Cloud Architecture and Design

A company is migrating a legacy application to the cloud. The application uses a relational database and requires strong consistency and ACID transactions. Which cloud service model is most appropriate?

A cloud architect is designing a solution that requires a shared, POSIX-compliant file system that can be mounted concurrently by hundreds of Linux EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones in the same AWS Region. The workload is read-heavy, and the file system must scale storage capacity automatically as data grows. Which AWS service should the architect choose?

A cloud architect is designing a stateless containerized workload that must remain available even if an entire data center fails. The workload has no persistent local state and must be able to scale horizontally across regions. Which design decision BEST meets these requirements?

A company runs a stateless web application on auto-scaling EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application experiences sudden traffic spikes. Which scaling approach will handle the spikes most efficiently while minimizing cost?

A cloud engineer needs to store database backups that must be retained for seven years. The backups are rarely accessed. Which storage type is most cost-effective for this use case?

A healthcare company runs a patient portal on virtual machines in a single on-premises datacenter. Regulatory requirements mandate that data must remain on-premises, but the company wants to burst to a public cloud during seasonal peaks and maintain a consistent operational model. The architect must design a hybrid solution that supports workload portability and centralized identity. Which approach BEST meets these requirements?

A financial services firm runs a latency-sensitive trading application in a public cloud. The security team requires that traffic between the application tier and the database tier never traverse the public internet, that both tiers reside in the same virtual network, and that access to the database be restricted to specific application subnet addresses. Which combination of cloud networking controls should the architect implement?

Which cloud characteristic allows a user to provision additional resources automatically without requiring human intervention?

A company runs a stateless web application on virtual machines. To handle increased traffic, they add more virtual machines and distribute incoming requests among them. What is this scaling method called?

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

A company is considering using a public cloud provider. Which TWO characteristics are typical of a public cloud deployment? (Select TWO.)

A cloud architect is designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical application. Which TWO metrics should be defined to establish recovery objectives?

A cloud architect is designing a microservices-based application that requires inter-service communication. The services must be loosely coupled, and the architecture must handle service failures gracefully. Which communication pattern is most appropriate?

A company is migrating a legacy application to the cloud. The application uses a fixed IP address that is hard-coded in several clients. The company needs to ensure the IP address remains the same even if the underlying virtual machine is replaced. Which cloud networking feature should be used?

An organization is designing a disaster recovery plan with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 4 hours and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 hour. Which disaster recovery strategy best meets these requirements while minimizing cost?

A cloud engineer is deploying a web application that requires SSL termination and content-based routing. Which type of load balancer should be used?

A cloud engineer is designing a microservices architecture on AWS. The services must communicate asynchronously and decouple producers from consumers. The engineer needs a fully managed message queuing service that supports dead-letter queues and message retention up to 14 days. Which AWS service should be used?

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

Which of the following is a key benefit of using object storage like Amazon S3 over block storage?

A healthcare company must ensure that patient records stored in a public cloud are encrypted at rest and that the company alone controls the keys used for encryption, including the ability to revoke access immediately if an employee leaves. Which key management approach BEST satisfies these requirements?

A company is migrating a legacy application to Google Cloud. The application requires a relational database with automatic failover and replication across multiple zones within a region. Which Google Cloud service should the company use?

A cloud architect is designing a VPC for a three-tier web application. The web servers must be accessible from the internet, the application servers should only be reachable from the web tier, and the database servers should not have any public IP addresses and should be isolated. Which subnet design meets these requirements?

A company deploys a stateless web application across two AWS Availability Zones behind a load balancer. This design primarily improves which characteristic?

A cloud engineer is configuring object storage for a media company that stores video archives accessed a few times per year but must retain them for seven years for compliance. Retrieval latency of several hours is acceptable, and cost must be minimized. Which storage tier characteristic should the engineer select?

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

A company wants to migrate its on-premises virtualized workloads to the cloud while maintaining control over the operating system and middleware. Which cloud service model should they choose?

A company is designing a hybrid cloud architecture connecting their on-premises data center to AWS. Which TWO options provide dedicated, private network connectivity? (Select TWO.)

A cloud engineer is designing a storage solution for a high-performance database that requires consistent low-latency access to block-level storage. The database runs on a single virtual machine and must support frequent random read/write operations. Which storage type should the engineer choose?

An e-commerce application experiences variable traffic with sudden spikes during flash sales. The application is designed to be stateless. Which scaling approach should the cloud architect implement to handle these spikes efficiently?

Which cloud service model provides the customer with the most control over the operating system and applications?

A cloud engineer is designing a solution for a financial application that requires strict data residency in a specific country. The application must also be highly available across multiple data centers within that country. Which design consideration is most critical?

Which cloud service model provides the customer with the ability to deploy and manage custom applications without managing the underlying operating system or runtime environment?

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

A cloud architect is designing a system that requires a durable, highly available object storage solution for storing backups and media files. The data must be accessible from anywhere via HTTP/HTTPS. Which AWS service should be used?

A cloud architect is designing a highly available two-tier web application. The database tier must remain available if a single Availability Zone fails. Which TWO design decisions should the architect make? (Choose two.)

A cloud architect is designing a multi-tier application that must be resilient to the failure of a single availability zone. The application consists of a web tier, an application tier, and a database tier. Which TWO design decisions will help achieve this resilience? (Choose two.)

An organization needs to recover its critical database within 15 minutes and lose at most 1 minute of data. Which configuration meets these requirements?

A company wants to ensure fault tolerance for a critical application by deploying across multiple availability zones. Which THREE design decisions contribute to fault tolerance? (Select THREE.)

A company hosts a web application on AWS and wants to improve latency for global users. Which service should they use to cache static content at edge locations?

A cloud architect is designing a solution that must automatically provision and configure compute, storage, and networking resources in a repeatable manner across multiple cloud providers. The solution must minimize manual intervention and ensure consistent configurations. Which approach best meets these requirements?

A company is using a PaaS offering to host a web application. Which THREE management responsibilities are retained by the customer? (Select THREE.)

A cloud architect is evaluating a multi-cloud strategy to improve resilience. Which THREE factors should be considered when designing multi-cloud architecture? (Select THREE.)

A cloud engineer is deploying a containerized microservices application on Google Kubernetes Engine. The team wants each pod to authenticate to Google Cloud APIs without embedding long-lived service account keys, and they want per-workload identity that can be granted least-privilege IAM roles. Which approach should the engineer implement?

A company wants to migrate its on-premises workload to the cloud and needs to maintain full control over the operating system, middleware, and applications. Which cloud service model should the company choose?

A cloud engineer is deploying a new web application on Google Cloud. The application must be reachable from the internet on HTTP and HTTPS, and the engineer wants Google's global edge network to terminate TLS and route users to the closest healthy backend. The backend instances should not be directly exposed to the internet. Which Google Cloud service should the engineer use?

A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to the cloud. The application currently runs on a single server with 16 vCPUs and 64 GB RAM. The cloud architect recommends redesigning the application to be stateless and horizontally scalable. What is the primary benefit of this approach?

A company is experiencing increased traffic to its web application. They want to handle the load by adding more web server instances behind a load balancer. This approach is known as:

A cloud architect is designing a highly available web application. The application must remain available even if an entire AWS Availability Zone fails. The architect decides to deploy identical application instances in two separate Availability Zones and distribute traffic equally. Which architecture is being implemented?

A company is designing a VPC in AWS. They need to host a web application with a public-facing load balancer, web servers in private subnets, and a database in a separate private subnet. Which network architecture is most secure and aligns with best practices?

A company wants to migrate a stateful application to the cloud but needs to ensure it can scale horizontally. What architectural change is required?

A cloud architect is designing a VPC with multiple tiers. The web servers must be accessible from the internet, but the database servers must not be directly accessible. Which subnet design should the architect implement?

An organization wants to minimize costs for a batch processing workload that runs nightly for 2 hours and can tolerate interruptions. Which pricing model is most cost-effective?

A company wants to reduce cloud costs for a stateless batch processing workload that runs nightly for about 3 hours. The workload can tolerate interruptions. Which pricing model is most cost-effective?

An organization runs a batch processing job that runs for 2 hours every night. The job can tolerate interruptions and can resume from the last checkpoint. Which cloud purchasing option minimizes cost?

A cloud architect is designing a disaster recovery strategy for a critical application with a Recovery Time Objective of 15 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective of 5 minutes. The secondary Region must be able to take over with minimal manual effort. Which strategy should the architect implement?

A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to AWS. The application requires a relational database and must support read-heavy workloads with minimal latency for users across North America and Europe. The database must be highly available and provide automatic failover. Which AWS database solution should the architect recommend?

A cloud architect is designing a containerized microservices application that must handle unpredictable traffic spikes and scale rapidly. The architect wants to minimize operational overhead while ensuring high availability across multiple Availability Zones. Which solution best meets these requirements?

A cloud administrator is deploying a web application on Azure. The application requires a shared, highly available file storage that can be mounted simultaneously by multiple virtual machines across different availability zones. Which Azure storage solution should the administrator choose?

A financial services firm is moving a regulated trading application to a public cloud. The security team must prove that data is encrypted in transit between the application tier and the database tier, and that only the application tier can reach the database port. Which two controls should the cloud architect implement? (Choose two.)

A startup wants to run code in response to events without provisioning or managing servers. Which cloud service model should they use?

A company wants to migrate its on-premises workloads to the cloud and requires full control over the operating system, installed software, and security configurations. Which cloud service model should they choose?

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

A cloud architect is designing a highly available application on AWS. The application must be fault-tolerant and able to withstand the failure of an entire Availability Zone. Which TWO actions should the architect take? (Select TWO.)

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

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

A cloud architect is designing a new application that must be highly available across multiple geographic regions. The application uses a relational database that must be writable in the primary region and readable in a secondary region with minimal replication lag. Which AWS database feature should the architect implement to meet these requirements?

A company is deploying a global web application that serves static content (images, CSS, JavaScript) to users worldwide. They want to reduce latency and offload traffic from the origin servers. Which service should they implement?

A cloud architect is designing a multi-tier application on a public cloud. The application must be highly available and fault-tolerant within a single region. Which three items should be included in the architecture? (Select THREE.)

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

Which of the following storage types is most suitable for hosting a shared file system that multiple virtual machines need to access concurrently using NFS?

A cloud architect is designing a system that must durably store an unlimited amount of unstructured data, such as images and videos, with 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability. The data will be accessed infrequently, but when accessed, it must be available within milliseconds. The architect wants the most cost-effective storage class for this access pattern. Which Amazon S3 storage class should the architect choose?

A company runs a stateless web application on AWS EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. To reduce costs, they want to use the most cost-effective compute option that can handle variable traffic and be interrupted. Which pricing model should they use for the EC2 instances?

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

Which cloud service model provides the customer with the most control over the operating system and software stack?

A cloud architect is designing a shared file system for a machine learning cluster where multiple Linux virtual machines must read and write the same training data concurrently with POSIX semantics. The workload runs for several weeks and needs high aggregate throughput. Which storage solution should the architect select?

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

A cloud architect is designing a highly available three-tier application on AWS. The web tier must survive the loss of a single Availability Zone, and the database tier must support automatic failover with minimal administrative intervention. Which TWO design decisions should the architect implement? (Choose two.)

A company uses AWS and Azure for redundancy. They deploy the same application on both clouds to avoid vendor lock-in and improve disaster recovery. Which cloud deployment model is this?

Which storage type is most appropriate for a shared file system that multiple virtual machines need to mount simultaneously with read/write access?

A cloud administrator is deploying a microservices application on Kubernetes in a public cloud. The services must be able to discover each other dynamically and route traffic without hardcoded IP addresses. Which Kubernetes resource should the administrator use to provide a stable network endpoint for a set of pods?

A company is designing a highly available architecture for a critical application. The solution must tolerate the failure of an entire availability zone. Which TWO design principles should be implemented? (Choose two.)

A media company stores finished video masters in Amazon S3. Regulators require that each master be retained unaltered for exactly seven years, and that no user, including the root account, be able to delete or overwrite it during that period. Which S3 capability should the administrator implement?

Which cloud service model gives the customer the most control over the operating system and applications, while the provider manages the physical hardware, network, and storage?

A company decides to use AWS for compute and Azure for storage to leverage best-of-breed services. This is an example of which cloud deployment model?

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

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

A cloud architect is designing a highly available web application on AWS. The application must continue serving traffic even if an entire AWS Availability Zone fails. Which architecture should the architect implement?

A company uses Azure and wants to connect its on-premises data center to Azure with a dedicated, private, and high-bandwidth connection. Which service should the company use?

An organization needs to connect its on-premises data center to a public cloud with a dedicated, low-latency, and consistent network connection. Which connectivity option should they use?

A company is designing stateless application tiers to support horizontal scaling. Which TWO design principles support statelessness? (Select TWO.)

Which cloud deployment model connects an on-premises data center to a public cloud using VPN or dedicated connections like AWS Direct Connect?

A company is deploying a web application on Google Cloud that requires low-latency access to static content (images, CSS) for global users. The application also needs to handle SSL termination to reduce load on backend instances. Which TWO services should the architect use? (Select TWO.)

A cloud architect is selecting a storage solution for a database that requires low-latency reads and writes. The database will run on a single VM and must support consistent performance. Which storage type is most appropriate?

A cloud architect is designing a solution to store and retrieve large volumes of unstructured data for a media company. The data must be highly durable, available, and accessible from multiple AWS Regions with low latency. The company also wants to minimize costs for data that is infrequently accessed but must be retained for years. Which AWS service and feature combination should the architect use?

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

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

A cloud architect is designing a containerized microservices platform for a retail company. The company requires that individual services scale independently, that failed containers be replaced automatically without manual intervention, and that the platform abstract away the underlying compute hosts. The operations team has limited experience with cluster management. Which cloud-native orchestration approach BEST meets these requirements?

A cloud engineer is sizing a relational database for an application with unpredictable read volume that spikes sharply during business hours. The database must scale read capacity without downtime and without changing the application's connection string. Which approach should the engineer use?

A cloud architect is designing a landing zone in AWS Organizations. The security team mandates that all member accounts must centrally log API activity and that individual account administrators must not be able to disable or alter the log destination. The architect needs to enforce this across every current and future account with minimal operational overhead. Which combination of actions should the architect take?

An organization is designing a VPC with public and private subnets. The web servers must be accessible from the internet, but database servers must not. The architecture also requires high availability across two Availability Zones. What is the minimum number of public subnets and private subnets needed?

Which cloud deployment model involves using services from multiple public cloud providers to avoid vendor lock-in and leverage best-of-breed solutions?

A company wants to minimize cloud costs for a batch processing job that runs for a few hours each night and can be interrupted. Which pricing model is most appropriate?

A cloud engineer is deploying a stateful application on Amazon EC2 that requires a persistent block storage volume with the highest possible IOPS and lowest latency for a database. The database will run on a single instance in one Availability Zone, and the engineer needs to choose the appropriate Amazon EBS volume type. Which volume type should the engineer select?

A company is deploying a global web application and wants to reduce latency for users around the world. The application serves static content (images, CSS) and dynamic API responses. Which combination of services should the architect use?

A cloud architect is designing a globally distributed application on Google Cloud. The application must serve users from the closest possible point of presence with minimal latency while using a single anycast IP address. Which load balancing solution should the architect choose?

A company is migrating a legacy application to AWS. The application requires a shared file system that can be mounted on multiple Linux-based EC2 instances simultaneously. The file system must be highly available and scalable, and it must support POSIX permissions. Which AWS service should be used?

A company uses Azure and needs shared file storage accessible from multiple Linux VMs using standard file sharing protocols. Which storage type should they choose?

An organization needs to store archival data for 7 years to meet compliance requirements. The data is rarely accessed, and retrieval time is not critical. Which cloud storage type is most cost-effective?

A company is designing a hybrid cloud storage solution. Which TWO storage services are suitable for a shared file system accessible from both on-premises and cloud VMs? (Select TWO.)

A cloud administrator is designing a backup strategy for a critical database. The recovery point objective (RPO) is 15 minutes, and the recovery time objective (RTO) is 1 hour. Which backup approach BEST meets these objectives?

A company is designing a disaster recovery plan for its critical application. The application must be recovered within 4 hours (RTO) and can tolerate up to 1 hour of data loss (RPO). Which replication strategy is most cost-effective?

A company is designing an auto-scaling solution for a stateless application. Which TWO features are essential for the application to scale horizontally without issues? (Select TWO.)

A cloud administrator needs to provide a shared file system that can be accessed by multiple Linux-based virtual machines in the same VPC. Which storage type should be used?

A cloud administrator is optimizing costs for a batch processing workload that runs nightly for 2 hours. The workload can tolerate interruptions. Which THREE purchasing options should the administrator consider? (Choose three.)

A financial services firm requires a cloud deployment that keeps sensitive customer data on-premises while bursting compute-intensive risk analysis workloads to a public cloud during peak times. Which deployment model best meets this requirement?

A cloud engineer is designing a VPC for a web application that requires a public subnet for a load balancer and a private subnet for application servers. The application servers must access the internet for software updates without being directly accessible from the internet. Which configuration should the engineer implement?

A cloud architect is deploying a web application across multiple availability zones within a single region to achieve high availability. The application requires that if one availability zone fails, traffic should automatically be rerouted to the remaining zones without manual intervention. Which configuration is required?

A cloud engineer is designing a disaster recovery strategy for a critical application hosted on Azure. The application uses a SQL Database and must be able to fail over to a secondary region with minimal data loss. The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is 5 minutes and the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is 15 minutes. The engineer needs a solution that automatically replicates data and provides a connection endpoint that remains constant during failover. Which Azure feature should be implemented?

A company is selecting a cloud deployment model. They require the ability to keep sensitive data on-premises due to regulatory compliance, but want to leverage cloud resources for burst computing capacity. Which THREE characteristics describe this model?

A company runs a stateful application that maintains session data in memory on the server. The application experiences performance issues during traffic spikes. Which design change would best improve scalability?

A cloud engineer is designing a VPC in AWS for a three-tier web application. The web servers must be accessible from the internet, the application servers should only be accessible from the web servers, and the database servers should only be accessible from the application servers. What is the most secure VPC design?

A cloud engineer is designing a serverless application that processes messages from an Amazon SQS queue. The application must scale automatically based on the number of messages in the queue and must handle failures gracefully by retrying failed messages. Which AWS service should the engineer use to run the application code?

A cloud architect is designing a highly available architecture on AWS for a web application that must survive the failure of an entire Availability Zone. The application uses an Application Load Balancer, web servers, and an Amazon RDS database. Which TWO design actions should the architect take? (Choose two.)

A cloud engineer is optimizing costs for a data analytics workload that runs periodically. The workload processes large datasets stored in Amazon S3 and runs on EC2 instances. Which THREE strategies should the engineer consider to reduce costs? (Select THREE.)

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

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

Which cloud deployment model involves connecting an on-premises data center to a public cloud provider using a VPN or dedicated connection?

A company runs a customer-facing web application on Azure virtual machines. During a regional outage, the operations team needs to bring up the same environment in a secondary Azure region. The team wants an automated, repeatable deployment that includes virtual networks, load balancers, and VM configurations. Which Azure capability should the team use to meet this goal?

A cloud architect is designing a disaster recovery strategy for a mission-critical application hosted in a single cloud region. The business requires that the application survive the loss of an entire region and that failover be largely automated with minimal data loss. The budget permits a warm standby environment. Which TWO design elements should the architect include to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

A company runs a production application on multiple cloud regions for high availability. They want to minimize latency for global users. Which DNS routing policy should they use?

A company wants to migrate its on-premises workloads to the cloud while maintaining the ability to run some sensitive applications on-premises. Which cloud deployment model best meets this requirement?

A cloud administrator is deploying a new three-tier application on Google Cloud. The web tier must be accessible from the internet, the application tier must only accept traffic from the web tier, and the database tier must only accept traffic from the application tier. The administrator needs to implement network security controls to enforce these requirements. Which two Google Cloud features should be used? (Choose two.)

A company needs to connect its on-premises data center to a public cloud provider with a dedicated, consistent network connection that bypasses the internet. Which connectivity method should be used?