time analytics application. The application ingests a continuous stream of data from thousands of IoT devices. The data must be processed in near real-time, and the results must be stored in a durable, scalable data store for later analysis. The architect needs to choose AWS services that can handle the ingestion and processing of the stream. (Choose two.)

A media archive requires consistent high IOPS for a transactional database on EC2. Which EBS volume type is most suitable? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

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?

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?

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?

An application uses DynamoDB to store order status. Reads happen extremely frequently for the same few keys (for example, the most recent orders), and the team wants lower read latency without changing the table’s partition key design. Which AWS service best fits this requirement?

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? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

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 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? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

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

A high-volume telemetry pipeline writes streaming click events that must be processed by multiple independent consumers. Which service is most appropriate? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A financial analytics firm runs a nightly batch job on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances that read millions of small JSON objects from an Amazon S3 bucket and write aggregated results to another S3 bucket. The job currently takes over six hours and the team wants to reduce this time without modifying the application code. The S3 buckets are in the same AWS Region as the EC2 instances. Which action will most effectively improve the performance of the batch job?

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 company runs a media-processing pipeline that ingests thousands of small files per minute into Amazon S3 and triggers AWS Lambda functions for each object. Processing each file takes 2-3 seconds, and the team is seeing throttling errors and duplicated processing under load. They want to decouple ingestion from processing, buffer bursty traffic, and avoid duplicate deliveries to Lambda. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?

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 telemetry pipeline 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?

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 company runs a microservices application on Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate. The services communicate over HTTP/2 and gRPC. The architect needs to implement service-to-service communication that provides high throughput, low latency, and mutual TLS encryption. The solution must also support traffic splitting for canary deployments. Which approach should the architect take?

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.

Your team runs a tightly coupled distributed workload (for example, synchronous training nodes) across many EC2 instances placed within a single cluster environment. The instances need low-latency networking to reduce delays at synchronization barriers. Which EC2 placement strategy should you use to improve inter-node latency?

A startup runs a stateless web application on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. Traffic is steady during business hours, but the team has configured the scaling policy with a target tracking metric of average CPU utilization at 50 percent. Users report intermittent 5xx errors during sudden traffic surges. Which change will most directly improve the application's ability to absorb rapid traffic increases?

A retail company runs a stateless web tier on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. During flash sales, response times spike because each request triggers many database queries. The team wants to reduce database load and improve read latency for product catalog pages that change only a few times per day. Which solution is MOST appropriate?

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 document portal needs low-latency full-text search across product descriptions and filtered attributes. Which managed service is most suitable? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

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.

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 architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

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?

A SaaS company serves a global web application from a single AWS Region. Users in distant geographies report high latency for static assets such as images and JavaScript bundles, and the company wants to reduce this latency without modifying the application code. Which action BEST achieves this?

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 data engineering team runs an Amazon EMR cluster that processes large datasets stored in Amazon S3. The cluster uses Amazon EBS volumes for temporary storage, and jobs frequently spill intermediate data to disk. The team notices that shuffle operations are slow and wants to improve performance without changing the data format or increasing the number of core nodes. Which change should the team make?

Based on the exhibit, a web application runs on an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. During traffic surges, the average CPU utilization stays below 35%, but request latency increases sharply and the ALB access logs show far more requests per target than expected. Which change is the best way to improve scaling behavior?

A SaaS company hosts a REST API on Amazon API Gateway with AWS Lambda proxy integration. The API serves tenants in North America and Europe. European users report high latency, but the Lambda function and its Amazon RDS database must remain in the us-east-1 Region for data residency and cost reasons. The team wants to reduce latency for European users without moving the backend. Which solution meets these requirements?

A company needs to replicate a DynamoDB table to three AWS regions so that users in each region can read and write to a local copy with the lowest possible latency. Changes must propagate to all regions within seconds. Which solution should a solutions architect implement?

Based on the exhibit, an Amazon Aurora MySQL application is read-heavy, but the database writer is nearing CPU limits while the reader instance is mostly idle. The application currently sends all queries to the writer endpoint. Which change should you make first to increase read throughput?

A logistics company runs an Amazon RDS for MySQL database that supports a parcel-tracking API. During the morning peak, read queries for tracking history saturate the primary instance's CPU, slowing writes. The reads can tolerate a few seconds of staleness, and the team wants to offload them without changing the database engine. Which action should the team take?

A team needs to distribute TCP traffic (not HTTP) across multiple services. The services must see the original client source IP for auditing. Which AWS load balancer is the best fit?

A trading analytics system deploys multiple EC2 instances that exchange very frequent, low-latency, east-west messages. The application team wants the instances to be placed to minimize network latency and variability. Which AWS feature should they use?

A media company streams live video from on-premises encoders to viewers across North America. The encoders push a single RTMP feed to AWS, and the company wants the lowest possible glass-to-glass latency for viewers while distributing to thousands of concurrent viewers. The team does not want to manage any streaming servers. Which solution BEST meets these requirements?

A web application uses an Amazon Aurora DB cluster for a read-heavy workload. The team wants to increase read throughput without changing the database schema or rewriting application data access patterns. Which two changes should they make? Select two.

A solutions architect is designing a high-performance computing (HPC) workload on AWS that requires a shared POSIX-compliant file system with high throughput and low latency for thousands of concurrent compute instances. The workload is temporary, running for a few hours each week, and the team wants to minimize cost. Which storage solution should the architect recommend?

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 retail company hosts a product catalogue API on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The API serves mostly small JSON responses and is read-heavy. Users in a distant continent report slow response times even though the origin servers are not heavily loaded. The company cannot change the application and wants the lowest-latency read experience globally. Which service should they use?

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 latency-sensitive API is implemented with AWS Lambda. During traffic ramp-ups, users sometimes experience slow responses due to cold starts. The team wants to ensure fast initialization for a baseline level of concurrent requests. Which AWS feature should they use?

A video platform 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.

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

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?

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? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A trading analytics system deploys 10 EC2 instances that exchange very frequent, low-latency messages over the network. The instances must be placed as close together as possible to minimize network hop count and inter-node jitter. Which deployment choice best matches this requirement?

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.

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

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 a public website on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The site is static HTML, CSS, and images, and the same content is served to all visitors. Origin CPU is high because every request is forwarded to the instances, and visitors in remote Regions see slow page loads. The team wants to reduce origin load and improve global latency with the least operational effort. Which solution should be used?

A financial analytics company runs a nightly batch job that reads 4 TB of compressed log data from an Amazon S3 bucket and writes aggregated results to another S3 bucket. The job runs on a fleet of 8 Amazon EC2 instances in a single AWS Region, and the team wants the highest possible aggregate read throughput while minimizing request costs. The data is already stored in S3 Standard, and the team does not want to change the storage class. Which solution best meets these requirements?

A logistics company runs an Amazon RDS for MySQL database that supports a shipment tracking application. Read replicas are already in use, but the primary instance's CPU is saturated by a small number of long-running analytical queries that the reporting team runs directly against the primary. The company wants to offload these analytical queries and improve primary performance while keeping the application's transactional writes fast. (Choose two.)

Your team hosts versioned static assets (for example, /static/app-<buildHash>.js). Each build hash never changes, but you release new files on new URLs. To maximize cache hit rate and reduce origin load using CloudFront, what should you do when generating HTTP responses for these assets?

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

A media company distributes on-demand video to viewers in North America, Europe, and Asia. The videos are stored in a single Amazon S3 bucket in us-east-1 and are served directly from S3. Viewers in Asia report slow start times and frequent buffering. The company wants to reduce latency for all viewers with minimal operational overhead. Which solution meets these requirements?

A web application uses an Amazon Aurora DB cluster for a read-heavy workload. The application team needs higher read throughput but cannot change the database schema. They want to avoid blocking writes and are willing to route read traffic separately. What is the most appropriate architecture change?

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 document portal requires consistent high IOPS for a transactional database on EC2. Which EBS volume type is most suitable? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

A media archive requires consistent high IOPS for a transactional database on EC2. Which EBS volume type is most suitable? The team wants the control to be enforceable during normal operations.

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 telemetry pipeline 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.

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 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 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?

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 media company serves a global audience from an Amazon S3 bucket in the us-east-1 Region. Users in Asia and Europe report high latency when downloading large video files directly from the bucket. The company wants to reduce download latency for these users without changing the application's bucket names or rewriting the application to use a different endpoint. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?

A company is deploying a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster with 16 EC2 instances. The workload requires the lowest possible network latency and highest throughput between all nodes for tightly coupled parallel MPI computations. Which EC2 placement group type should a solutions architect recommend?

A research team runs a latency-sensitive distributed training job on Amazon EC2. They deploy 80 identical nodes that exchange small messages frequently and need low network jitter. The job must run entirely within one Availability Zone. Which placement group strategy should a solutions architect use to maximize intra-cluster network performance?

A game streaming service must use UDP for real-time gameplay traffic. For external firewall allowlisting, the service requires stable, static IP addresses. The TLS handshake must be handled end-to-end by the application servers (the load balancer must not terminate TLS). Which AWS load balancing option best fits these requirements?

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

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

A company runs a stateless web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application stores session state in a relational database, which is becoming a bottleneck during peak hours. The team wants to improve performance and reduce database load while keeping the application stateless. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?

A retail company runs a stateless web tier on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Traffic is steady during the day but drops to near zero between 01:00 and 06:00, and the team wants to reduce cost without manual intervention. The instances take about four minutes to boot and warm up. Which configuration meets these requirements?

A company runs an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database. The application performs frequent OLTP writes, but it also has a separate dashboard that runs heavy SELECT queries and is slowing down overall database performance. The writes must remain on the primary. What is the best approach to improve performance for the dashboard?

Based on the exhibit, a media rendering job runs on a single EC2 instance and writes a large working set of metadata to block storage. The workload performs sustained random reads and writes and must keep latency consistently low for the entire run. The instance may be stopped and started between jobs, and the data must persist. Which storage choice best meets the requirements?

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.)

An application uses an Amazon Aurora cluster. The workload becomes read-heavy, but the team cannot change the database schema. They need higher read throughput while keeping writes on the primary. What should they do?

Based on the exhibit, a distributed analytics workload runs on 12 EC2 instances in one Availability Zone. The nodes exchange thousands of small messages per second and require the lowest possible intra-cluster latency and jitter. Which EC2 placement strategy is the best fit?

A document portal 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.

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 media archive requires consistent high IOPS for a transactional database on EC2. Which EBS volume type is most suitable? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A team serves image files from S3 through CloudFront. During a performance review, they notice that CloudFront cache hit ratio is low and the S3 origin receives many repeated requests for the same images. Request URLs include a volatile query parameter called 'sessionId' that changes for each user, but the image content is identical regardless of 'sessionId'. What configuration change will most effectively increase cache hit ratio?

A financial analytics team runs a batch job every night that scans a 4 TB Amazon Redshift provisioned cluster table to compute aggregates for a reporting dashboard. The dashboard queries are read-only, run for several hours each morning, and compete with ETL writes on the same cluster, causing slow dashboard response times. The team wants to isolate the dashboard workload and improve query performance without changing the ETL job. Which solution meets these requirements with the LEAST operational effort?

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.

A startup runs a static website hosted on Amazon S3. The website is accessed globally, and users in Europe report slow load times. The company wants to improve performance for these users without changing the website's code. Which AWS service should the company use?

A healthcare company runs a patient portal on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application stores session state in memory on each instance, and users are being logged out when the load balancer routes them to a different instance. The company wants to keep the application stateless and avoid modifying application code. Which solution best meets these requirements?

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?

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

A latency-sensitive video platform uploads large files to S3 from users around the world. Which two features can improve upload performance? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A genomics company stores about 400 TB of compressed research data in Amazon S3 and runs a nightly analysis job on a fleet of EC2 instances in the same Region. The job reads the entire dataset every night, and the team wants to reduce the time the fleet spends waiting on storage without changing the data format or the S3 bucket. Which change best improves read throughput for the fleet?

A data engineering team ingests a continuous stream of clickstream events into Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. Downstream consumers process the events, but the team observes that a single consumer is handling a disproportionate share of the records, causing hot shards and throttling. The team wants the stream to distribute records as evenly as possible across shards. Which change should the team make?

A backend API uses an AWS Lambda function behind API Gateway. The first requests after every weekly deployment experience cold starts, causing p95 latency spikes for a few minutes. Which configuration most directly prevents those cold starts for the published version?

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 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 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.)

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

A solutions architect is designing a high-performance architecture for a read-heavy web application backed by Amazon RDS for MySQL. The database is currently a single db.r6g.4xlarge instance that is CPU-bound during peak hours, and the application performs many repeated identical read queries. The architect must improve read scalability and reduce load on the primary instance. (Choose two.)

A media archive needs low-latency full-text search across product descriptions and filtered attributes. Which managed service is most suitable?

A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application stores user-uploaded images in an Amazon S3 bucket. Users report slow image upload times, especially from mobile devices in remote locations. The solutions architect needs to improve upload performance for these users. Which action should the architect take?

Based on the exhibit, a serverless checkout API is implemented in AWS Lambda and deployed in one Region. The function has a cold-start time of 700-900 ms on the first request after idle periods. Marketing launches a predictable traffic spike every weekday at 09:00 UTC, and the p95 latency target is under 150 ms during the first five minutes of the spike. What should the solutions architect do to meet the latency target while controlling cost?

A solutions architect is designing a high-performance architecture for a web application that serves static content from Amazon S3 and dynamic content from an Application Load Balancer. The application must deliver low latency to users across multiple continents and reduce origin load. The team wants to use Amazon CloudFront. Which two actions should the architect take to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

A financial analytics team runs a read-heavy workload on Amazon Aurora MySQL. The primary instance is experiencing high CPU during end-of-day reporting, and read replicas are lagging by several seconds. The application requires strong read consistency for account balances but can tolerate eventual consistency for historical reports. Which change should a solutions architect make to improve performance while meeting consistency requirements?

A company needs to implement session management for a web application. Sessions must persist across multiple EC2 instances, survive EC2 failures, and be accessible with sub-millisecond latency. Sessions must also be sortable by last-access time to expire the oldest sessions first. Which caching solution should a solutions architect recommend?

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 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?

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 trading platform ingests market data events at very high volume and must deliver them with the lowest possible latency to multiple independent consumer applications. Each consumer must read the full stream independently, and ordering must be preserved per instrument symbol. Which solution meets these requirements?

A financial analytics company runs an Amazon RDS for MySQL database that supports a read-heavy web application. The primary DB instance is heavily loaded during business hours, and read replicas are already deployed and receiving traffic from the application. The team wants to reduce the load on the primary DB instance caused by read queries as much as possible, while keeping the application changes minimal. Which action should a solutions architect take?

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 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?

A CPU-bound batch rendering service runs on EC2. The application is Linux-based, compatible with ARM64, and the team wants the best throughput per dollar without changing the workload's architecture. Which two instance-family choices should the team consider first? Select two.

A startup runs a static marketing website on Amazon S3 and wants to serve it to users worldwide with low latency. The site consists of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images stored in a single S3 bucket in the us-east-1 Region. The team wants to minimize cost while improving global performance. Which solution should the team implement?

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? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

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.

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 team wants to run containerized services with AWS-managed orchestration and autoscaling. They do NOT require Kubernetes compatibility. Which AWS service choice is most appropriate to meet these goals?

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

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

A company runs a stateless containerized web application on Amazon ECS with the Fargate launch type behind an Application Load Balancer. The application must scale out quickly when request latency rises and scale in when traffic drops, and the operations team wants a managed target-tracking approach. Which solution meets these requirements?

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 genomics research company runs a large-scale sequence alignment workload on AWS. The workload requires a shared file system that can be accessed concurrently by thousands of EC2 instances, provides high throughput and low latency, and supports POSIX permissions. The data set is about 500 TB and grows by 10 TB per month. The solutions architect needs to choose a storage solution that meets these performance and scalability requirements. Which solution should the architect use?

A telemetry pipeline 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 architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

Based on the exhibit, an application repeatedly reads the same DynamoDB items with extremely low latency requirements. The business can tolerate data that is a few seconds stale. Which architecture change best improves read performance?

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

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 design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

A Lambda-based retail API 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?

Your team serves static JavaScript and CSS files from an S3 origin through CloudFront. After a release, the CloudFront cache hit ratio dropped because clients keep re-downloading the same assets. What is the best next change to improve caching performance?

A financial services firm runs a stateless containerized trading dashboard on Amazon ECS with the Fargate launch type. The dashboard queries a backend over HTTPS and must present responses in under 200 ms. During market open, traffic triples within a few minutes and latency spikes because tasks take time to start. The team needs faster, more predictable scaling and wants to avoid over-provisioning during quiet periods. Which solution meets these requirements?

A company runs a stateless web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Traffic has grown, and the operations team notices that individual instances are often underutilized while others are saturated because traffic is not evenly distributed. The team wants the load balancer to distribute requests more evenly across healthy targets. Which action should the team take?

A media company serves on-demand video to viewers worldwide from an Amazon S3 bucket in us-east-1. Viewers in Asia and Europe report slow start times because the first byte takes several seconds to arrive. The videos are already stored as objects and must remain in the us-east-1 bucket as the origin. Which solution improves global read performance with the LEAST operational effort?

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?