Your company has performed a Disaster Recovery drill which failed to meet the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) desired by executive management. The failure was due in large part to the amount of time taken to restore proper functioning on the database side. You have given management a recommendation of implementing synchronous data replication for the RDS database to help meet the RTO. Which of these options can perform synchronous data replication in RDS?

You work for an advertising company that has a real-time bidding application. You are also using CloudFront on the front end to accommodate a worldwide user base. Your users begin complaining about response times and pauses in real-time bidding. What is the best service that can be used to reduce DynamoDB response times by an order of magnitude (milliseconds to microseconds)?

You work for a large healthcare provider as an AWS lead architect. There is a need to collect data in real-time from devices throughout the organization. The data will include log and event data from sources such as servers, desktops, and mobile devices. The data initially captured will be technical device data, but the goal is to expand the effort to collecting clinical data in real-time from handheld devices used by nurses and doctors. Which AWS service best meets this requirement?

A new startup is considering the advantages of using Amazon DynamoDB versus a traditional relational database in AWS RDS. The NoSQL nature of DynamoDB presents a small learning curve to the team members who all have experience with traditional databases. The company will have multiple databases, and the decision will be made on a case-by-case basis. Which of the following use cases would favor Amazon DynamoDB?

(Choose3)

After an IT Steering Committee meeting, you have been put in charge of configuring a hybrid environment for the company’s compute resources. You weigh the pros and cons of various technologies, such as VPN and Direct Connect, and based on the requirements you have decided to configure a VPN connection. What features and advantages can a VPN connection provide?

You are designing a new application for a social media gaming company and they want to be able to use people’s facebook account to login and to sign up to the new app. They’ve asked that you use Cognito to achieve this. However, management wants to know the steps involved for user authentication. Which of the steps below is the correct order to authenticate with Cognito?

A gaming company is designing several new games which focus heavily on player-game interaction. The player makes a certain move and the game has to react very quickly to change the environment based on that move and to present the next decision for the player in real-time. A tool is needed to continuously collect data about player-game interactions and feed the data into the gaming platform in real-time. Which AWS service can best meet this need?

Currently, you are employed as a solutions architect for a large international shipping company. The company is undergoing an IT transformation and they want to create an immutable database, where they can track packages as they are sent around the world. They will need to track what boxes they go in, what trucks they are sent in, and what aircraft or sea containers they are shipped in. The database needs to be immutable and cryptographically verifiable, and they would like to leverage the AWS cloud to achieve this. What database technology would best suit this requirement?

A software company has developed a social gaming application that leverages EC2 web servers with Amazon DynamoDB to store player data, session history, and leaderboards for a huge number of concurrent users. The DynamoDB table has pre-configured read and write capacity units. Users have been reporting slowdown issues, and an analysis has revealed that the application requires response times in microseconds for optimal performance. What step can you take to enable this application to handle read-heavy or bursty workloads, while delivering the fastest possible response time for eventually consistent read operations?

A consultant is hired by a small company to configure an AWS environment. The consultant begins working with the VPC and launching EC2 instances within the VPC. The initial instances will be placed in a public subnet. The consultant begins to create security groups. The consultant has launched several instances, created security groups, and has associated security groups with instances. The consultant wants to change the security groups that are associated with the instance. Which statement is true?

A testing team is using a group of EC2 instances to run batch, automated tests on an application. The tests run overnight, but don’t take all night. The instances sit idle for long periods of time and accrue unnecessary charges. What can you do to stop these instances when they are idle for long periods?

You work for a Defense contracting company. The company develops software applications which perform intensive calculations in the area of Mechanical Engineering related to metals for ship building. You have a 3-year contract and decide to purchase reserved EC2 instances for a 3-year duration. You are informed that the particular program has been cancelled abruptly and negotiations have brought the contract to an amicable conclusion one year early. What can you do to stop incurring charges and save money on the EC2 instances?

The AWS team in a large company is spending a lot of time monitoring EC2 instances and maintenance when the instances report health check failures. How can you most efficiently automate this monitoring and repair?

You are working for a large financial institution and preparing for disaster recovery and upcoming DR drills. A key component in the DR plan will be the database instances and their data. An aggressive Recovery Time Objective (RTO) dictates that the database needs to be synchronously replicated. Which configuration can meet this requirement?

You work for an Australian company, who are currently being audited and need some compliance reports regarding your applications that are hosted on AWS. Specifically, they need a Australian Hosting Certification Framework - Strategic Certification certificate. You need to get this as quickly as possible. What should you do?

You are designing an architecture that will house an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances. The application hosted on the instances is expected to be extremely popular. Forecasts for traffic to this site predict very high traffic, and you will need a load balancer to handle tens of millions of requests per second while maintaining high throughput at ultra-low latency. You need to select the correct type of load balancer to front your Auto Scaling group to meet this high traffic requirement. Which load balancer should you select?

Your company needs to deploy an application in the company AWS account. The application will reside on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling Group fronted by an Application Load Balancer. The company has been using Elastic Beanstalk to deploy the application due to limited AWS experience within the organization. The application now needs upgrades and a small team of subcontractors have been hired to perform these upgrades. Which web service can be used to provide users that you authenticate with short-term security credentials that can control access to your AWS resources?

After being assigned to oversee the data storage within your organization, you begin looking at the monthly billing for S3. You notice that large amounts of data are sitting in S3, and after discussions with team members you find that a large amount of the data is historical data that needs to be kept for audit purposes. You detail the cost savings and get approval to move this data to Amazon Glacier for long-term storage. For what types of data is Glacier best suited?

(Choose2)

You have just started working at a company that is migrating from a physical data center into AWS. Currently, you have 25 TB of data that needs to be moved to an S3 bucket. Your company has just finished setting up a 1 GB Direct Connect drop, but you will not have a VPN up and running for 30 days. This data needs to be encrypted during transit and at rest and must be uploaded to the S3 bucket within 21 days. What is the best way to meet these requirements?

Your company has gotten back results from an audit. One of the mandates from the audit is that your application, which is hosted on EC2, must encrypt the data before writing this data to storage. It has been directed internally that you must have the ability to manage dedicated hardware security module instances to generate and store your encryption keys. Which service could you use to meet this requirement?

Jennifer is a cloud engineer for her application team. The application leverages several third-party SaaS vendors to complete their workflows within the application. Currently, the team uses numerous AWS Lambda functions for each SaaS vendor that run daily to connect to the configured vendor. The functions initiate a transfer of data files, ranging from one megabyte up to 80 gibibytes in size. These data files are stored in an Amazon S3 bucket and then referenced by the application itself. The data transfer routinely fails due to execution timeout limits in the Lambda functions, and the team wants to find a simpler and less error-prone way of transferring the required data. Which solution or AWS service could be the best fit for their solution?

A company has created a mobile application that is hugely popular. The initial plan was to give each user login credentials to the application. But due to the volume of users, this idea has become impractical. What service can you use to allow outside users to login through a third party such as Facebook, Amazon, Google or Apple?

A new startup company decides to use AWS to host their web application. They configure a VPC as well as two subnets within the VPC. They also attach an internet gateway to the VPC. In the first subnet, they create the EC2 instance which will host their web application. They finish the configuration by making the application accessible from the Internet. The second subnet hosts their database and they don’t want the database accessible from the Internet. Which statement best describes this scenario?

You are evaluating the security setting within the main company VPC. There are several NACLs and security groups to evaluate and possibly edit. What is true regarding NACLs and security groups?

You have recently migrated your small company to AWS and are looking for some general best practice guidance within the platform. Which AWS service can help you optimize your AWS environment by giving recommendations to reduce cost, increase performance, and improve security?

A company is going to use several EC2 instances to host various reference applications. The applications are expected to receive steady and relatively low traffic. These applications are expected to run for 3 years, at which time the applications will be evaluated for upgrade. What type of EC2 will meet this requirement considering cost as an additional factor?

An application is hosted on an EC2 instance in a VPC. The instance is in a subnet in the VPC, and the instance has a public IP address. There is also an internet gateway and a security group with the proper ingress configured. But your testers are unable to access the instance from the Internet. What could be the problem?

A company needs to deploy EC2 instances to handle overnight batch processing. This includes media transcoding and some voice to text transcription. This is not high priority work, and it is OK if these batch runs get interrupted. What is the best EC2 instance purchasing option for this work?

Due to strict compliance requirements, your company cannot leverage AWS cloud for hosting their Kubernetes clusters, nor for managing the clusters. However, they do want to try to follow the established best practices and processes that the Amazon EKS service has implemented. How can your company achieve this while running entirely on-premises?

You work for a large online education company that teaches IT using pre-recorded videos. You have converted their online videos into text to be accessible for the hearing impaired. They now want to convert the transcribed text into other languages using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Which AWS service should they use?

You are managing data storage for your company, and there are many EBS volumes. Your management team has given you some new requirements. Certain metrics on the EBS volumes need to be monitored, and the database team needs to be notified by email when certain metric thresholds are exceeded. Which AWS services can be configured to meet these requirements?

(Choose2)

A financial institution has an application that produces huge amounts of actuary data, which is ultimately expected to be in the terabyte range. There is a need to run complex analytic queries against terabytes of structured data, using sophisticated query optimization, columnar storage on high-performance storage, and massively parallel query execution. Which service will best meet this requirement?

Your company has decided to migrate a SQL Server database to a newly-created AWS account. Which service can be used to migrate the database?

You are managing S3 buckets in your organization. This management of S3 extends to Amazon Glacier. For auditing purposes you would like to be informed if an object is restored to S3 from Glacier. What is the most efficient way you can do this?

You are working in a large healthcare facility which uses EBS volumes on most of the EC2 instances. The CFO has approached you about some cost savings and it has been decided that some of the EC2 instances and EBS volumes would be deleted. What step can be taken to preserve the data on the EBS volumes and keep the data available on short notice?

You have landed your dream job at Amazon and are moving to the Alexa team. You will be tasked with product design and improvement. You meet a new colleague who does not come from a tech background, and they would like to know what services make up the Alexa service. Select the correct services.

(Choose3)

Your company needs to shift an application to the cloud. You are looking for a solution to collect, process, gain immediate insight, and then transfer the application data to AWS. Part of this effort also includes moving a large data warehouse into AWS. The warehouse is 50TB, and it would take over a month to migrate the data using the current bandwidth available. What is the best option available to perform this one time migration considering both cost and performance aspects?

Your company has a multi-account AWS environment with over 100 accounts. Each account belongs to a specific application team within the company, and they all fall within the same consolidated billing family. The company has just received funding for the next two years, but they are unsure about anything beyond that. With this in mind, they plan on aggressively deploying applications to AWS during the two years.

Recently, there was a massive spike in unplanned Amazon EC2 and AWS Lambda costs, causing significant financial stress.

What can an organization administrator do to maximize savings for the entire organization for this first year?

You have been evaluating the NACLs in your company. Currently, you are looking at the default network ACL. Which statement is true about NACLs?

You are working for a startup company with a small number of employees. The company expects rapid growth and you have been assigned to configure existing users and onboard new users with IAM privileges and logins. You intend to create IAM groups for the company departments and add new users to the appropriate group when you onboard them. You begin creating policies to assign permissions and attach them to the appropriate group. What is the best practice when giving users permissions in IAM policies?

You have been evaluating the NACLs in your company. Most of the NACLs are configured the same:

100 All Traffic Allow
200 All Traffic Deny
* All Traffic Deny

If a request comes in, how will it be evaluated?

An application team has decided to leverage AWS for their application infrastructure. The application performs proprietary, internal processes that other business applications utilize for their daily workloads. It is built with Apache Kafka to handle real-time streaming, which virtual machines running the application in docker containers consume the data from. The team wants to leverage services that provide less overhead but also cause the least amount of disruption to coding and deployments. Which combination of AWS services would best meet the requirements?

(Choose2)

You have been given an assignment to configure Network ACLs in your VPC. Before configuring the NACLs, you need to understand how the NACLs are evaluated. How are NACL rules evaluated?

You have taken over management of several instances in the company AWS environment. You want to quickly review scripts used to bootstrap the instances at runtime. A URL command can be used to do this. What can you append to the URL http://169.254.169.254/latest/ to retrieve this data?

You are a solutions architect working for an online gaming company. The company wants to integrate Amazon, Facebook, and Google authentication into the application so people can use their existing social media accounts to sign up to the application. Which AWS service facilitates this?

An insurance company is creating an application that will perform analytics in near real-time on huge datasets in the terabyte range, and potentially even petabyte. The company is evaluating an AWS data storage option. Which AWS service will allow storage of petabyte-scale data and also allow fast complex queries over a large number of rows?

Your company is in the process of creating a multi-region disaster recovery solution for your database, and you have been tasked to implement it. The required RTO is 1 hour, and the RPO is 15 minutes. What steps can you take to ensure these thresholds are met?

An Application Load Balancer is fronting an Auto Scaling Group of EC2 instances, and the instances are backed by an RDS database. The Auto Scaling Group has been configured to use the Default Termination Policy. You are testing the Auto Scaling Group and have triggered a scale-in. Which instance will be terminated first?

A small startup company has multiple departments with small teams representing each department. They have hired you to configure Identity and Access Management in their AWS account. The team expects to grow rapidly, and promote from within which could mean promoted team members switching over to a new team fairly often. How can you configure IAM to prepare for this type of growth?

A Solutions Architect has been assigned the task of helping the company development optimize the performance of their web application. End users have been complaining about slow response times. The Solutions Architect has determined that improvements can be realized by adding ElastiCache to the solution. What can ElastiCache do to improve performance?

Recently, you've been experiencing issues with your dynamic application that is running on EC2 instances. These instances aren't able to keep up with the amount of traffic being sent to them, and customers are getting timeouts. Upon further investigation, there is no discernible traffic pattern for these surges. The application can be easily containerized. What can you do to fix the problem while keeping cost in mind?

A financial tech company has decided to begin migrating their applications to the AWS cloud. Currently, they host their entire application using several self-managed Kubernetes clusters. One of their major concerns during this migration is monitoring and collecting system metrics due to the very large-scale deployments that are in place. Your Chief Technology Officer wants to avoid using AWS-proprietary technology-based monitoring services and instead leverage existing, well-known, open-source applications to help meet the monitoring requirements. Which combination of the following AWS services would best fit the company requirements while minimizing operational overhead?

(Choose2)

You have been put in charge of S3 buckets for your company. The buckets are separated based on the type of data they are holding and the level of security required for that data. You have several buckets that have data you want to safeguard from accidental deletion. Which configuration will meet this requirement?

You have joined a newly formed software company as a Solutions Architect. It is a small company, and you are the only employee with AWS experience. The owner has asked for your recommendations to ensure that the AWS resources are deployed to proactively remain within budget. Which AWS service can you use to help ensure you don’t have cost overruns for your AWS resources?

Several S3 Buckets have been deleted and a few EC2 instances have been terminated. Which AWS service can you use to determine who took these actions?

Your team owns three separate AWS accounts: one for production, one for staging, and one for development. Recently, there has been a push from the CEO to begin breaking down costs to the most comprehensive, detailed level. In addition to this level of detail, the team needs to store daily comma-separated value (CSV) reports in Amazon S3 for ingestion into the company’s internal analytics tooling.

What would be the most efficient solution for this scenario?

A team of architects is designing a new AWS environment for a company which wants to migrate to the Cloud. The architects are considering the use of EC2 instances with instance store volumes. The architects realize that the data on the instance store volumes are ephemeral. Which action will not cause the data to be deleted on an instance store volume?

You have been hired as a Solutions Architect for a company that pairs photos with related story narratives in PDF format. The company needs to be able to store files in several different formats, such as PDF, JPG, PNG, Word, and several others. This storage needs to be highly durable. Which storage type will best meet this requirement?

After an IT Steering Committee meeting, you have been put in charge of configuring a hybrid environment for the company’s compute resources. You weigh the pros and cons of various technologies based on the requirements you are given. The decision you make is to go with Direct Connect. Which option best describes the features Direct Connect provides?

You work for a consulting company, which is currently undergoing both a financial and technical audit. You have been asked by the auditors to produce regular reports in regards to your PCI compliance. You need to produce this as fast and as efficiently as possible. Which AWS service should you consider using?

You have a typical architecture for an Application Load Balancer fronting an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances, backed by an RDS MySQL database. Your Application Load Balancer is performing health checks on the EC2 instances. What actions will be taken if an instance fails these health checks?

An online retailer currently runs their application within AWS. Currently, everything is running on Amazon EC2 instances, including all application software. The application is well-written and completes order processes following a specific workflow logic order. The online retailer has begun to explore shifting their entire code base to AWS Lambda for each compute-based portion of the workflow, but they are not sure how best to interconnect the functions. There are three major requirements that need to be met. The first is that they need to implement a 20-minute wait period between certain functions in the application code and process. The second is they want to be able to conditionally handle a few different known scenarios that may occur during the order processing. The last requirement is to have an auditable workflow history. Which AWS service is the best fit for their workflow orchestration needs that has the least operational overhead and is the most cost-efficient?

A data company has implemented a subscription service for storing video files. There are two levels of subscription: personal and professional use. The personal users can upload a total of 5 GB of data, and professional users can upload as much as 5 TB of data. The application can upload files of size up to 1 TB to an S3 Bucket. What is the best way to upload files of this size?

An organization of about 100 employees has performed the initial setup of users in IAM. All users except administrators have the same basic privileges. But now it has been determined that 50 employees will have extra restrictions on EC2. They will be unable to launch new instances or alter the state of existing instances. What will be the quickest way to implement these restrictions?