AWS Certified Solutions Architect - ProfessionalPreview

You have recently joined a startup company building sensors to measure street noise and air quality in urban areas. The company has been running a pilot deployment of around 100 sensors for 3 months each sensor uploads 1KB of sensor data every minute to a backend hosted on AWS.
During the pilot, you measured a peak or 10 IOPS on the database, and you stored an average of 3GB of sensor data per month in the database.
The current deployment consists of a load-balanced auto scaled Ingestion layer using EC2 instances and a PostgreSQL RDS database with 500GB standard storage.
The pilot is considered a success and your CEO has managed to get the attention or some potential investors. The business plan requires a deployment of at least 100K sensors which needs to be supported by the backend. You also need to store sensor data for at least two years to be able to compare year over year
Improvements.
To secure funding, you have to make sure that the platform meets these requirements and leaves room for further scaling.
Which setup win meet the requirements?

A hybrid network architecture must be used during a company's multi-year data center migration from multiple private data centers to AWS. The current data centers are linked together with private fiber. Due to unique legacy applications, NAT cannot be used. During the migration period, many applications will need access to other applications in both the data centers and AWS.
Which option offers a hybrid network architecture that is secure and highly available, that allows for high bandwidth and a multi-region deployment post-migration?

A company's data center is connected to the AWS Cloud over a minimally used 10 Gbps AWS Direct Connect connection with a private virtual interface to its virtual private cloud (VPC). The company internet connection is 200 Mbps, and the company has a 150 TB dataset that is created each Friday. The data must be transferred and available in Amazon S3 on Monday morning.
Which is the LEAST expensive way to meet the requirements while allowing for data transfer growth?

A company manages more than 200 separate internet-facing web applications. All of the applications are deployed to AWS in a single AWS Region. The fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) of all of the applications are made available through HTTPS using Application Load Balancers (ALBs). The ALBs are configured to use public SSL/TLS certificates.
A Solutions Architect needs to migrate the web applications to a multi-region architecture. All HTTPS services should continue to work without interruption.
Which approach meets these requirements?

A company is using AWS to run an internet-facing production application written in Node.js. The Development team is responsible for pushing new versions of their software directly to production. The application software is updated multiple times a day. The team needs guidance from a Solutions Architect to help them deploy the software to the production fleet quickly and with the least amount of disruption to the service.
Which option meets these requirements?

A company is migrating an application to AWS. It wants to use fully managed services as much as possible during the migration. The company needs to store large, important documents within the application with the following requirements:
✑ The data must be highly durable and available.
✑ The data must always be encrypted at rest and in transit.
✑ The encryption key must be managed by the company and rotated periodically.
Which of the following solutions should the Solutions Architect recommend?

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?

A company is building a voting system for a popular TV show, viewers win watch the performances then visit the show's website to vote for their favorite performer. It is expected that in a short period of time after the show has finished the site will receive millions of visitors. The visitors will first login to the site using their Amazon.com credentials and then submit their vote. After the voting is completed the page will display the vote totals. The company needs to build the site such that can handle the rapid influx of traffic while maintaining good performance but also wants to keep costs to a minimum.
Which of the design patterns below should they use?

A company is running a batch analysis every hour on their main transactional DB, running on an RDS MySQL instance, to populate their central Data Warehouse running on Redshift. During the execution of the batch, their transactional applications are very slow. When the batch completes they need to update the top management dashboard with the new data. The dashboard is produced by another system running on-premises that is currently started when a manually-sent email notifies that an update is required. The on-premises system cannot be modified because is managed by another team.
How would you optimize this scenario to solve performance issues and automate the process as much as possible?

A company runs a legacy system on a single m4.2xlarge Amazon EC2 instance with Amazon EBS storage. The EC2 instance runs both the web server and a self- managed Oracle database. A snapshot is made of the EBS volume every 12 hours, and an AMI was created from the fully configured EC2 instance.
A recent event that terminated the EC2 instance led to several hours of downtime. The application was successfully launched from the AMI, but the age of the
EBS snapshot and the repair of the database resulted in the loss of 8 hours of data. The system was also down for 4 hours while the Systems Operators manually performed these processes.
What architectural changes will minimize downtime and reduce the chance of lost data?

A company has created an account for individual Development teams, resulting in a total of 200 accounts. All accounts have a single virtual private cloud (VPC) in a single region with multiple microservices running in Docker containers that need to communicate with microservices in other accounts. The Security team requirements state that these microservices must not traverse the public internet, and only certain internal services should be allowed to call other individual services. If there is any denied network traffic for a service, the Security team must be notified of any denied requests, including the source IP.
How can connectivity be established between service while meeting the security requirements?

A media storage application uploads user photos to Amazon S3 for processing. End users are reporting that some uploaded photos are not being processed properly. The Application Developers trace the logs and find that AWS Lambda is experiencing execution issues when thousands of users are on the system simultaneously. Issues are caused by:
✑ Limits around concurrent executions.
✑ The performance of Amazon DynamoDB when saving data.
Which actions can be taken to increase the performance and reliability of the application? (Choose two.)

A company operates a group of imaging satellites. The satellites stream data to one of the company's ground stations where processing creates about 5 GB of images per minute. This data is added to network-attached storage, where 2 PB of data are already stored.
The company runs a website that allows its customers to access and purchase the images over the Internet. This website is also running in the ground station.
Usage analysis shows that customers are most likely to access images that have been captured in the last 24 hours.
The company would like to migrate the image storage and distribution system to AWS to reduce costs and increase the number of customers that can be served.
Which AWS architecture and migration strategy will meet these requirements?

A company ingests and processes streaming market data. The data rate is constant. A nightly process that calculates aggregate statistics is run, and each execution takes about 4 hours to complete. The statistical analysis is not mission critical to the business, and previous data points are picked up on the next execution if a particular run fails.
The current architecture uses a pool of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances with 1-year reservations running full time to ingest and store the streaming data in attached Amazon EBS volumes. On-Demand EC2 instances are launched each night to perform the nightly processing, accessing the stored data from NFS shares on the ingestion servers, and terminating the nightly processing servers when complete. The Reserved Instance reservations are expiring, and the company needs to determine whether to purchase new reservations or implement a new design.
Which is the most cost-effective design?

A three-tier web application runs on Amazon EC2 instances. Cron daemons are used to trigger scripts that collect the web server, application, and database logs and send them to a centralized location every hour. Occasionally, scaling events or unplanned outages have caused the instances to stop before the latest logs were collected, and the log files were lost.
Which of the following options is the MOST reliable way of collecting and preserving the log files?

An e-commerce company is revamping its IT infrastructure and is planning to use AWS services. The company's CIO has asked a Solutions Architect to design a simple, highly available, and loosely coupled order processing application. The application is responsible for receiving and processing orders before storing them in an Amazon DynamoDB table. The application has a sporadic traffic pattern and should be able to scale during marketing campaigns to process the orders with minimal delays.
Which of the following is the MOST reliable approach to meet the requirements?

A Solutions Architect is redesigning an image-viewing and messaging platform to be delivered as SaaS. Currently, there is a farm of virtual desktop infrastructure
(VDI) that runs a desktop image-viewing application and a desktop messaging application. Both applications use a shared database to manage user accounts and sharing. Users log in from a web portal that launches the applications and streams the view of the application on the user's machine. The Development Operations team wants to move away from using VDI and wants to rewrite the application.
What is the MOST cost-effective architecture that offers both security and ease of management?

A Solutions Architect must update an application environment within AWS Elastic Beanstalk using a blue/green deployment methodology. The Solutions Architect creates an environment that is identical to the existing application environment and deploys the application to the new environment.
What should be done next to complete the update?

A bank is re-architecting its mainframe-based credit card approval processing application to a cloud-native application on the AWS cloud.
The new application will receive up to 1,000 requests per second at peak load. There are multiple steps to each transaction, and each step must receive the result of the previous step. The entire request must return an authorization response within less than 2 seconds with zero data loss. Every request must receive a response. The solution must be Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)-compliant.
Which option will meet all of the bank's objectives with the LEAST complexity and LOWEST cost while also meeting compliance requirements?

A company runs its containerized batch jobs on Amazon ECS. The jobs are scheduled by submitting a container image, a task definition, and the relevant data to an Amazon S3 bucket. Container images may be unique per job. Running the jobs as quickly as possible is of utmost importance, so submitting job artifacts to the
S3 bucket triggers the job to run immediately. Sometimes there may be no jobs running at all. However, jobs of any size can be submitted with no prior warning to the IT Operations team. Job definitions include CPU and memory resource requirements.
What solution will allow the batch jobs to complete as quickly as possible after being scheduled?

A company runs an IoT platform on AWS. IoT sensors in various locations send data to the company's Node.js API servers on Amazon EC2 instances running behind an Application Load Balancer. The data is stored in an Amazon RDS MySQL DB instance that uses a 4 TB General Purpose SSD volume.
The number of sensors the company has deployed in the field has increased over time, and is expected to grow significantly. The API servers are consistently overloaded and RDS metrics show high write latency.
Which of the following steps together will resolve the issues permanently and enable growth as new sensors are provisioned, while keeping this platform cost- efficient? (Choose two.)

A Solutions Architect is designing a system that will collect and store data from 2,000 internet-connected sensors. Each sensor produces 1 KB of data every second. The data must be available for analysis within a few seconds of it being sent to the system and stored for analysis indefinitely.
Which is the MOST cost-effective solution for collecting and storing the data?

A company has decided to move some workloads onto AWS to create a grid environment to run market analytics. The grid will consist of many similar instances, spun-up by a job-scheduling function. Each time a large analytics workload is completed, a new VPC is deployed along with job scheduler and grid nodes. Multiple grids could be running in parallel.
Key requirements are:
✑ Grid instances must communicate with Amazon S3 to retrieve data to be processed.
✑ Grid instances must communicate with Amazon DynamoDB to track intermediate data.
✑ The job scheduler needs only to communicate with the Amazon EC2 API to start new grid nodes.
A key requirement is that the environment has no access to the internet, either directly or via the on-premises proxy. However, the application needs to be able to seamlessly communicate to Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon EC2 API, without the need for reconfiguration for each new deployment.
Which of the following should the Solutions Architect do to achieve this target architecture? (Choose three.)

A group of Amazon EC2 instances have been configured as a high performance computing (HPC) cluster. The instances are running in a placement group, and are able to communicate with each other at network speeds of up to 20 Gbps.
The cluster needs to communicate with a control EC2 instance outside of the placement group. The control instance has the same instance type and AMI as the other instances, and is configured with a public IP address.
How can the Solutions Architect improve the network speeds between the control instance and the instances in the placement group?