AWS Solutions Architect Associate - Architectures

Your website TriangleSunglasses.com is hosted on a fleet of EC2 instances managed by an Auto Scaling Group and fronted by an Application Load Balancer. Your ASG has been configured to scale on-demand based on the traffic going to your website. To reduce costs, you have configured the ASG to scale based on the traffic going through the ALB. To make the solution highly available, you have updated your ASG and set the minimum capacity to 2. How can you further reduce the costs while respecting the requirements?

• Remove the ALB and use an Elastic IP instead

• Reserve two EC2 instances

• Reduce the minimum capacity to 1

• Reduce the minimum capacity to 0

Answer explanation

This is the way to save further costs as we will run 2 EC2 instances no matter what.

Which of the following will NOT help us while designing a STATELESS application tier?

• Store session data in Amazon RDS

• Store session data in Amazon ElastiCache

• Store session data in the client HTTP cookies

• Store session data on EBS volumes

Answer explanation

EBS volumes are created in a specific AZ and can only be attached to one EC2 instance at a time.

You want to install software updates on 100s of Linux EC2 instances you manage. You want to store these updates on shared storage which should be dynamically loaded on the EC2 instances and shouldn't require heavy operations. What do you suggest?

• Store the software updates on EBS and sync them using data replication software from one master in each AZ

• Store the software updates on EFS and mount EFS as a network drive at startup

• Package the software updates as an EBS snapshot and create EBS volumes for each new software update

• Store the software updates on Amazon RDS

Answer explanation

EFS is a network file system (NFS) that allows you to mount the same file system to 100s of EC2 instances. Storing software updates on an EFS allows each EC2 instance to access them.

As a Solutions Architect, you plan to migrate a complex ERP software suite to AWS Cloud. You want to host the software on a set of Linux EC2 instances managed by an Auto Scaling Group. The software usually takes over an hour to set up on a Linux machine. How do you recommend speeding up the installation process during a scale-out event?

• Use a Golden AMI

• Bootstrap using EC2 User Data

• Store the application in Amazon RDS

• Retrieve the application setup files from EFS

Answer explanation

Golden AMI is an image that contains all your software installed and configured so that future EC2 instances can boot up quickly from that AMI.

You're developing an application and would like to deploy it to Elastic Beanstalk with minimal cost. You should run it in ________.

• Single Instance Mode

• High Availability Mode

Answer explanation

The question mentions that you're still in the development stage and you want to reduce costs. Single Instance Mode will create one EC2 instance and one Elastic IP.

You're deploying your application to an Elastic Beanstalk environment but notice that the deployment process is painfully slow. After reviewing the logs, you found that your dependencies are resolved on each EC2 instance each time you deploy. How can you speed up the deployment process with minimal impact?

• Remove some dependencies in your code

• Place the dependencies in Amazon EFS

• Create a Golden AMI that contains the dependencies and use that image to launch the EC2 instances

Answer explanation

Golden AMI is an image that contains all your software, dependencies, and configurations, so that future EC2 instances can boot up quickly from that AMI.

A startup company plans to run its application on AWS. As a solutions architect, the company hired you to design and implement a fully Serverless REST API. Which technology stack do you recommend?

• • API Gateway + AWS Lambda

• • Application Load Balancer + EC2

• • Elastic Container Service (ECS) + Elastic Block Store (EBS)

• • Amazon CloudFront + S3

The following AWS services have an out of the box caching feature, EXCEPT:

• API Gateway

• Lambda

• DynamoDB

Answer explanation

Lambda does not have an out-of-the-box caching feature.

You have a lot of static files stored in an S3 bucket that you want to distribute globally to your users. Which AWS service should you use?

• S3 Cross-Region Replication

• Amazon CloudFront

• Amazon Route 53

• API Gateway

Answer explanation

Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds. This is a perfect use case for Amazon CloudFront.

You created a DynamoDB table in ap-northeast-1 and would like to make it available in eu-west-1, so you decided to create a DynamoDB Global Table. What needs to be enabled first before you create a DynamoDB Global Table?

• DynamoDB Streams

• DynamoDB DAX

• DynamoDB Versioning

• DynamoDB Backups

Answer explanation

DynamoDB Streams enable DynamoDB to get a changelog and use that changelog to replicate data across replica tables in other AWS Regions.