SAP-C02PRACTICE QUESTIONS

SAP-C02 practice questions with answers

21 example questions from the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional question bank, grouped by exam domain. Pick an answer and check it to see the explanation.

Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity

Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity domain involves creating scalable, secure, and efficient architectures. This includes managing multiple AWS accounts, implementing governance strategies, ensuring compliance, and optimizing resources.

Question 1Select 1

Task 1.1 Architect network connectivity strategies

Your company has deployed a multi-tier application in AWS where the web tier is fronted by an AWS Network Load Balancer (NLB). The application has been performing as expected until recently, when users began experiencing intermittent connectivity issues. After reviewing CloudWatch metrics for the EC2 instances and the NLB, no evident issues were found. The instances are healthy and the NLB appears to be configured correctly. However, some users are consistently being disconnected or are facing high latency when trying to access the application. As a Solutions Architect, you need to troubleshoot the problem using AWS tools. What should you do next to identify the cause of the traffic flow issues?

A. Enable VPC Flow Logs for the network interfaces (ENIs) attached to the NLB to analyze the traffic patterns and identify any discrepancies.

B. Increase the size of your EC2 instances behind the NLB to accommodate more traffic and reduce latency.

C. Switch from the Network Load Balancer to an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to provide better handling of sudden traffic spikes.

D. Check the security group rules for the NLB to ensure that they are not blocking incoming traffic from users.

Question 2Select 1

Task 1.2 Prescribe security controls

As the lead architect for a global e-commerce platform, you decide to streamline the customer experience by allowing users to log in using their existing social media accounts. To securely integrate with various third-party identity providers, you plan to implement an authentication protocol. Your top requirement is that the e-commerce system should be able to obtain access to user resources on the social media platforms without gaining access to users' passwords. Which of the following options would be the best approach to meet this requirement?

A. Implement OAuth 2.0, which will delegate user authentication to the third-party identity providers and provide tokens for authorization without exposing user passwords.

B. Use a simple HTTP Basic Authentication over SSL for each third-party identity provider.

C. Configure a SAML 2.0 (Security Assertion Markup Language) based federation for user authentication with the social media identity providers.

D. Adopt OpenID Connect for authentication, with no additional authorization framework.

Question 3Select 1

Task 1.3 Design reliable and resilient architectures

You are an AWS Solutions Architect working for an international media company that has recently seen a major spike in traffic due to the global popularity of their new streaming service. To ensure seamless global content delivery, you've been tasked with architecting a solution that can scale effectively to handle millions of concurrent users while maintaining low latency and high transfer speeds. You've decided to integrate Amazon CloudFront into your architecture for its content delivery network capabilities. Given the need to design a reliable and resilient architecture that scales appropriately for this use case, which of the following strategies would be the most suitable to optimize the architecture considering the scale-up and scale-out options provided by AWS?

A. Implement Amazon CloudFront with regional edge caches and configure origin failover by integrating with Amazon S3 and Amazon Route 53 health checks to handle geographic redundancy.

B. Deploy multiple Amazon CloudFront distributions for each geographic region and manually switch between them based on the region that receives the most traffic.

C. Use a single Amazon EC2 instance as the origin server for CloudFront and scale it up by changing to a larger instance type whenever traffic spikes occur.

D. Scale up the Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) in front of an EC2 Auto Scaling group and bypass Amazon CloudFront entirely, as it does not provide enough scaling capabilities.

Question 4Select 1

Task 1.4 Design a multi-account AWS environment

Your company, GlobalTech, is adopting AWS at scale and plans to employ a multi-account strategy to segment different workloads appropriately. The Security team at GlobalTech needs to ensure centralized management of resources across all AWS accounts for improved governance. They have proposed the use of AWS Resource Access Manager to share AWS Transit Gateway, subnets, and license configurations across multiple AWS accounts within the organization. As a Solutions Architect, you need to evaluate if AWS RAM is the most appropriate service for this use case considering GlobalTech's organizational requirements. Which of the following statements best justifies the use of AWS RAM for GlobalTech's multi-account strategy?

A. AWS RAM is appropriate as it allows you to share AWS resources that you create in one AWS account with other AWS accounts in the same organization, enabling centralized management and governance.

B. AWS RAM should be avoided because it only allows the sharing of resources with AWS accounts outside of the organization, which could lead to security risks.

C. AWS RAM is not suitable as it does not support the sharing of resources like AWS Transit Gateway and subnets between accounts.

D. GlobalTech should not use AWS RAM as it requires separate management of resources for each AWS account, which goes against centralized management principles.

Question 5Select 1

Task 1.5 Determine cost optimization and visibility strategies

Your company is running multiple critical workloads on AWS, and you have been tasked with optimizing costs while ensuring thorough monitoring of compliance and governance. The company's current setup utilizes AWS Cost Explorer for tracking monthly expenses and making projections. As part of strengthening the governance aspect, you decide to integrate AWS CloudTrail logs to track changes and ensure better visibility of user and resource activity. Keeping in mind the need for cost optimization and visibility, which of the following strategies should you implement to effectively track both the money spent on AWS services and the associated CloudTrail logs, without incurring unnecessary costs?

A. Enable CloudTrail with a multi-region trail set up to log all events and store logs into S3 with a lifecycle policy that shifts them to Glacier after 90 days for cost-effective long-term storage.

B. Use AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate the costs of CloudTrail and apply recommendations to delete logs older than 30 days directly from the S3 bucket to prevent additional charges.

C. Activate AWS Trusted Advisor's cost optimization feature to automatically reduce the storage class of CloudTrail logs in S3 from Standard to Infrequent Access after 30 days.

D. Implement AWS Budgets to set a fixed budget for CloudTrail logs storage and receive alerts when nearing the limit, but avoid setting up lifecycle policies to prevent accidental log deletion.

Design for New Solutions

Design for New Solutions domain focuses on creating innovative, scalable, and resilient architectures using AWS services. It involves evaluating new technologies, designing for high availability, ensuring security, and optimizing performance.

Question 1Select 1

Task 2.1 Design a deployment strategy to meet business requirements

Your company has several AWS accounts that are used by different development teams for various projects. To streamline billing and compliance, you plan to reorganize these accounts into a single organization using AWS Organizations. One of your primary goals is to enforce service control policies (SCPs) to limit the services that each team can use, ensuring adherence to the company's security and compliance standards. You also want to upgrade the services and features within this new setup to the latest ones that comply with your policies. While designing a deployment strategy to meet these business requirements, which of the following steps should you take?

A. Create an AWS Organization, migrate the individual accounts into the organization as member accounts, establish an organizational unit (OU) structure that reflects the teams' projects, and apply SCPs at the OU or account level to control available services.

B. Manually monitor and upgrade services in each individual account without using AWS Organizations, relying on compliance reports to enforce standards.

C. Keep the accounts separate but create cross-account roles that can enforce SCPs applied from a central management account over the individual accounts.

D. Merge all individual AWS accounts into a single master account to simplify tracking and apply service control policies at the group level within the account.

Question 2Select 1

Task 2.2 Design a solution to ensure business continuity

A company running its financial application on AWS relies heavily on the ability to maintain business continuity, even in the event of a regional disruption. They want to implement a cost-effective disaster recovery strategy with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of a few hours. To achieve this, they are considering using the Pilot Light approach. As the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, how would you design an architecture to meet these requirements using the Pilot Light concept?

A. Maintain a replica of the production environment's core elements, such as database servers, on smaller instance sizes in a second AWS region. Continuously replicate data and keep the application server AMIs ready to launch. In the event of a disaster, scale up the instances and redirect traffic.

B. Implement an active-active architecture with full production-scale environments in at least two regions and Route 53 for routing traffic accordingly.

C. Configure AWS Auto Scaling with a minimum instance count set to zero in the primary region and trigger scaling when needed in the event of a disruption.

D. Utilize AWS CloudFormation StackSets to create a full-stack clone of your production environment in multiple regions, ensuring global redundancy.

Question 3Select 1

Task 2.3 Determine security controls based on requirements

A company has recently deployed a serverless architecture on AWS to process confidential data. As a solutions architect, you designed a system where AWS Lambda functions, residing within a private VPC, interact with Amazon S3 to store processed data. You are tasked with ensuring that the traffic from the Lambda functions to S3 does not traverse the public internet for security reasons. You've decided to implement VPC endpoints for this purpose. Additionally, you have to make sure that traffic between subnets inside VPC is restricted according to the company's security requirements. Which of the following options should you configure to fulfill these requirements while allowing the necessary communication between the VPC, the Lambda functions, and S3?

A. Establish a Gateway VPC Endpoint for Amazon S3 and configure the Network Access Control Lists (NACLs) to allow traffic to and from the endpoint.

B. Create an Interface VPC Endpoint (PrivateLink) for the Lambda functions and deny all outbound traffic using the NACLs.

C. Establish a NAT Gateway and configure the NACLs to allow all outbound internet traffic.

D. Configure NACLs to deny all traffic between subnets and create an Internet Gateway for the VPC for S3 access.

Question 4Select 1

Task 2.4 Design a strategy to meet reliability requirements

Your company's application is currently deployed in the AWS us-east-1 region and relies on a DynamoDB table for its data storage needs. Due to recent business expansion, your application will now serve users globally, and you are tasked with ensuring high availability and minimal latency for all users. The application has a write-heavy workload and requires strong consistency across all regions. Which of the following approaches should you take to meet these requirements using AWS managed services?

A. Configure Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables to automatically replicate your DynamoDB data across multiple AWS regions.

B. Use Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments in each region with bidirectional replication to support the high-availability requirements.

C. Deploy additional DynamoDB tables in each new region and manually synchronize data using custom Lambda functions.

D. Implement Amazon ElastiCache in each region to cache read data, and rely solely on this for write-heavy workload distribution.

Question 5Select 1

Task 2.5 Design a solution to meet performance objectives

A company is building a new web application on AWS, which will experience unpredictable traffic patterns. The Solutions Architect needs to ensure the infrastructure dynamically scales to meet user demand while optimizing costs. The application stack includes an Application Load Balancer (ALB), a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances for the web layer, and an Amazon RDS database. Which of the following strategies should the Architect implement to align with the designed performance objectives and cost-efficiency?

A. Implement AWS Auto Scaling policies to adjust the EC2 fleet's capacity based on observed ALB request metrics and set RDS to use Auto Scaling storage.

B. Manually adjust the number of EC2 instances at regular intervals and use RDS read replicas to distribute the database load.

C. Implement scheduled scaling actions for the EC2 fleet and RDS, adjusting the resources based on expected load patterns.

D. Size the EC2 fleet based on peak load projections and enable Multi-AZ deployments for RDS for high availability.

Question 6Select 1

Task 2.6 Determine a cost optimization strategy to meet solution goals and objectives

A media company is planning to move their image processing workloads to AWS. Each day they need to process hundreds of gigabytes of image data, which is currently stored on-premises. The CTO wants to ensure efficient data transfer to the cloud while considering cost optimizations. The image data will be accessed and processed by multiple EC2 instances concurrently in a compute-intensive workload. The CTO is considering using Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) due to its scalability and elastic nature. Which of the following would be the most cost-effective method for moving existing image data to EFS and subsequent regular updates?

A. Set up a Direct Connect connection to AWS for initial bulk data transfer into EFS and then use AWS DataSync for ongoing updates.

B. Transfer data over the internet using SFTP to EFS for both initial and ongoing updates.

C. Use AWS Snowball devices to transfer all the image data initially and for each subsequent update to the EFS.

D. Periodically take EBS snapshots and copy them to EFS for initial bulk data transfer and for subsequent data updates.

Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions

Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions domain involves optimizing and enhancing current AWS architectures. This includes performance tuning, cost management, security enhancements, and adopting CI/CD solutions.

Question 1Select 1

Task 3.1 Determine a strategy to improve overall operational excellence

You are working as a Solutions Architect for a tech company that is using AWS infrastructure to run its web applications. The company's applications are packaged and deployed using AWS Elastic Beanstalk due to its ease of use and simplicity for developers unfamiliar with AWS. However, your team is now considering the need for configuring a more sophisticated system of configuration management automation that can handle not only application deployment but also configuration changes, resource provisioning, and software updates across multiple environments. Your responsibility involves ensuring that the system can scale, manage changes with minimal downtime, and improve the overall operational excellence. Which AWS solution would you recommend to enable the necessary level of configuration management automation and integrate seamlessly with AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

A. AWS OpsWorks

B. AWS CodeCommit

C. AWS CloudFormation

D. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Question 2Select 1

Task 3.2 Determine a strategy to improve security

Your company has a web application hosted on AWS with an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances behind an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). As the Solutions Architect, you are tasked with designing and implementing a patch and update process that causes minimum disruption to service and maintains high availability. How should you design this process to ensure instances are patched without affecting user experience?

A. Use ELB connection draining to take instances out of service, then incrementally update and test patched instances in the Auto Scaling group before reintroducing them into service.

B. Remove all the instances from the ELB at the same time, patch them, and then re-register them with the ELB.

C. Directly SSH into each EC2 instance and apply patches manually while they are serving traffic.

D. Stop the ELB service during off-peak hours and patch all instances at once before restarting the ELB.

Question 3Select 1

Task 3.3 Determine a strategy to improve performance

A company is using a self-managed Apache Kafka cluster on Amazon EC2 instances to handle real-time streaming data. The company has recently noticed performance bottlenecks during peak traffic times, which has led to delayed data processing and increased latency. The DevOps team is considering whether to scale up the EC2 instances or migrate to a managed service to address these issues. As a Solutions Architect, you recommend evaluating Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) as a solution. Which of the following reasons makes Amazon MSK a suitable option for improving the performance of the company's streaming data architecture?

A. Amazon MSK provides a fully managed service that automates the provisioning, configuration, and maintenance of Apache Kafka clusters, leading to improved scalability and performance without the operational overhead.

B. Since Amazon MSK is a third-party service, it is always more cost-effective to manage Apache Kafka clusters on EC2 instances directly.

C. Enabling an in-memory caching layer on the current Apache Kafka setup will provide similar performance benefits when compared to Amazon MSK.

D. Amazon MSK is simply a newer technology and thus will naturally provide better performance than their current Apache Kafka setup on EC2 instances.

Question 4Select 1

Task 3.4 Determine a strategy to improve reliability

A company hosts a web application behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB), which triggers AWS Lambda functions for various tasks. After a recent review, the company's Solutions Architect observes that during peak times, some Lambda functions are failing intermittently, reporting 'ThrottlingException' errors due to reaching the maximum concurrent execution limit. The company wants to ensure the reliability of its application without incurring unnecessary costs. Which of the following strategies should the Solutions Architect recommend to improve the reliability of the Lambda-invoked architecture?

A. Implement Lambda reserved concurrency for critical functions to guarantee that a portion of the account level concurrent execution limit is always available.

B. Convert the Lambda functions to run on EC2 instances to have more direct control over the scaling.

C. Completely remove concurrency limits on the Lambda functions to avoid any throttling issues.

D. Increase the memory allocation for the Lambda functions to prevent the 'ThrottlingException' errors.

Question 5Select 1

Task 3.5 Identify opportunities for cost optimizations

A company has deployed an online gaming application with a global user base on AWS, utilizing Amazon Elasticache to maintain high-speed read access to gaming leaderboards and session states. Over time, the company notices through their AWS Cost and Usage Reports that the costs associated with Amazon Elasticache instances are significantly higher than anticipated. Further analysis indicates that the memory utilization across their Elasticache clusters rarely exceeds 25%, suggesting that the provisioned resources are overprovisioned. As an AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, you are asked to identify a cost optimization strategy for the underutilized Amazon Elasticache resources. Which of the following recommendations would most effectively optimize costs?

A. Implement Amazon Elasticache Reserved Nodes for a 1 or 3-year term for the baseline capacity and leverage Autoscaling for any unpredictable surges in demand.

B. Upgrade to the latest generation of Elasticache nodes to benefit from better performance and cost savings.

C. Consolidate the Elasticache clusters into a single, larger node to benefit from economies of scale.

D. Migrate from Amazon Elasticache to a self-managed caching solution on Amazon EC2 instances to have more control over resource utilization.

Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization

Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization domain involves swiftly transitioning and updating workloads to AWS. This includes planning migrations, leveraging automation, optimizing legacy applications, and using modern architectures.

Question 1Select 1

Task 4.1 Select existing workloads and processes for potential migration

As a Solutions Architect at a large enterprise, you have been tasked with completing an application migration assessment regarding the migration of a multi-tier web application to AWS. The application has an authentication system that relies on an on-premises Microsoft Active Directory for user credentials. Part of the migration requires integrating AWS resources with the on-premises Active Directory to maintain user access controls without significant changes to the authentication process. Which of the following IAM configurations should you recommend to meet these requirements?

A. Establish an AWS Directory Service AD Connector to the on-premises Active Directory and configure IAM roles that trust the AD identities, allowing for the use of existing user credentials.

B. Use AWS IAM Access Analyzer to review and import the on-premises Active Directory policies and apply them directly to IAM policies.

C. Deploy an AWS Managed Microsoft AD in AWS and migrate all user accounts from the on-premises Active Directory to AWS Managed Microsoft AD.

D. Create individual IAM users for each of your on-premises Active Directory users and assign IAM policies according to their current permissions.

Question 2Select 1

Task 4.2 Determine the optimal migration approach for existing workloads

A company has a large-scale deployment running on a VMware infrastructure in their on-premises datacenters. The Chief Technical Officer (CTO) wants to migrate these workloads to AWS to take advantage of cloud scalability and to retire their aging hardware. The deployment includes several business-critical applications that should have minimal downtime during migration. Furthermore, the CTO wishes to maintain the use of their existing VMware management tools post-migration. Which data transfer service and migration strategy would be most appropriate for this scenario?

A. VMware Cloud on AWS

B. AWS Direct Connect

C. AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)

D. AWS Snowball

Question 3Select 1

Task 4.3 Determine a new architecture for existing workloads

A company is moving their legacy web application to AWS. The web application consists of a stateless web tier and a database tier. The company wants to ensure high availability and scalability for their web tier in the cloud. They are considering using Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to distribute incoming traffic across multiple EC2 instances. As an AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, which type of Elastic Load Balancing solution should you recommend to meet the company's requirements?

A. Application Load Balancer (ALB)

B. Network Load Balancer (NLB)

C. Elastic IP Load Balancing

D. Classic Load Balancer (CLB)

Question 4Select 1

Task 4.3 Determine a new architecture for existing workloads

Your company has decided to migrate a compute-intensive application to AWS to improve performance and cost-efficiency. After thorough analysis, the application has been identified as compatible with the AWS Graviton Processor, which is based on the ARM architecture, and offers better price performance for workloads. The application runs on x86-based Linux virtual machines that are self-managed on-premises. As an AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, which of the following compute options should you choose to achieve the company's goal?

A. Migrate the application to Amazon EC2 instances powered by AWS Graviton2 or Graviton3 processors.

B. Refactor the application to run on AWS Lambda using the ARM architecture compatibility.

C. Retain the application on x86-based EC2 instances with the latest Intel or AMD processors.

D. Host the application on AWS Outposts to utilize AWS Graviton processors on-premises.

Question 5Select 1

Task 4.4 Determine opportunities for modernization and enhancement

A company is refactoring its monolithic e-commerce application into a microservices architecture on the AWS Cloud in an effort to increase scalability and maintainability. The application's order processing system must handle spikes during flash sales events without incurring unnecessary costs during periods of low activity. The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) has asked you to minimize operational overhead. As the Solutions Architect on this project, which of the following would you recommend to publish order events from the checkout service, which can then trigger downstream processing in a decoupled and scalable way?

A. Use Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) to publish messages to a topic that then triggers AWS Lambda functions to process the order.

B. Deploy dedicated EC2 instances that will poll an SQS queue where the order events are placed, and scale them with Auto Scaling Groups.

C. Create an RDS database trigger that directly invokes an AWS Lambda function for each new order inserted into the order table.

D. Implement a cron job on an EC2 instance to check for new orders in a database at regular intervals and process them accordingly.

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