Home Amazon Web Services AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional – Free Practice Tests

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional – Free Practice Tests

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This AWS practice test helps you to pass the following AWS exams and can also helps you to revise the AWS concepts if you are preparing for AWS interviews.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

Below AWS practice tests has two different Modes

Learning Mode: 25 questions per test with answers and explanation, no time limit, repeat tests
Exam Mode: 75 questions per test (similar to real AWS exam), 180 minutes, repeat tests

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1. AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional – Learning Mode

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AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional - Learning Mode

1 / 25

One of your customers is a large multi-national company whose infrastructure on AWS has grown significantly over the past year. The CIO has come to you asking how the huge amount of data that is being generated can be accessed in real-time which would give them a significant edge over all of their competitors. You know that AWS can provide a range of analytics but which of the following would be best to try and accomplish this?

AWS Data Pipeline

Amazon EMR

Amazon Elasticsearch

Amazon Kinesis

Explanation

Amazon Kinesis is a fully managed service for real-time processing of streaming data at massive scale. Amazon Kinesis can continuously capture and store terabytes of data per hour from hundreds of thousands of sources such as website clickstreams, financial transactions, social media feeds, IT logs, and location-tracking events. With Amazon Kinesis Client Library (KCL), you can build Amazon Kinesis Applications and use streaming data to power real-time dashboards, generate alerts, implement dynamic pricing and advertising, and more.

Explanation

2 / 25

Your team is developing an application using Elastic Beanstalk and discussing the most appropriate environment for deployment. What two types of environments can be created when using Elastic Beanstalk? (Choose 2 answers)

Load-balancing and auto-scaling environment

Web worker environment

Multi-region, multiple-instance environment

Single-instance environment

Explanation

In Elastic Beanstalk, you can create a load-balancing, autoscaling environment or a single-instance environment. The type of environment that you require depends on the application that you deploy. For example, you can develop and test an application in a single-instance environment to save costs and then upgrade that environment to a load-balancing, autoscaling environment when the application is ready for production.

Explanation

3 / 25

Your company wants to migrate an on-premises SQL Server DB to AWS RDS SQL Server. As the DBA, you have determined that your database can be offline while the backup is created, copied, and restored. You decide to use native backup and restore. Which steps are required during setup? (Choose 3 answers)

Create an Amazon S3 bucket for your backup files

Turn on compression for your backup files by running “exec rdsadmin..rds_set_configuration ‘S3 backup compression’, ‘true.’”

Create an AWS IAM role for access to the S3 bucket

Add the SQLSERVER_BACKUP_RESTORE option to an option group on your DB instance.

Explanation

There are three components you'll need to set up for native backup and restore: an Amazon S3 bucket to store your backup files; an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role to access the bucket, and the SQLSERVER_BACKUP_RESTORE option added to an option group on your DB instance.

Explanation

4 / 25

A MySQL database currently contains 2 million records. Approximately 2000 new records are added every day, with an average of 80 queries per second. The database is running on a 4 core, 4 GB dedicated system in the local data center. Once a week, on average, the system has issues and resets. It is next on the list to be moved to the cloud. What step should be taken first before it is migrated?

Order an on-demand instance matching the on-premises architecture.

Use the AWS server migration service to migrate existing records

Fix all MySQL issues in the local data center.

Export all database records to S3.

Explanation

Issues that are not first solved locally will not be solved by moving to the cloud. Moving to the cloud is not a silver bullet. If there are inherent problems in the existing architecture there is no guarantee that they will be solved by moving to the cloud. Try to resolve any issues locally before migrating your architecture (and its existing issues) to the cloud.

Explanation

5 / 25

Your organization is thinking of running parts of their workload on AWS while keeping the critical and sensitive servers on-premises with continuous connectivity between instances in AWS and corporate data center. In such a hybrid cloud environment what are the minimum requirements to maintain resilient continuous connectivity between AWS and corporate data center?

A primary direct connect line and a VPN connection for backup connected to the corporate primary router

A primary direct connect line connected to at least two routers in the corporate data center

A primary and a backup direct connect line connected to the primary router in the corporate data center

A primary and a backup direct connect line and at least two routers in the corporate data center

Explanation

In Hybrid cloud environment where connectivity between AWS and Corporate datacenter is critical, redundant active/active or active/passive configurations should be implemented for connectivity resources. redundancy has to be on both sides (AWS and On-premises) hence the minimum requirements to implement this architecture is two direct connect lines and two customer devices (ideally in two different data centers)

Explanation

6 / 25

You have a lot of data stored in the AWS Storage Gateway and your manager has come to you asking about how the billing is calculated, specifically the Virtual Tape Shelf usage. What would be a correct response to this?

You are billed for the virtual tape data you store in Amazon Glacier and are billed for the size of the virtual tape

You are billed for the virtual tape data you store in Amazon S3 and billed for the portion of virtual tape capacity that you use, not for the size of the virtual tape.

You are billed for the virtual tape data you store in Amazon Glacier and billed for the portion of virtual tape capacity that you use, not for the size of the virtual tape.

You are billed for the virtual tape data you store in Amazon S3 and are billed for the size of the virtual tape.

Explanation

The AWS Storage Gateway is a service connecting an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage to provide seamless and secure integration between an organization's on-premises IT environment and AWS's storage infrastructure. AWS Storage Gateway billing is as follows. Volume storage usage (per GB per month): You are billed for the Cached volume data you store in Amazon S3. You are only billed for volume capacity you use, not for the size of the volume you create. Snapshot Storage usage (per GB per month): You are billed for the snapshots your gateway stores in Amazon S3. These snapshots are stored and billed as Amazon EBS snapshots. Snapshots are incremental backups, reducing your storage charges. When taking a new snapshot, only the data that has changed since your last snapshot is stored. Virtual Tape Library usage (per GB per month): You are billed for the virtual tape data you store in Amazon S3. You are only billed for the portion of virtual tape capacity that you use, not for the size of the virtual tape. Virtual Tape Shelf usage (per GB per month): You are billed for the virtual tape data you store in Amazon Glacier. You are only billed for the portion of virtual tape capacity that you use, not for the size of the virtual tape

Explanation

7 / 25

Your team has found that a client's load balancer needs to be configured with support for SSL offload using the default security policy. When negotiating the SSL connections between the client and the load balancer, you want the load balancer to determine which cipher is used for the SSL connection. Which actions perform this process on the load balancer? (Choose 3 answers)

Select a client configuration preference option

Choose the server order preference option

Select the default security policy.

Enable SSL offload.

Explanation

Elastic Load Balancing uses a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) negotiation configuration, known as a security policy, to negotiate SSL connections between a client and the load balancer. A security policy is a combination of SSL protocols, SSL ciphers, and the Server Order Preference option.

Explanation

8 / 25

You are migrating your Oracle database using the AWS Database Migration Service. Due to a large amount of data being replicated, you need the replication process to be continuous. What must be changed on your replication instance to use ongoing replication?

Disable Multi-AZ on the target instance

Enable the Multi-AZ option on the replication instance.

Disable backups on the target instance

Increase the number of tables that are cached in RAM.

Explanation

Enabling the Multi-AZ option provides high availability and failover support for the replication instance

Explanation

Enabling the Multi-AZ option provides high availability and failover support for the replication instance

9 / 25

You configured a VPC with web servers hosted on EC2 instances in an EC2 Auto Scaling group in a public subnet. You then create a private subnet and deploy your Amazon RDS database servers in it. You granted a database administrator access in IAM to the RDS database instance, who is now attempting to connect from a secure, company-managed on-premise IP address range. However, she is unable to connect to the RDS instance. You have reviewed IAM permissions for the administrator and AWS resources that need to connect to the database, and they appear correctly configured. All application instances are able to connect to the RDS instance, but other employees on the same approved IP address range cannot connect to the database. What steps is a recommended first step to troubleshoot the issue?

Enable multi-factor authentication for your database administrator.

Check the database security group's specific ingress and egress rules.

Create a key pair for your database administrator to log into the environment's EC2 instances

Configure single sign-on for your database administrator.

Explanation

When you are unable to connect to a new database, it is often because the DB instance creation is still in progress and is not available yet. A reasonable amount of time to wait (at most) is 20 to 30 minutes. Beyond that, there is likely a problem. A common pattern in DB implementation involves placing databases in private subnets for additional security. If you follow this practice, make sure that the Security Groups provide appropriate ingress and egress to the DB instance.

Explanation

10 / 25

Your on-premise bare-metal servers are over five years old. You’re considering moving to AWS. The offerings of virtual instances far surpass what you can access on-premises. Before you choose your test instance at AWS, what questions should you ask? (Choose 3 answers)

When peak load occurs, how much over-provisioning is required?

What is the cost of over-provisioning?

What is the average server utilization?

How much network bandwidth do you need?

Explanation

On-premises data centers have costs associated with the servers, storage, networking, power, cooling, physical space, and IT labor required to support applications and services running in the production environment. For servers, these questions are most applicable: What is your average server utilization? How much do you overprovision for peak load? What is the cost of over-provisioning?

Explanation

11 / 25

You have configured an AWS cloud environment for an ecommerce company. This environment is heavily reliant upon being highly available as downtime will lose the company a great deal of money. You monitor this environment very closely with numerous CloudWatch alarms. Recently you are seeing 'InsufficientInstanceCapacity' errors during auto scaling attempts during peak hours from 4:00 - 9:00 pm EST. This is causing costly downtime. Which option will best handle this situation?

Increase the maximum size of you auto scaling group to add more capacity

Use spot instances in place of on-demand instances

Scale up your RDS instance for more capacity

Purchase Scheduled Reserved Instances for peak hours

Explanation

If you get an InsufficientInstanceCapacity error when you try to launch an instance or start a stopped instance, AWS does not currently have enough available capacity to service your request. In this situation, reserved instances offer the required reliability to avoid outages and loss of money. Reserved Instances are a long-term capacity reservation, and you will not have to rely on Amazon having enough on-demand capacity. Usually these capacity issues are short term, but due to the nature of the company even short outages can be very costly.

Explanation

12 / 25

The IAM administrator is trying to create IAM groups and IAM users for employees within numerous separate company departments. The owner has created groups for each department, but needs even further separation between department subgroups within IAM groups. For example, two users from different department subgroups should be identified separately and have separate permissions.

How can the IAM administrator configure this?

Use the paths to separate IAM users within the same IAM group

Create a nested IAM group

Create a hierarchy of separate IAM users based on their department

It is not possible to subdivide IAM users within an IAM group

Explanation

The path functionality within an IAM group and user allows them to delineate by further levels. In this case, the user needs to use the path with each user or group so that the ARN of the user will look similar to:

arn:aws:iam::123456789012:user/division_abc/subdivision_xyz/user1
arn:aws:iam::123456789012:user/division_abc/subdivision_xyz/user2

Explanation

arn:aws:iam::123456789012:user/division_abc/subdivision_xyz/user1
arn:aws:iam::123456789012:user/division_abc/subdivision_xyz/user2

13 / 25

You are an AWS Solutions Architect helping a client plan a migration to the AWS cloud. The client is very cost-conscious and needs to understand the budget implications of any design decisions prior to signing off. Now that you’ve identified the resources that must be created in the AWS environment to support the migration, what tool could you use to help project future costs given this information?

TCO Calculator

Detailed Billing Reports

Simple Monthly Calculator

Cost Explorer

Explanation

The Simple Monthly Calculator is used to calculate projected costs, assuming you know what AWS resources you’ll be consuming.

Explanation

The Simple Monthly Calculator is used to calculate projected costs, assuming you know what AWS resources you’ll be consuming.

14 / 25

Your company decided to create AWS Account and start moving some workloads to the cloud. The security team would like to utilize the existing identity and access management system which is based on Active Directory to manage access to the new AWS Account. For that reason you decided to use SAML federation to allow users in local identity and access management system access to AWS Services.

Which of the following are primary components in SAML Federation configuration for the new AWS account? (Choose 2 answers)

IAM Roles matching Active Directory groups that you would like to allow access to AWS

IAM trust policy that allows external identity store like Active Directory to be used as the primary IDP for this AWS account

SAML-Based identity provider has to be available to be used with company's identity store (Active Directory)

Direct Connect or VPN connectivity must be established between AWS and your company's data center

Explanation

To enable SAML-Based federation for AWS Account, the following actions are required

1- Inside your organization's network, you configure your identity store (such as Windows Active Directory) to work with a SAML-based identity provider (IdP) like Windows Active Directory Federation Services

2- In IAM, create a new SAML provider, which is an entity in IAM that holds information about your organization's identity provider.

3- You also need to create roles that will map to allowed groups in company's identity store, members of these groups will be presented with set of roles that map to their group membership to choose which role they would like to assume while logging in to AWS console

Explanation

To enable SAML-Based federation for AWS Account, the following actions are required

2- In IAM, create a new SAML provider, which is an entity in IAM that holds information about your organization's identity provider.

15 / 25

You have been using T2 instances as your CPU requirements have not been that intensive. However, you now start to think about larger instance types and start looking at M1 and M3 instances. You are a little confused as to the differences between them as they both seem to have the same ratio of CPU and memory. Which statement below is incorrect as to why you would use one over the other?

M3 instances provide better, more consistent performance that M1 instances for most use-cases

M3 instances are configured with more swap memory than M1 instances.

M3 instances are less expensive than M1 instances

M3 instances also offer SSD-based instance storage that delivers higher I/O performance.

Explanation

Amazon EC2 allows you to set up and configure everything about your instances from your operating system up to your applications. An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is simply a packaged-up environment that includes all the necessary bits to set up and boot your instance. M1 and M3 Standard instances have the same ratio of CPU and memory, some reasons below as to why you would use one over the other. M3 instances provide better, more consistent performance that M1 instances for most use-cases. M3 instances also offer SSD-based instance storage that delivers higher I/O performance. M3 instances are also less expensive than M1 instances. Due to these reasons, we recommend M3 for applications that require general purpose instances with a balance of compute, memory, and network resources. However, if you need more disk storage than what is provided in M3 instances, you may still find M1 instances useful for running your applications

Explanation

16 / 25

A gaming company comes to you and asks you to build infrastructure for their site. They are not sure how big they will be because, as with all startups, they have limited money and big ideas. What they do tell you is that if the game becomes successful, like one of their previous games, it may rapidly grow to millions of users and generate tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of writes and reads per second. After considering all of this, you decide that they need a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability and persistent storage. Which of the following databases do you think would best fit their needs?

Amazon Redshift

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon Aurora

Amazon Elasticache

Explanation

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. Amazon DynamoDB enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling distributed databases to AWS, so they don’t have to worry about hardware provisioning, setup and configuration, replication, software patching, or cluster scaling.

Today’s web-based applications generate and consume massive amounts of data. For example, an online game might start out with only a few thousand users and a light database workload consisting of 10 writes per second and 50 reads per second. However, if the game becomes successful, it may rapidly grow to millions of users and generate tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of writes and reads per second. It may also create terabytes or more of data per day. Developing your applications against Amazon DynamoDB enables you to start small and simply dial-up your request capacity for a table as your requirements scale, without incurring downtime. You pay highly cost-efficient rates for the request capacity you provision, and let Amazon DynamoDB do the work over partitioning your data and traffic over sufficient server capacity to meet your needs. Amazon DynamoDB does the database management and administration, and you simply store and request your data. Automatic replication and failover provides built-in fault tolerance, high availability, and data durability. Amazon DynamoDB gives you the peace of mind that your database is fully managed and can grow with your application requirements.

Explanation

17 / 25

Your client wants to implement scalable but cost-effective storage while maintaining data security. You recommend using AWS Storage Gateway and set up an instance as a cached volume gateway for low latency. You immediately realize that you need to access the storage on the gateway. Which method would you use?

NFS

CIFS

Fibre

iSCSI

Explanation

AWS Storage Gateway enables applications that are clustered using Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) to use the iSCSI initiator to access a gateway's volumes. However, connecting multiple hosts to the same iSCSI target is not supported. When using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), you use the iscsi-initiator-utils RPM package to connect to your gateway iSCSI targets (volumes or VTL devices).

Explanation

18 / 25

Your company has decided to use cloud methods for disaster recovery. The company is most concerned with RTO and RPO and is willing to accept the extra cost of Warm Standby over Pilot Light. When a disaster occurs, your top priority is to increase the processing capacity of your scaled-down environment. Once that is accomplished, you can then increase the environment's resilience and self-management capabilities.

What steps will help you accomplish your top priority when a disaster occurs? (Choose 2 answers)

Re-size the small capacity servers to run on larger EC2 instances

Modify your Amazon RDS servers to a multi-AZ deployment

Extend your auto scaling group across multiple availability zones

Explanation

The Warm Standby scenario uses a scaled-down version of a fully functional environment that is always running. Business-critical applications can always be running in the cloud. When a DR scenario comes about, the servers can be quickly scaled up, scaled out or both, but horizontal scaling is preferred over vertical scaling.

The two incorrect choices will increase your environment's resilience by adding availability

Explanation

The two incorrect choices will increase your environment's resilience by adding availability

19 / 25

You are an engineer at a large bank, responsible for managing your firm’s AWS infrastructure. Your finance team has approached you, indicating their concern over the growing EC2 budget. They have asked you to identify strategies to reduce the EC2 spend by at least 25% before the next monthly billing cycle. How choices below could assist in accomplishing this? (Choose 3 answers)

Consolidate AWS accounts for billing.

Reduce or eliminate over-provisioned or unused instances.

Look for opportunities to use dedicated instances.

Look for opportunities to use reserved or spot instances.

Explanation

You can reduce EC2 spend by migrating to reserved/spot instances, eliminating/shrinking unused resources, or consolidating AWS accounts (to qualify for volume discounts). The paying account's use of consolidated billing can benefit from volume pricing discounts gained thru aggregate account usage.

Explanation

20 / 25

A client of yours has a huge amount of data stored on Amazon S3, but is concerned about someone stealing it while it is in transit. You know that all data is encrypted in transit on AWS, but which of the following is wrong when describing server-side encryption on AWS?

Amazon S3 server-side encryption uses one of the strongest block ciphers available, 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256), to encrypt your data

In server-side encryption, you manage encryption/decryption of your data, the encryption keys, and related tools.

Server-side encryption is about data encryption at rest--that is, Amazon S3 encrypts your data as it writes it to disks.

Amazon S3 server-side encryption employs strong multi-factor encryption.

Explanation

Amazon S3 encrypts your object before saving it on disks in its data centers and decrypts it when you download the objects. You have two options depending on how you choose to manage the encryption keys: Server-side encryption and client-side encryption. Server-side encryption is about data encryption at rest--that is, Amazon S3 encrypts your data as it writes it to disks inits data centers and decrypts it for you when you access it. As long as you authenticate your request and you have access permissions, there is no difference in the way you access encrypted or unencrypted objects. Amazon S3 manages encryption and decryption for you. For example, if you share your objects using a pre-signed URL, that URL works the same way for both encrypted and unencrypted objects. In client-side encryption, you manage encryption/decryption of your data, the encryption keys, and related tools. Server-side encryption is an alternative to client-side encryption in which Amazon S3 manages the encryption of your data, freeing you from thetasks of managing encryption and encryption keys. Amazon S3 server-side encryption employs strong multi-factor encryption. Amazon S3 encrypts each object with a unique key. As an additional safeguard, it encrypts the key itself with a masterkey that it regularly rotates. Amazon S3 server-side encryption uses one of the strongest block ciphers available, 256- bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256), to encrypt your data

Explanation

21 / 25

You are configuring Amazon Route 53 to route traffic destined for yourwebsite.com to an Application Load Balancer that is configured to distribute traffic in two availability zones in the same AWS region. Which record set should you edit to point traffic for yourwebsite.com to your Application Load Balancer? Select the answer that is the most cost-effective and scalable.

CNAME

Alias

Explanation

yourwebsite.com is a zone apex. Alias record sets can be used to set a zone apex, but CNAME records cannot. Additionally, queries to Alias records that are mapped to an ELB are free. A records are used to map IPv4 addresses to FQDNs, the IP address of the ELB may change. MX records are used for email servers.

Explanation

22 / 25

You have deployed an application hosted on both a primary instance and a secondary standby instance. The instances are in the same subnet within a VPC.

If the primary instance fails, you would like to failover to the secondary instance without having to reconfigure the application. How can you accomplish this? (Choose 3 answers)

Use an additional elastic network interface for failover to another instance

Use load balancing to redirect traffic to the secondary instance

Add a second private IP address to the primary instance's ENI that can be moved to the secondary instance's ENI.

Attach elastic network interfaces to the primary and secondary instances

Explanation

The ENI can only be attached to an instance hosted in a VPC. When you move a network interface from one instance to another, network traffic is redirected to the new instance. Some network and security appliances, such as load balancers, network address translation (NAT) servers, and proxy servers prefer to be configured with multiple network interfaces. You can create and attach secondary network interfaces to instances in a VPC that are running these types of applications and configure the additional interfaces with their own public and private IP addresses, security groups, and source/destination checking

Explanation

23 / 25

You have been asked to create a new S3 Bucket that will be used by the financial auditing team to store and share some files. There are a lot of different permissions between listing only, read-only and read-write access. You have decided to use resource-based permissions for the flexibility of it. Which statements below are correct with regards to resource-based permissions on your S3 bucket? (Choose 2 answers)

Resource-based permissions are managed policies you can apply directly to your bucket

With resource-based permissions, you can define permissions for sub-directories of your bucket separately

Resource-based permissions could be attached to a user, role or group

An explicit deny in resource-based permissions will overwrite an allow permissions the user might have for the same resource

Explanation

Resource-based permissions are permissions you attach directly to a resource. Resource-level permissions refer to the ability to specify not just what actions users can perform, but which resources they're allowed to perform those actions on. Resource-based policies are inline only, not managed. You can specify resource-based permissions for Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon Glacier vaults, Amazon SNS topics, Amazon SQS queues, and AWS Key Management Service encryption keys.

Explanation

24 / 25

Your developers have created a sales application that works in tandem with the no SQL database. To ensure the fastest response for the application in production, the developers wish to remove the need to wait for acknowledgments from the database to the application after data have been sent. The acknowledgments can be stored and accessed asynchronously. Which managed application would be the best choice for their design?

Simple Queue Service

Simple Workflow Service

CloudWatch Logs

AWS Config

Explanation

SQS allows you to quickly build hosted and scalable message queuing applications that can run on any computer. SQS stores messages in transit between diverse, distributed application components without losing messages and without requiring each component to be always available

Explanation

25 / 25

Due to compliance rules and regulations, your company's workload has to run on dedicated instances. How can you make sure that all EC2 instances created for your workload now and in the future are dedicated instances? (Choose 2 answers)

Create a golden AMI of the dedicated instance and enforce this AMI as the base for any new instance in your environment. This guarantees that all instances created based on the AMI will be dedicated

Create your VPCs with instance tenancy of dedicated. This will ensure that all instances launched in VPC are dedicated

Create a dedicated Placement Group and associate all new instances with this placement group at launch time. All instances launched in a dedicated placement group will be dedicated

Create a CloudFormation template that has the EC2 Instance Tenancy attribute as dedicated and always use it to launch any new instance

Explanation

You can create a VPC with an instance tenancy of dedicated to ensure that all instances launched into the VPC are dedicated instances. Alternatively, you can specify the tenancy of the instance during launch

Explanation

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Previous articleAWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (SAA02) – Free Practice Tests

Anil K Y Ommi

Cloud Solutions Architect with more than 10 years of experience in designing & deploying application in multiple cloud platforms. Owner of Mycloudwiki.com and tsmtutorials.com tech blogs. Email me if you are interested in writing tech articles.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (SAA02) – Free Practice Tests