Sample Questions from AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02)

Preview a few questions below — answers are revealed when you take the exam.

  1. A company is migrating a large-scale, multi-tier application to AWS. The application requires high availability and fault tolerance. The architecture includes a web tier, an application tier, and a database tier. The database tier uses Amazon RDS for MySQL. The application tier is hosted on Amazon EC2 instances, and the web tier is served by an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The company wants to ensure that the application can handle a sudden increase in traffic without manual intervention. What strategy should be applied to automatically scale the EC2 instances in the application tier?

    • Implement Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups with target tracking scaling policies based on CPU utilization metrics to automatically adjust the number of EC2 instances in response to changing traffic patterns.
    • Configure Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups with scheduled scaling actions to increase the number of EC2 instances during predicted high-traffic periods and decrease them during low-traffic periods.
    • Use AWS Lambda functions to monitor the Application Load Balancer metrics and manually adjust the number of EC2 instances based on the observed traffic patterns.
    • Deploy the application tier on AWS Fargate and use AWS Step Functions to orchestrate the scaling of the Fargate tasks based on the traffic load.

  2. A financial services company is deploying a new microservices-based application on AWS. The application consists of several independent services that communicate with each other using REST APIs. The company wants to ensure that the services can discover each other dynamically and that the communication between them is secure and efficient. Which service should be used to facilitate service discovery and secure communication between the microservices?

    • Use AWS App Mesh with mutual TLS authentication to enable secure communication between the microservices and AWS Cloud Map for service discovery.
    • Deploy the microservices on AWS ECS with service discovery enabled and use AWS PrivateLink to establish a private connection between the services.
    • Implement a custom service discovery mechanism using Amazon Route 53 and secure the communication between the microservices using AWS Certificate Manager.
    • Use AWS Service Discovery with DNS-based service discovery and AWS Network Firewall to secure the communication between the microservices.

  3. An e-commerce company is experiencing performance issues with its Amazon DynamoDB table, which stores product catalog data. The table uses a composite primary key with a partition key and a sort key. The company notices that certain partition keys are receiving a disproportionate amount of read and write traffic, leading to hot partitions and throttled requests. What approach should be taken to address the hot partition issue and improve the table's performance?

    • Implement a DynamoDB global secondary index (GSI) with a different partition key to distribute the read and write traffic more evenly across the table.
    • Use DynamoDB auto scaling to automatically adjust the provisioned throughput based on the observed traffic patterns and alleviate the hot partition issue.
    • Partition the product catalog data across multiple DynamoDB tables with different partition keys to distribute the traffic more evenly.
    • Implement a custom sharding strategy using DynamoDB streams and AWS Lambda to dynamically redistribute the data across multiple partitions.

  4. A media streaming company is looking to optimize the cost and performance of its Amazon S3 storage. The company stores a large amount of video content in S3 and serves it to users through a content delivery network (CDN). The company wants to ensure that the most frequently accessed objects are stored in the lowest-cost storage class while maintaining high availability and low latency for user access. Which S3 storage class configuration should be used to achieve this goal?

    • Use S3 Intelligent-Tiering for all objects to automatically move them between different storage classes based on access patterns, with S3 Standard for frequently accessed objects and S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) for less frequently accessed objects.
    • Store all objects in S3 Standard for high availability and low latency, and use S3 Lifecycle policies to transition infrequently accessed objects to S3 Glacier after a specified period.
    • Use S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA) for all objects to reduce costs, accepting the risk of data loss in a single Availability Zone.
    • Store all objects in S3 Intelligent-Tiering and use S3 Lifecycle policies to transition objects to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after a specified period for long-term archival.

  5. Identify the AWS service that provides a fully managed, petabyte-scale data lake service that makes it easy to build and secure data lakes in the cloud.

    • Amazon S3
    • AWS Lake Formation
    • Amazon Redshift
    • AWS Glue