You are a solutions architect for an online gambling company. You notice a series of web-layer DDoS attacks. This is coming from a large number of multiple IP addresses. In order to mitigate these web-layer DDoS attacks, you have been asked to implement a rule capable of blocking all IPs that have more than 2,000 requests in the last 5 minute interval. What should you do?

You work for a large chip manufacturer in Taiwan who has a large dedicated cluster running MongoDB. Unfortunately, they have a large period of downtime and would now like to migrate their MongoDB instance to the AWS cloud. They do not want to make any changes to their application architecture. What AWS service would you recommend to use for MongoDB?

You have a large number of files in S3 and you have been asked to build an index of these files. In order to do this, you need to read the the first 250 bytes of each object in S3. This data contains some metadata about the content of the file itself. Unfortunately, there are over 10,000,000 files in your S3 bucket, and this is about 100 TB of data. The data will then need to be stored in an Aurora Database. How can you build this index in the fastest way possible?

Your website is an online store, and it has sporadic and unpredictable transactional workloads throughout the day and night that are very hard to predict. The website is currently being hosted at your corporate data center and needs to be migrated to AWS. A new relational database is required that autoscales capacity to meet these peaks as well as being able to scale back when not being used. Which database technology would be best suited for your website?

Janelle works as a cloud solutions architect for a large enterprise that has begun the process of migrating to AWS for all of their application needs. The CTO and CISO have already decided that AWS Organizations is a required service for the multi-account environment that will be put into place. Janelle has been brought in to help solve the primary concern of member AWS accounts not following the required compliance rules set forth by the company. They want to both send alerts on configuration changes and prevent specific actions from occurring. Which solution would be the most efficient in solving this projected problem?

A Fintech startup has a small application that receives intermittent and random traffic. At some points, it may not receive any traffic at all; at other times, it might receive tens of thousand of queries at once. You need to rearchitect the application for the AWS cloud using a relational database. What database technology would best suit your needs while keeping costs at a minimum?

You have a web application that is hosted on a series of EC2 instances that have an Application Load Balancer in front of them. You have created a new CloudFront distribution. You then set up its origin to point to your ALB. You need to provide access to hundreds of private files served by your CloudFront distribution. What should you use?

A financial institution has begun using AWS services and plans to migrate as much of their IT infrastructure and applications to AWS as possible. The nature of the business dictates that strict compliance practices be in place. The AWS team has configured AWS CloudTrail to help meet compliance requirements and be ready for any upcoming audits. Which item is not a feature of AWS CloudTrail?

You work at a mortgage brokerage firm in New York City. An intern has recently joined the company and you discover that they have been storing customer data in public S3 buckets. Because the company uses so many different S3 buckets, you need to identify a quick and efficient way to discover what personally identifiable information (PII) is being stored in S3. Which AWS service should you use?

You work for a small startup that has a shoestring budget. You accidentally leave a large EC2 instance running over a few days and are hit with a huge bill. You need to prevent this from happening in the future. What should you do?

You have a custom VPC hosted in the AWS cloud that contains your secure web application. During routine analysis, you notice some port scans coming in from unrecognizable IP addresses. You are suspicious, and decide to block these IP addresses for the next 48 hours. What is the best way to achieve this?

You need to design a stateless web application tier. Which of the following would NOT help you achieve this?

You need to be able to perform vulnerability scans on your large fleet of EC2 instances. Which AWS service should you choose?

You work for a popular streaming service that runs its NoSQL backend in-house on large Cassandra clusters. You recently had a major outage and realize you need to migrate your Cassandra workload on to something more reliable, such as the AWS Cloud. You do a cost analysis and realize that, in the long run, this will probably save the company a lot of overhead fees. You need to select a Cassandra-compatible service on which to run your workloads. Which service should you select?

You work for a pharmaceutical company that recently had a major outage due to a sophisticated DDoS attack. They need you to implement DDoS mitigation to prevent this from happening again. They require you to have near real-time visibility into attacks, as well as 24/7 access to a dedicated team who can help mitigate this in the future. Which AWS service should you recommend?

A web analytics company is receiving both structured and semi-structured data from a large number of different sources each day. The developers plan on using big data processing frameworks to analyze the data and access it using Business Intelligence (BI) tools and SQL queries. Which of the following provides the best high-performing solution?

You have an online store and you are preparing for the week before Christmas, which is your busiest period of the year. You estimate that your traffic will increase by 50% during this period. Your website is using an SQS standard queue, and you're running a fleet of EC2 instances configured in an Auto Scaling group which then consumes the SQS messages. What should you do to prepare your SQS queue for the 50% increase in traffic?

You work for an automotive company that has a small estate on AWS, but the majority of their assets are hosted in-house at their own data center. They are now looking to save money by moving more and more real estate to AWS and have started creating multiple AWS accounts in the same Region. As part of their expansion strategy, they plan to deploy multiple VPCs across these AWS accounts. They currently have one Direct Connect connection installed between their on-premises data center and AWS. Now that they have multiple production accounts and a growing number of VPCs, they will need to connect these to the on-premises data center using a dedicated connection. What is the most cost-effective way of doing this?

You work for a startup that has recently been acquired by a large insurance company. As per the insurance company's internal security controls, you need to be able to monitor and record all API calls made in your AWS infrastructure. What AWS service should you use to achieve this?

You host a healthcare-related web application in AWS behind an Application Load Balancer and Auto Scaling group. Recent budget cuts mean you have to see if you can find a way to cut costs while still maintaining performance. Your boss is concerned about over-provisioning resources when an Auto Scaling event occurs. Which dynamic scaling policy should be used to prevent this?

You work for a government agency who are migrating their production environment to AWS from on-premises. They want you to create a serverless solution that is high-performing and scales effortlessly. They have a web frontend, a MongoDB No-SQL backend, and large amounts of static files such as pictures and images. What would be the ideal serverless solution from the choices below?

You have developed an AI-powered app that is used to predict the prices of cryptocurrency in real time. The app requires low latency and high throughput storage performance for processing training sets. You need to archive the completed processed training sets on storage that is as cost effective as possible, but can still maintain immediate access. What two storage solutions should you use?

(Choose2)

A recent audit of IT services deployed within many of the AWS Organization member accounts in your company has caused numerous remediation tasks for the SecOps team, as well as the member account owners. Post-remediation efforts, the CISO has asked you to identify a solution within AWS for preventing this from repeating. They would like you to instead find a way to allow end users in the accounts to deploy preapproved services within AWS to avoid them accidentally using the offending services. Which of the following is the optimal approach for this solution?

You work for an online bank that is migrating a customer portal to AWS. Because of the legislative requirements, you need a threat detection service that continuously monitors your AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity and delivers detailed security findings for visibility and remediation. Which service should you use?

You run an online platform that specializes in five different dream vacations. The platform allows customers to submit queries about their five different experiences. You need to ensure that all queries are answered within 24 hours, either by a person or by a bot. You decide to create five separate SQS queues for each experience request. You need to automatically publish messages to their respective SQS queues as soon as customers submit their queries. Which architecture would be best suited to achieve this?

You are planning to migrate a complex big data application to AWS using EC2. The application requires complex software to be installed, which typically takes a couple of hours. You need this application to be behind an Auto Scaling group so that it can react in a scaling event. How do you recommend speeding up the installation process when there's a scale-out event?

You are a solutions architect working for a biotech company that has a large private cloud deployment using VMware. You have been tasked to setup their disaster recovery solution on AWS. What is the simplest way to achieve this?

A pharmaceutical company has created a hybrid cloud that connects their on-premises data center and cloud infrastructure in AWS. They need to back up their storage to AWS. The backups must be stored and retrieved from AWS using the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. The backups must be immediately accessible within minutes for three months. What is the best solution?

Your company has a local content management system (CMS) using Microsoft Sharepoint that is hosted on-premises. Due to a recent acquisition of another company, you expect traffic to the CMS to more than double in the coming week, so you have decided to migrate the SharePoint server to AWS. You need high performance using Windows shared file storage. You also need a high-performing cloud storage solution that is highly available and that can be integrated with Active Directory. What would be the best storage option?

You have landed a job with a major insurance firm that is moving their AWS estate to the cloud. They use artificial intelligence and machine learning using custom models built via Jupyter notebooks. Your boss would like to do the Jupyter Notebook development in the AWS Cloud from now on. Which AWS service would allow you to do this?

You start work for a government agency that is creating a new intranet for internal employees. The department has a sprawl of information across multiple AWS accounts and services, and you need to find a way to make this information searchable. Which AWS service should you consider using?

You work for a large advertising company that is moving its videos and photos to AWS. The size of the migration is 70 terabytes, and it needs to be completed as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. What is the best way to achieve this?

You work for a private library that is digitizing its collection of ancient books. The library wants to store scans of each book in the cloud at the cheapest rate possible. The files will be accessed only occasionally, but will need to be retrieved instantly. What is the most cost-effective way to achieve this?

You manage 12 EC2 instances and you need to have a central file repository that these EC2 instances can access. What would be the best possible solutions for this?

(Choose2)

You want to migrate an on-premises Couchbase NoSQL database to AWS. You need this to be as resilient as possible and you want to minimize any management of servers. Preferably, you'd like to go serverless. Which database should you choose?

A junior intern just started working at your company. During the course of the day, they accidentally delete a critical encryption key that you had stored securely in S3. You need to prevent this from happening in the future. Which two steps should you take to prevent this from happening again in the future?

(Choose2)

As a car manufacturing enterprise, you're using Amazon RDS to store data from a web-based application. The application typically experiences low RDS usage. However, sporadic bursts of high, ready-heavy traffic to RDS will occur in response to the launch of new marketing campaigns. Additionally, you're tasked with developing an API that allows third-party database queries. Given these conditions, which architecture would be most optimal?

You have a serverless image-sharing website that utilizes S3 to store high-quality images. Unfortunately, your competitors start linking to your website and borrowing your photos. How can you best prevent unauthorized access?

You have an image sharing website that sits on EC2 and uses EBS as the backend storage. Unfortunately, you keep running out of space and you are forced to mount additional EBS volumes. Your boss asks if there are any other services on AWS you can use to store images or videos. What service would you suggest?

You run a popular online store that specializes in Christmas decorations. You are about to enter the Christmas period and the traffic to your website is expected to increase by 10x. Your website uses API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB on the background. Last year during the sale, you got the following exception from DynamoDB: ProvisionedThroughputExceededException. You need to prevent this from happening again this year. What would you do to prevent this?

You have a secure web application hosted on AWS using Application Load Balancers, Auto Scaling, and a fleet of EC2 instances connected to an RDS database. You need to ensure that your RDS database can only be accessed using the profile credentials specific to your EC2 instances (via an authentication token). How can you achieve this?

You are a database administrator working for a small start up that has just secured Venture Capital (VC) funding. As part of the new investment the VC’s have asked you to ensure that your application has minimum downtime. Currently, your backend is hosted on a dedicated cluster running MongoDB. You spend a lot of time managing the cluster, configuring backups, and trying to ensure there is no downtime. You would like to migrate your MongoDB database to the AWS cloud. What service should you use for your backend database, assuming you don’t want to make any changes to your database and application?

You are migrating your automotive company's customer-facing systems to AWS. One of the backend systems requires a database that is scalable globally and that can handle frequent updates to the database schema. You need to ensure there is no downtime or performance issues every time there is a schema change. You always require low-latency responses to high-traffic queries. What database would best suit this requirement?

A small biotech company has finalized their decision to begin deploying their application to the AWS cloud. They expect to have a handful of AWS accounts to begin with, but expect to grow to over 100 by the end of the year. The security engineer on the project has stressed that they want to have a centralized method of storing AWS CloudTrail logs for all accounts and alert on any notifications regarding compliance violations with AWS services in the member accounts. What solution would be the best fit for this scenario?

You work for an insurance company that stores a lot of confidential medical data. They are migrating to AWS and have an encryption requirement where you need to manage the hardware security modules (HSMs) that generate and store the encryption keys. You also create the symmetric keys and asymmetric key pairs that the HSM stores. Which AWS service should you use to meet these requirements?

You work for a large investment bank that is migrating its applications to the cloud. The bank is developing a custom fraud detection system using Python in Jupyter Notebook. They then build and train their models and put them into production. They want to migrate to the AWS Cloud and are looking for a service that would meet these requirements. Which AWS service would you recommend they use?

You work for an insurance company that uses an AWS web application to look up customers' credit scores. For security purposes, this web application cannot traverse the internet or leave the Amazon network. It needs to communicate to Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon S3 in a custom VPC. What networking technology should you implement to achieve this?

You work for a Fintech company that is migrating its application to AWS. You have a small team of six developers who need varying levels of access to the AWS platform. Using IAM, what is the most secure way to achieve this?

You have a steady application serving around 3,000 customers that needs to be migrated to AWS. Based on historical data, traffic and usage has not grown very much in the past 24 months and you expect the application to remain steady for the next 3 years. You need to run the application on EC2. What is the most cost-effective EC2 instance type to use?

You host a web application on Amazon EC2 that contains a large number of files that are infrequently accessed. Currently, the files are hosted on provisioned IOPS; however, due to budget cuts, your manager asks you to move the files to a more cost-effective solution. What storage solution should you choose?

You work for a Fintech company that is launching a new cryptocurrency trading platform hosted on AWS. Because of the nature of the cryptocurrency industry, you have been asked to implement a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) service that performs security best practice checks, aggregates alerts, and enables automated remediation. Which AWS service would meet this requirement?

You have started a network design for a large pharmaceutical company to migrate their on-premises environment to AWS. The network will be highly complex with over 1,000 VPCs (all of which will need to communicate to each other) as well as having transitive peering between some on-premises data centers while all supporting IP Multicast. What VPC Network Solution should you recommend?

You are working as a Solutions Architect for an online travel company. Your application is going to use an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances but you need to have some decoupling to store messages because of high volume. Which AWS service can be added to the solution to meet this requirement?

You work for an insurance company that has just been merged with two other insurance companies. All companies have production workloads on AWS using multiple AWS accounts. Which of the following is something you could recommend to your boss to immediately start saving money?

You are database administrator for a security company using a large graph database used to build graph queries for near real-time identity fraud pattern detection in financial and purchase transactions. You recently experienced an outage and you want to migrate this database to somewhere more secure and stable such as AWS. What AWS service would you recommend to the business to handle graph queries?

You are working for a small startup that wants to design a content management system (CMS). The company wants to architect the CMS so that the company only incurs a charge when someone tries to access their content. They want to try and keep costs as low as possible and remain in the AWS Free Tier if possible. Which of the following options is the most cost-effective architecture?

A small startup is beginning to configure IAM for their organization. The user logins have been created and now the focus will shift to the permissions to grant to those users. An admin starts creating identity-based policies. To which item can an identity-based policy not be attached?

You have been tasked with designing a strategy for backing up EBS volumes attached to an instance-store-backed EC2 instance. You have been asked for an executive summary on your design, and the executive summary should include an answer to the question, “What can an EBS volume do when snapshotting the volume is in progress”?

You have launched an EC2 instance that will host a PHP application. You install all the required software such as PHP and MySQL. You make a note of the EC2 public IPv4 address and then you stop and restart your EC2 instance. You notice that after the restart, you can't access the EC2 instance and that the instance's public IPv4 has been changed. What should you do to make sure your IPv4 address does not change?

You use AWS Route53 as your DNS service and you have updated your domain, hello.acloud.guru, to point to a new Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). However, when you check the update it looks like users are still redirected to the old ELB. What could be the problem?

A large fintech company is using a web application that stores its data on Amazon RDS. As a solutions architect, you have been asked to upgrade the web application so that users around the world can access it using an API. The application will need to be able to handle large bursts of traffic in seconds from time to time. What would an ideal solution look like?

You are a solutions architect at an insurance company. Someone on a previous shift has deployed an EC2 instance using a bootstrap script. However, the EC2 instance does not have the required software installed on it. You do not have access to the bootstrap script that they used. However, you do have admin access to the EC2 instance that was provisioned. How can you review the bootstrap script used to deploy the EC2 instance?

What is the most cost-effective architecture for a front-facing website, assuming a peak load of 500 users per hour will be accessing the site?

Your company has a small web application hosted on an EC2 instance. The application has just been deployed but no one is able to connect to the web application from a browser. You had recently ssh’d into this EC2 instance to perform a small update, but you also cannot browse to the application from Google Chrome. You have checked and there is an internet gateway attached to the VPC and a route in the route table to the internet gateway. Which situation most likely exists?