Phase 2 Exam: Core Services

A startup is building a web application that experiences unpredictable traffic spikes. The development team wants to minimize costs during low-traffic periods while ensuring the application can handle sudden increases in demand. The team does not have enough historical data to predict usage patterns. Which EC2 pricing model is most appropriate for this workload?

A company stores application logs in Amazon S3. The logs are accessed frequently during the first 30 days for troubleshooting, occasionally accessed between 30 and 90 days for compliance audits, and must be retained for one year but are rarely accessed after 90 days. Which S3 Lifecycle configuration minimizes storage costs while meeting these requirements?

A solutions architect is designing a database tier for an e-commerce application. The application requires complex SQL queries that join data across multiple tables, ACID transactions spanning several tables, and the ability to generate monthly sales reports with aggregations. Which AWS database service is the best fit?

An application running on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) is experiencing intermittent 503 errors. The operations team discovers that the ALB health checks are failing for some instances. Which TWO actions should the team take to diagnose and resolve the issue? (Select TWO.)Select multiple

A company needs to process customer orders in the exact sequence they are submitted. Each order must be processed exactly once to prevent duplicate charges. Which Amazon SQS queue type should the company use, and why?

A media company stores video files in Amazon S3. The company wants to protect against accidental deletion of video files by users. Which TWO S3 features should the company enable to meet this requirement? (Select TWO.)Select multiple

A solutions architect needs to deploy a PostgreSQL database on AWS for a production application. The database must remain available if a single Availability Zone experiences an outage. The architect also needs to minimize the recovery time in the event of a failure. Which RDS deployment option meets these requirements?

A company is deploying a web application across two Availability Zones. The application runs on EC2 instances managed by an Auto Scaling group. The team wants to distribute incoming HTTPS traffic across the instances and route requests to different backend services based on the URL path (for example, `/api/*` to one set of servers and `/static/*` to another). Which load balancer type should the team use?

A development team is building a notification system. When a new order is placed, the system must simultaneously send an email to the customer, add a message to a processing queue, and invoke a Lambda function for analytics. Which AWS service is best suited for this fan-out requirement?

A data engineering team needs to store sensor readings from IoT devices. Each device sends thousands of readings per second. The data model is simple: each reading has a device ID, a timestamp, and a set of metric values. The team needs single-digit millisecond read latency when querying the latest readings for a specific device. Which database solution is the best fit?

A company runs a batch processing workload that analyzes large log files stored on Amazon EBS volumes attached to EC2 instances. The workload reads data sequentially and requires high throughput but does not need high IOPS. The company wants to minimize storage costs. Which EBS volume type is the best choice for this workload?

A solutions architect is designing a disaster recovery strategy for a web application. The application runs behind an Application Load Balancer in the `us-east-1` Region. The architect deploys a standby copy of the application behind another ALB in `us-west-2`. The architect wants DNS to automatically direct traffic to the standby Region if the primary Region becomes unavailable. Which Route 53 configuration achieves this?

An application uses an Amazon SQS queue to process image uploads. Each image takes approximately 120 seconds to process. The operations team notices that some images are being processed more than once. Which configuration change is most likely to resolve the duplicate processing issue?

A company wants to host a static marketing website on AWS. The website consists of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and image files. The company wants the simplest and most cost-effective hosting solution. Which approach should the company use?

A solutions architect is configuring an Auto Scaling group for a web application. The application must maintain at least 2 instances at all times, typically runs 4 instances during normal business hours, and can scale up to 10 instances during peak traffic. Which Auto Scaling group configuration correctly represents these requirements?

A company has an SNS topic that receives order events. Three different teams need to process these events independently: the fulfillment team, the analytics team, and the notification team. Each team processes events at a different speed, and a failure in one team's processing must not affect the others. Which architecture pattern should the company implement?

A database administrator needs to scale read traffic for an Amazon RDS MySQL database that serves a reporting dashboard. The dashboard generates complex read queries that are slowing down the primary database, which also handles write operations from the application. Which approach should the administrator use to offload read traffic without affecting write performance?

A company is migrating an application to AWS. The application produces events that must be routed to different processing targets based on the event content. For example, events from the "payments" source should go to a Lambda function, while events from the "inventory" source should go to an SQS queue. The company also needs to capture events generated by AWS services such as EC2 instance state changes. Which service is the best fit for this event routing requirement?

Place the following steps in the correct order for how an Auto Scaling group responds when a target tracking scaling policy detects that average CPU utilization has exceeded the target value. 1. The Auto Scaling group launches new instances using the launch template configuration. 2. CloudWatch reports that the average CPU utilization metric exceeds the target value. 3. New instances are registered with the ALB target group and begin receiving traffic after passing health checks. 4. The Auto Scaling group calculates how many instances to add to bring the metric back to the target.

A solutions architect is designing a high-availability architecture for a web application. The application runs on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an ALB in `us-east-1`. The architect configures Route 53 with a failover routing policy and a health check on the primary ALB. A standby ALB exists in `us-west-2`. Which combination correctly describes how the ALB health checks and Route 53 health checks work together in this architecture? (Select TWO.)Select multiple

A company stores 500 TB of historical data in Amazon S3. The data is accessed approximately once per quarter for regulatory audits. When accessed, the data must be available within 12 hours. The company wants to minimize storage costs. Which S3 storage class is the most cost-effective for this use case?

A development team is building a DynamoDB table to store user session data. Each user can have multiple active sessions. The team needs to query all active sessions for a specific user efficiently. They also need to query sessions by expiration time across all users to clean up expired sessions. Which table design supports both access patterns?

A company runs a web application on EC2 instances. The application stores user-uploaded images on the instance's root EBS volume. The operations team wants to ensure that images are not lost if an instance is terminated. Which TWO changes should the team make? (Select TWO.)Select multiple

A solutions architect needs to configure an SQS queue for a payment processing application. Messages that fail processing after three attempts should be moved to a separate queue for manual investigation. Which SQS feature should the architect configure?

A company is designing a decoupled, event-driven architecture for an e-commerce platform. When a customer places an order, the following must happen independently and in parallel: the inventory service deducts stock, the payment service charges the customer, and the shipping service schedules delivery. Each service processes at a different speed, and a temporary failure in one service must not block the others. The architecture must also handle failed messages gracefully. Which architecture meets all of these requirements? (Select THREE.)Select multiple