Amazon
SAP-C01 Exam
Questions

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional SAP-C01

Amazon (SAP-C01) Exam Questions And Answers page 81

What action should you take if your on-premises server cannot access the mount target in an unavailable Availability Zone?

Single Choice

Your Application is not highly available, and your on-premises server cannot access the mount target because the Availability Zone (AZ) in which the mount target exists is unavailable.

Which of the following actions is recommended?

The application must implement the checkpoint logic and recreate the mount target.

The application must implement the shutdown logic and delete the mount target in the AZ.

The application must implement the delete logic and connect to a different mount target in the same AZ.

The application must implement the restart logic and connect to a mount target in a different AZ.

Designing highly available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, scalable systems Designing for security and compliance

Do any architecture changes need to be made to maintain high availability with anticipated workload growth?

Single Choice

Your application is using an ELB in front of an Auto Scaling group of web/application servers deployed across two AZs and a Multi-AZ RDS Instance for data persistence.
The database CPU is often above 80% usage and 90% of I/O operations on the database are reads. To improve performance you recently added a single-node Memcached ElastiCache Cluster to cache frequent DB query results. In the next weeks the overall workload is expected to grow by 30%.

Do you need to change anything in the architecture to maintain the high availability or the application with the anticipated additional load? Why?

Yes, you should deploy two Memcached ElastiCache Clusters in different AZs because the RDS instance will not be able to handle the load if the cache node fails.

No, if the cache node fails you can always get the same data from the DB without having any availability impact.

No, if the cache node fails the automated ElastiCache node recovery feature will prevent any availability impact.

Yes, you should deploy the Memcached ElastiCache Cluster with two nodes in the same AZ as the RDS DB master instance to handle the load if one cache node fails.

Designing highly available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, scalable systems Designing enterprise-wide scalable operations on AWS

Correct Answer:

Yes, you should deploy two Memcached ElastiCache Clusters in different AZs because the RDS instance will not be able to handle the load if the cache node fails.

Explanation:

ElastiCache for Memcached
The primary goal of caching is typically to offload reads from your database or other primary data source. In most apps, you have hot spots of data that are regularly queried, but only updated periodically. Think of the front page of a blog or news site, or the top 100 leaderboard in an online game. In this type of case, your app can receive dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of requests for the same data before it's updated again. Having your caching layer handle these queries has several advantages. First, it's considerably cheaper to add an in-memory cache than to scale up to a larger database cluster. Second, an in-memory cache is also easier to scale out, because it's easier to distribute an in-memory cache horizontally than a relational database.
Last, a caching layer provides a request buffer in the event of a sudden spike in usage. If your app or game ends up on the front page of Reddit or the App Store, it's not unheard of to see a spike that is 10 to 100 times your normal application load. Even if you autoscale your application instances, a 10x request spike will likely make your database very unhappy.
Let's focus on ElastiCache for Memcached first, because it is the best fit for a cachingfocused solution. We'll revisit Redis later in the paper, and weigh its advantages and disadvantages.
Architecture with ElastiCache for Memcached
When you deploy an ElastiCache Memcached cluster, it sits in your application as a separate tier alongside your database. As mentioned previously, Amazon ElastiCache does not directly communicate with your database tier, or indeed have any particular knowledge of your database. A simplified deployment for a web application looks something like this:

In this architecture diagram, the Amazon EC2 application instances are in an Auto Scaling group, located behind a load balancer using Elastic Load Balancing, which distributes requests among the instances. As requests come into a given EC2 instance, that EC2 instance is responsible for communicating with ElastiCache and the database tier. For development purposes, you can begin with a single ElastiCache node to test your application, and then scale to additional cluster nodes by modifying the ElastiCache cluster. As you add additional cache nodes, the EC2 application instances are able to distribute cache keys across multiple ElastiCache nodes. The most common practice is to use client-side sharding to distribute keys across cache nodes, which we will discuss later in this paper.

When you launch an ElastiCache cluster, you can choose the Availability Zone(s) that the cluster lives in. For best performance, you should configure your cluster to use the same Availability Zones as your application servers. To launch an ElastiCache cluster in a specific Availability Zone, make sure to specify the Preferred Zone(s) option during cache cluster creation. The Availability Zones that you specify will be where ElastiCache will launch your cache nodes. We recommend that you select Spread Nodes Across Zones, which tells ElastiCache to distribute cache nodes across these zones as evenly as possible. This distribution will mitigate the impact of an Availability Zone disruption on your ElastiCache nodes. The trade-off is that some of the requests from your application to ElastiCache will go to a node in a different Availability Zone, meaning latency will be slightly higher. For more details, refer to Creating a Cache Cluster in the Amazon ElastiCache User Guide.
As mentioned at the outset, ElastiCache can be coupled with a wide variety of databases. Here is an example architecture that uses Amazon DynamoDB instead of Amazon RDS and MySQL:

This combination of DynamoDB and ElastiCache is very popular with mobile and game companies, because DynamoDB allows for higher write throughput at lower cost than traditional relational databases. In addition, DynamoDB uses a key-value access pattern similar to ElastiCache, which also simplifies the programming model. Instead of using relational SQL for the primary database but then key-value patterns for the cache, both the primary database and cache can be programmed similarly. In this architecture pattern, DynamoDB remains the source of truth for data, but application reads are offloaded to ElastiCache for a speed boost.

How to implement a data transformation system with priority for premium customer files on Amazon S3 and spot EC2 instances?

Single Choice

Your application provides data transformation services. Files containing data to be transformed are first uploaded to Amazon S3 and then transformed by a fleet of spot EC2 instances. Files submitted by your premium customers must be transformed with the highest priority.

How should you implement such a system?

Use a DynamoDB table with an attribute defining the priority level. Transformation instances will scan the table for tasks, sorting the results by priority level.

Use Route 53 latency based-routing to send high priority tasks to the closest transformation instances.

Use two SQS queues, one for high priority messages, the other for default priority. Transformation instances first poll the high priority queue; if there is no message, they poll the default priority queue.

Use a single SQS queue. Each message contains the priority level. Transformation instances poll high-priority messages first.

Designing highly available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, scalable systems Designing for security and compliance

How can you develop a cost-effective disaster recovery plan for a 2-tier web application in AWS?

Single Choice

Your company currently has a 2-tier web application running in an on-premises data center. You have experienced several infrastructure failures in the past two months resulting in significant financial losses. Your CIO is strongly agreeing to move the application to AWS. While working on achieving buy-in from the other company executives, he asks you to develop a disaster recovery plan to help improve Business continuity in the short term. He specifies a target Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 4 hours and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 hour or less. He also asks you to implement the solution within 2 weeks.

Your database is 200GB in size and you have a 20Mbps Internet connection. How would you do this while minimizing costs?

Create an EBS backed private AMI which includes a fresh install of your application. Develop a CloudFormation template which includes your AMI and the required EC2, AutoScaling, and ELB resources to support deploying the application across Multiple- Availability-Zones. Asynchronously replicate transactions from your on-premises database to a database instance in AWS across a secure VPN connection.

Deploy your application on EC2 instances within an Auto Scaling group across multiple availability zones. Asynchronously replicate transactions from your on-premises database to a database instance in AWS across a secure VPN connection.

Create an EBS backed private AMI which includes a fresh install of your application. Setup a script in your data center to backup the local database every 1 hour and to encrypt and copy the resulting file to an S3 bucket using multi-part upload.

Install your application on a compute-optimized EC2 instance capable of supporting the application's average load. Synchronously replicate transactions from your on-premises database to a database instance in AWS across a secure Direct Connect connection.

Designing highly available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, scalable systems Designing enterprise-wide scalable operations on AWS

Correct Answer:

Create an EBS backed private AMI which includes a fresh install of your application. Develop a CloudFormation template which includes your AMI and the required EC2, AutoScaling, and ELB resources to support deploying the application across Multiple- Availability-Zones. Asynchronously replicate transactions from your on-premises database to a database instance in AWS across a secure VPN connection.

Explanation:

Overview of Creating Amazon EBS-Backed AMIs
First, launch an instance from an AMI that's similar to the AMI that you'd like to create. You can connect to your instance and customize it. When the instance is configured correctly, ensure data integrity by stopping the instance before you create an AMI, then create the image. When you create an Amazon EBS-backed AMI, we automatically register it for you.
Amazon EC2 powers down the instance before creating the AMI to ensure that everything on the instance is stopped and in a consistent state during the creation process. If you're confident that your instance is in a consistent state appropriate for AMI creation, you can tell Amazon EC2 not to power down and reboot the instance. Some file systems, such as XFS, can freeze and unfreeze activity, making it safe to create the image without rebooting the instance.
During the AMI-creation process, Amazon EC2 creates snapshots of your instance's root volume and any other EBS volumes attached to your instance. If any volumes attached to the instance are encrypted, the new AMI only launches successfully on instances that support Amazon EBS encryption. For more information, see Amazon EBS Encryption.
Depending on the size of the volumes, it can take several minutes for the AMI-creation process to complete (sometimes up to 24 hours). You may find it more efficient to create snapshots of your volumes prior to creating your AMI. This way, only small, incremental snapshots need to be created when the AMI is created, and the process completes more quickly (the total time for snapshot creation remains the same). For more information, see Creating an Amazon EBS Snapshot.
After the process completes, you have a new AMI and snapshot created from the root volume of the instance. When you launch an instance using the new AMI, we create a new EBS volume for its root volume using the snapshot. Both the AMI and the snapshot incur charges to your account until you delete them. For more information, see Deregistering Your AMI.
If you add instance-store volumes or EBS volumes to your instance in addition to the root device volume, the block device mapping for the new AMI contains information for these volumes, and the block device mappings for instances that you launch from the new AMI automatically contain information for these volumes. The instance-store volumes specified in the block device mapping for the new instance are new and don't contain any data from the instance store volumes of the instance you used to create the AMI. The data on EBS volumes persists. For more information, see Block Device Mapping.

How can I improve my application's ability to handle unexpected increases in web traffic?

Single Choice

Your company has an on-premises multi-tier PHP web application, which recently experienced downtime due to a large burst in web traffic due to a company announcement Over the coming days, you are expecting similar announcements to drive similar unpredictable bursts, and are looking to find ways to quickly improve your infrastructures ability to handle unexpected increases in traffic.
The application currently consists of 2 tiers a web tier which consists of a load balancer and several Linux Apache web servers as well as a database tier which hosts a Linux server hosting a MySQL database.

Which scenario below will provide full site functionality, while helping to improve the ability of your application in the short timeframe required?

Failover environment: Create an S3 bucket and configure it for website hosting. Migrate your DNS to Route53 using zone file import, and leverage Route53 DNS failover to failover to the S3 hosted website.

Hybrid environment: Create an AMI, which can be used to launch web servers in EC2. Create an Auto Scaling group, which uses the AMI to scale the web tier based on incoming traffic. Leverage Elastic Load Balancing to balance traffic between on-premises web servers and those hosted in AWS.

Offload traffic from on-premises environment: Setup a CIoudFront distribution, and configure CloudFront to cache objects from a custom origin. Choose to customize your object cache behavior, and select a TTL that objects should exist in cache.

Migrate to AWS: Use VM Import/Export to quickly convert an on-premises web server to an AMI. Create an Auto Scaling group, which uses the imported AMI to scale the web tier based on incoming traffic. Create an RDS read replica and setup replication between the RDS instance and on-premises MySQL server to migrate the database.

Designing highly available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, scalable systems Designing enterprise-wide scalable operations on AWS

How to design a database architecture for a multi-regional logistics software on AWS to optimize cross-regional reports?

Single Choice

Your company has HQ in Tokyo and branch offices all over the world and is using a logistics software with a multi-regional deployment on AWS in Japan, Europe and USA. The logistic software has a 3-tier architecture and currently uses MySQL 5.6 for data persistence. Each region has deployed its own database.
In the HQ region you run an hourly batch process reading data from every region to compute cross-regional reports that are sent by email to all offices this batch process must be completed as fast as possible to quickly optimize logistics.

How do you build the database architecture in order to meet the requirements?

For each regional deployment, use RDS MySQL with a master in the region and a read replica in the HQ region

For each regional deployment, use MySQL on EC2 with a master in the region and send hourly EBS snapshots to the HQ region

For each regional deployment, use RDS MySQL with a master in the region and send hourly RDS snapshots to the HQ region

For each regional deployment, use MySQL on EC2 with a master in the region and use S3 to copy data files hourly to the HQ region

Use Direct Connect to connect all regional MySQL deployments to the HQ region and reduce network latency for the batch process

Designing highly available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, scalable systems Designing enterprise-wide scalable operations on AWS

How can NOC members administer Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Management Console without creating new IAM users?

Single Choice

Your company has recently extended its datacenter into a VPC on AWS to add burst computing capacity as needed Members of your Network Operations Center need to be able to go to the AWS Management Console and administer Amazon EC2 instances as necessary. You don't want to create new IAM users for each NOC member and make those users sign in again to the AWS Management Console.

Which option below will meet the needs for your NOC members?

Use OAuth 2.0 to retrieve temporary AWS security credentials to enable your NOC members to sign in to the AWS Management Console.

Use web Identity Federation to retrieve AWS temporary security credentials to enable your NOC members to sign in to the AWS Management Console.

Use your on-premises SAML 2.0-compliant identity provider (IDP) to grant the NOC members federated access to the AWS Management Console via the AWS single sign-on (SSO) endpoint.

Use your on-premises SAML2.0-compliam identity provider (IDP) to retrieve temporary security credentials to enable NOC members to sign in to the AWS Management Console.

Designing highly available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, scalable systems

What options will support the requirements of a highly available design for a social media site?

Single Choice

Your company hosts a social media site supporting users in multiple countries. You have been asked to provide a highly available design tor the application that leverages multiple regions tor the most recently accessed content and latency sensitive portions of the wet) site The most latency sensitive component of the application involves reading user preferences to support web site personalization and ad selection.

In addition to running your application in multiple regions, which option will support this application s requirements?

Serve user content from S3. CloudFront and use Route53 latency-based routing between ELBs in each region Retrieve user preferences from a local DynamoDB table in each region and leverage SQS to capture changes to user preferences with SOS workers for propagating updates to each table.

Use the S3 Copy API to copy recently accessed content to multiple regions and serve user content from S3. CloudFront with dynamic content and an ELB in each region Retrieve user preferences from an ElasticCache cluster in each region and leverage SNS notifications to propagate user preference changes to a worker node in each region.

Use the S3 Copy API to copy recently accessed content to multiple regions and serve user content from S3 CloudFront and Route53 latency-based routing Between ELBs In each region Retrieve user preferences from a DynamoDB table and leverage SQS to capture changes to user preferences with SOS workers for propagating DynamoDB updates.

Serve user content from S3. CloudFront with dynamic content, and an ELB in each region Retrieve user preferences from an ElastiCache cluster in each region and leverage Simple Workflow (SWF) to manage the propagation of user preferences from a centralized OB to each ElastiCache cluster.

Designing highly available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, scalable systems Designing for security and compliance

How can the architecture be optimized to reduce costs while maintaining security and scalability?

Single Choice

Your company hosts a social media website for storing and sharing documents. The web application allows user to upload large files while resuming and pausing the upload as needed. Currently, files are uploaded to your PHP front end backed by Elastic Load Balancing and an autoscaling fleet of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances that scale upon average of bytes received (NetworkIn). After a file has been uploaded, it is copied to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Amazon EC2 instances use an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role that allows Amazon S3 uploads. Over the last six months, your user base and scale have increased significantly, forcing you to increase the Auto Scaling group s Max parameter a few times. Your CFO is concerned about rising costs and has asked you to adjust the architecture where needed to better optimize costs.

Which architecture change could you introduce to reduce costs and still keep your web application secure and scalable?

Replace the Auto Scaling launch configuration to include c3.8xlarge instances; those instances can potentially yield a network throuthput of 10gbps.

Re-architect your ingest pattern, have the app authenticate against your identity provider, and use your identity provider as a broker fetching temporary AWS credentials from AWS Secure Token Service (GetFederationToken). Securely pass the credentials and S3 endpoint/prefix to your app. Implement client-side logic to directly upload the file to Amazon S3 using the given credentials and S3 prefix.

Re-architect your ingest pattern, and move your web application instances into a VPC public subnet. Attach a public IP address for each EC2 instance (using the Auto Scaling launch configuration settings). Use Amazon Route 53 Round Robin records set and HTTP health check to DNS load balance the app requests; this approach will significantly reduce the cost by bypassing Elastic Load Balancing.

Re-architect your ingest pattern, have the app authenticate against your identity provider, and use your identity provider as a broker fetching temporary AWS credentials from AWS Secure Token Service (GetFederationToken). Securely pass the credentials and S3 endpoint/prefix to your app. Implement client-side logic that used the S3 multipart upload API to directly upload the file to Amazon S3 using the given credentials and S3 prefix.

Designing highly available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, scalable systems Implementing cost control strategies

What are the best approaches to resolve read contention on RDS MySQL in this scenario?

Multiple Choice

Your company is getting ready to do a major public announcement of a social media site on AWS. The website is running on EC2 instances deployed across multiple Availability Zones with a Multi-AZ RDS MySQL Extra Large DB Instance. The site performs a high number of small reads and writes per second and relies on an eventual consistency model. After comprehensive tests you discover that there is read contention on RDS MySQL.

Which are the best approaches to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

Deploy ElastiCache in-memory cache running in each availability zone

Implement sharding to distribute load to multiple RDS MySQL instances

Increase the RDS MySQL Instance size and Implement provisioned IOPS

Add an RDS MySQL read replica in each availability zone

Designing highly available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, scalable systems Designing enterprise-wide scalable operations on AWS

Previous Questions

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Amazon (SAP-C01) Exam Questions And Answers page 81

What action should you take if your on-premises server cannot access the mount target in an unavailable Availability Zone?

Correct Answer:

Explanation:

References:

Comments

Do any architecture changes need to be made to maintain high availability with anticipated workload growth?

Correct Answer:

Explanation:

Comments

How to implement a data transformation system with priority for premium customer files on Amazon S3 and spot EC2 instances?

Comments

How can you develop a cost-effective disaster recovery plan for a 2-tier web application in AWS?

Correct Answer:

Explanation:

Comments

How can I improve my application's ability to handle unexpected increases in web traffic?

Correct Answer:

Explanation:

Comments

How to design a database architecture for a multi-regional logistics software on AWS to optimize cross-regional reports?

Comments

How can NOC members administer Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Management Console without creating new IAM users?

Correct Answer:

References:

Comments

What options will support the requirements of a highly available design for a social media site?

Comments

How can the architecture be optimized to reduce costs while maintaining security and scalability?

Comments

What are the best approaches to resolve read contention on RDS MySQL in this scenario?

Comments

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