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AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional practice questions

214 free questions with answers and explanations.

Practice test
  1. 1.A media company is migrating its video streaming platform to AWS. The platform relies on a highly available, low-latency key-value store for user session data and content metadata. The existing on-premises solution uses a sharded Redis cluster. The company needs to replicate this functionality in AWS with minimal operational overhead and maximum performance, while ensuring data durability. Which AWS service would be the MOST appropriate choice?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  2. 2.A global online learning platform serves video content to millions of users worldwide. The current architecture stores video files in an Amazon S3 bucket, and users access them directly. Customers in geographically distant regions report high latency and buffering during video playback, especially during peak hours. The company wants to improve the user experience by reducing latency and increasing content delivery speed globally. Which AWS service should a Solutions Architect recommend to achieve this MOST cost-effectively and efficiently?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  3. 3.A global manufacturing company operates a critical enterprise resource planning (ERP) application on-premises. The application is a monolithic C#/.NET application running on Windows Server with a Microsoft SQL Server database. The company wants to migrate this application to AWS quickly, with minimal changes to the application code or architecture, to reduce operational overhead and improve infrastructure scalability. Which migration strategy and AWS services should a Solutions Architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  4. 4.An online gaming company's backend microservices communicate synchronously, leading to cascading failures when a single service experiences high load or downtime. This results in poor user experience, including game freezes and disconnections. The company wants to improve the resilience and scalability of its microservices architecture, decouple services, and handle peak loads gracefully, without requiring real-time responses for all operations. Which architectural improvement should a Solutions Architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  5. 5.A large e-commerce company operates a monolithic application on Amazon EC2 instances that experiences performance bottlenecks during peak sales events, leading to customer dissatisfaction and lost revenue. The application relies on a single, large relational database. The company wants to improve scalability and resilience without a complete rewrite of the core business logic. Which architectural improvement should a solutions architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  6. 6.A global enterprise has several applications deployed on Amazon EC2 instances within a single VPC. They need to enforce strict outbound traffic filtering rules, such as blocking access to specific malicious IP addresses, preventing data exfiltration to unauthorized domains, and inspecting all egress traffic for compliance. The current solution uses security groups and network ACLs, which are insufficient for deep packet inspection and URL-based filtering. The company requires a centralized, managed solution that can be applied across all subnets in the VPC without deploying and managing individual proxy servers or firewalls on each EC2 instance. Which AWS service should the Solutions Architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  7. 7.A large enterprise is planning to migrate hundreds of on-premises applications to AWS. The applications vary widely in complexity, from simple web servers to monolithic enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems with tightly coupled databases. The enterprise's primary goal is to minimize downtime during migration and optimize costs post-migration. They have a limited internal team with AWS expertise. Which migration strategy should the enterprise prioritize for the majority of its applications to achieve these goals efficiently?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  8. 8.A startup is building a new real-time analytics platform. Their existing data ingestion pipeline uses Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to collect high-volume, high-velocity streaming data. They need to perform continuous SQL queries on these fast-moving data streams to generate real-time dashboards and trigger alerts based on specific data patterns, without managing any underlying servers or infrastructure. The solution must be highly available and scalable to handle spikes in data volume. Which AWS service should a Solutions Architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  9. 9.A financial institution uses an on-premises data warehouse that struggles to scale with increasing data volumes and query complexity, leading to batch processing delays. They want to migrate to AWS to improve performance and enable real-time analytics capabilities. The solution must support petabyte-scale data, complex SQL queries, and integrate with existing business intelligence (BI) tools. Which AWS service is the most appropriate for this requirement?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  10. 10.A global e-commerce company uses Amazon S3 for storing product images, videos, and customer-uploaded content. They have millions of objects, and their data analysts frequently need to understand the total storage size per prefix, object count, and last modified date for auditing and cost optimization. Manually listing objects with the AWS CLI or S3 console is time-consuming and often hits API rate limits. The company requires an automated, daily report that provides a comprehensive, unthrottled view of their S3 object metadata. Which AWS service should the Solutions Architect recommend to achieve this?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  11. 11.A startup is building a new real-time analytics platform. Their existing data ingestion pipeline uses Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. They need to perform continuous, low-latency processing of streaming data to derive insights within seconds, such as anomaly detection and real-time dashboards. Which AWS service should they use to efficiently process this streaming data?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  12. 12.A large pharmaceutical company has a massive archive of research data (petabytes) stored on-premises on magnetic tapes. This data is rarely accessed but must be retained for regulatory compliance for decades. The company wants to migrate this archive to AWS to reduce physical storage costs and improve long-term durability. Access times for retrieval can be several hours, but the cost must be absolutely minimized. How should the company migrate and store this data in AWS?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  13. 13.A healthcare provider operates a critical patient record application on-premises. The application experiences frequent downtime due to hardware failures and requires significant manual effort for patching and maintenance. The provider wants to migrate this application to AWS to improve availability, reduce operational burden, and meet strict compliance requirements (e.g., HIPAA). The solution must ensure high availability across multiple Availability Zones, automated patching, and robust data encryption at rest and in transit. Which combination of AWS services should a solutions architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  14. 14.A global enterprise uses AWS Organizations to manage multiple AWS accounts. They need to enforce strict compliance and security policies across all accounts, including preventing users from launching EC2 instances in unsupported regions and ensuring that all S3 buckets are encrypted by default. These policies must be applied consistently to newly created accounts and existing ones, without exceptions. Which AWS service should the Solutions Architect recommend to implement these guardrails?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  15. 15.A company is migrating a complex, multi-tier enterprise application from on-premises to AWS. The application uses Microsoft SQL Server as its database backend and requires high performance and availability. The company wants to leverage AWS managed services to reduce the operational burden of database administration, while also ensuring compatibility with their existing SQL Server tools and expertise. Which AWS database service should be chosen?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  16. 16.A financial institution processes millions of transactions daily. Their existing on-premises data warehouse struggles to ingest and process data fast enough to provide near real-time analytics for fraud detection. The current batch processing system has a latency of several hours, making it ineffective for identifying fraudulent activities as they occur. The company needs a highly scalable, fully managed data analytics platform on AWS that can ingest and process high-volume, streaming transaction data with sub-second latency, allowing for immediate fraud detection. Which AWS service combination should the Solutions Architect recommend to build this real-time data platform?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  17. 17.A global e-commerce company uses Amazon S3 for storing product images, videos, and customer-uploaded content. With petabytes of data, they need a way to regularly audit and report on the objects stored in their buckets, including metadata, object size, and encryption status, for compliance and cost optimization. The current method of listing objects using the S3 API is too slow and expensive for their scale. Which AWS service should the Solutions Architect recommend to efficiently gather this information?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  18. 18.A large enterprise has several applications deployed on Amazon EC2 instances within a single VPC. These applications frequently communicate with each other, but the current network configuration relies heavily on security groups, which have become complex and difficult to manage as the number of applications grows. The enterprise wants to improve its network security posture by implementing a more centralized and granular traffic inspection and filtering mechanism. The solution must provide visibility into inter-application traffic and allow for dynamic policy updates without modifying individual application security groups. Which AWS service should be used to achieve this?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  19. 19.A global manufacturing company has an existing data processing pipeline that relies on a self-managed Apache Spark cluster running on-premises. This cluster is difficult to scale, prone to resource contention, and requires significant operational effort for patching, monitoring, and maintenance. The company wants to migrate their Spark workloads to AWS to improve scalability, reduce operational overhead, and leverage a fully managed service for big data processing. They need a solution that is compatible with their existing Spark jobs and can easily integrate with Amazon S3 for data storage. Which AWS service should the Solutions Architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  20. 20.A global manufacturing company has an existing data processing pipeline that relies on a single, large Apache Spark cluster running on Amazon EC2 instances. This cluster is over-provisioned to handle peak loads, leading to high costs during off-peak times. The company wants to optimize costs and improve efficiency by dynamically scaling resources based on workload demands. The solution must support Spark workloads and allow for granular control over compute resources. Which architectural change should the solutions architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  21. 21.A global media company uses AWS Organizations to manage multiple accounts. They want to ensure that all accounts within a specific Organizational Unit (OU) adhere to strict security policies, such as disallowing the creation of IAM users with administrative permissions and preventing the use of unapproved AWS regions. These policies must be enforced at the account level, regardless of the IAM permissions granted to individual users or roles within those accounts. Which AWS service or feature should a Solutions Architect recommend to implement these preventative controls?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  22. 22.A company has several legacy applications running on Windows Server 2008 R2, which is approaching end-of-life support. These applications have strict dependencies on specific Windows features and cannot be easily re-platformed to newer Windows Server versions or Linux. The company wants to migrate these applications to AWS to reduce on-premises infrastructure costs and improve operational resilience, without extensive re-architecture. Which migration strategy and service should be used?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  23. 23.A financial institution needs to migrate a critical, high-transactional database (20 TB) from an on-premises Oracle Exadata cluster to AWS. The migration must achieve near-zero downtime and maintain data consistency throughout the process. After migration, the database needs to scale elastically and be highly available. Which AWS service and strategy should be used to meet these requirements?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  24. 24.A large enterprise has several applications deployed on Amazon EC2 instances within a single VPC. The security team has identified a need to implement granular network traffic inspection and filtering at the VPC boundary for both inbound and outbound traffic, including stateful inspection, intrusion prevention (IPS), and intrusion detection (IDS). This must be centrally managed and applied consistently across multiple subnets and workloads, without requiring the deployment and management of individual security appliances on EC2 instances. Which AWS service should a Solutions Architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  25. 25.A manufacturing company has an on-premises Hadoop cluster used for big data analytics. They want to migrate this workload to AWS to leverage cloud scalability and reduce operational costs associated with managing the cluster. The company prefers a managed service approach to minimize administrative overhead. Which AWS service should they use for this migration?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  26. 26.A global media company plans to modernize its existing content transcoding pipeline. The current system uses on-premises servers that are often underutilized outside peak hours but struggle to keep up during major live events, leading to delays. The goal is to achieve extreme scalability, pay only for actual processing time, and minimize operational overhead. Which AWS modernization strategy and service combination should be recommended?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  27. 27.A global enterprise has a legacy application that stores sensitive customer data in a database on an EC2 instance. The database is encrypted using a self-managed key on the EC2 instance, which is cumbersome to rotate and audit. The enterprise wants to migrate this database to a fully managed service on AWS to improve security posture, simplify key management, and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements (e.g., GDPR, PCI DSS). Which solution should a solutions architect recommend for the database and key management?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  28. 28.A financial services company is migrating a legacy batch processing application to AWS. The application performs complex calculations on large datasets, takes several hours to complete, and runs only once a day. The company wants to optimize costs and minimize the operational burden of managing underlying infrastructure while ensuring the jobs complete reliably. Which AWS service combination is MOST appropriate for this migration?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  29. 29.A large manufacturing company is migrating its legacy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to AWS. The ERP system relies heavily on a tightly coupled, synchronous messaging pattern for inter-service communication and has strict requirements for message ordering and delivery guarantees. The company wants to modernize this communication layer to a cloud-native solution without rewriting the entire ERP application immediately. Which AWS service would best meet these requirements?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  30. 30.A global e-commerce company is modernizing its customer identity and access management (CIAM) system. The existing system is an on-premises LDAP directory that supports millions of users and high authentication rates, especially during peak sales events. The company wants to migrate this system to AWS, leveraging a fully managed service that can scale to handle extreme loads while maintaining compatibility with their existing applications that rely on LDAP. Which AWS service should the company choose for this migration?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  31. 31.A global manufacturing company has an existing data processing pipeline that relies on a self-managed Apache Spark cluster running on-premises. The cluster is difficult to scale, costly to maintain, and experiences frequent resource contention, leading to delayed data analytics. The company wants to migrate this workload to AWS to improve scalability, reduce operational overhead, and accelerate data processing. Which AWS service should they use for their Spark workloads?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  32. 32.An online gaming company's backend microservices communicate synchronously, leading to cascading failures when a single service experiences high load or becomes unavailable. The company wants to improve the system's resilience and scalability by decoupling these services. Which AWS service should they integrate to facilitate asynchronous communication between microservices?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  33. 33.A software development company is migrating its CI/CD pipeline from an on-premises Jenkins server to AWS. The company requires a fully managed solution that integrates seamlessly with source control (AWS CodeCommit), provides automated build and test capabilities, and supports continuous deployment to various AWS environments (e.g., EC2, Lambda, ECS). The solution must also allow for custom build environments using Docker images. Which AWS service combination is the MOST suitable for this modernization?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  34. 34.A global manufacturing company is modernizing its on-premises data processing pipeline. The current pipeline uses a proprietary scheduling system and processes large batches of data daily, taking several hours to complete. The company wants to move this workload to AWS, improve scalability, reduce operational overhead, and allow for more dynamic, event-driven processing without a complete re-architecture of the core processing logic. Which AWS service combination offers the MOST effective modernization strategy?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  35. 35.A global manufacturing company is modernizing its on-premises data processing pipeline. The pipeline involves several sequential steps: data ingestion, data transformation, and data loading into a data warehouse. Each step is implemented as a separate, long-running application. The company needs a fully managed solution to orchestrate these steps, handle retries, manage dependencies, and provide clear visibility into the overall workflow execution. Which AWS service should be used for orchestration?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  36. 36.A global online learning platform serves video content to millions of users worldwide. The current architecture serves videos directly from Amazon S3. Users in geographically distant regions experience high latency and buffering issues, leading to a poor user experience. The company wants to improve content delivery performance, reduce latency for global users, and offload traffic from their S3 bucket to optimize costs. Which AWS service should the Solutions Architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  37. 37.A large e-commerce company operates a legacy order processing system that frequently experiences outages during peak sales events, leading to significant lost revenue. The system is a monolithic application running on a single, oversized on-premises server. The company wants to migrate this system to AWS to improve reliability, scalability, and reduce operational overhead, but they cannot afford a complete rewrite due to business-critical deadlines. They need a solution that allows for incremental modernization while keeping the existing system operational during the transition. Which approach should the Solutions Architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  38. 38.A research institution is migrating a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster to AWS. The cluster consists of tightly coupled applications that require ultra-low latency networking (sub-millisecond) and high inter-node bandwidth for inter-process communication (MPI). The existing on-premises cluster uses InfiniBand interconnects. Which AWS EC2 instance type and networking feature combination BEST meets these demanding requirements?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  39. 39.A global media company is modernizing its on-premises content delivery network (CDN) to AWS. The existing CDN relies on a custom-built caching layer that serves petabytes of video content globally. The company wants to ensure low-latency access for viewers worldwide, minimize data transfer costs out of AWS, and maintain fine-grained control over caching behavior, including invalidation strategies. Which combination of AWS services should the company use to achieve these goals?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  40. 40.A global manufacturing company has an existing data processing pipeline that relies on a self-managed Apache Spark cluster running on Amazon EC2 instances. The cluster requires constant monitoring, manual scaling adjustments, and patching, leading to high operational overhead and occasional resource bottlenecks during peak processing times. The company wants to improve the agility and cost-efficiency of its data processing by migrating to a fully managed, scalable, and serverless Spark solution on AWS. The solution must support existing Spark jobs without significant code changes. Which AWS service should a Solutions Architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  41. 41.An enterprise is performing a large-scale migration of legacy Windows Server applications to AWS. Many of these applications have hardcoded IP addresses or rely on specific DNS names that are currently managed by an on-premises Active Directory and DNS infrastructure. The enterprise wants to maintain these existing hostnames and IP addresses during the migration to minimize application refactoring while moving to a fully managed DNS solution in AWS. Which approach BEST facilitates this requirement?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  42. 42.A financial institution uses an on-premises data warehouse for its analytics and reporting needs. The data warehouse struggles to scale with increasing data volumes and query complexity, leading to slow report generation and frustrated business users. Maintaining the infrastructure and licenses is also becoming prohibitively expensive. The institution wants to migrate to a fully managed, cost-effective, and scalable cloud-native data warehousing solution on AWS that can handle petabytes of data and complex analytical queries efficiently. Which AWS service is the MOST appropriate for this requirement?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  43. 43.A large e-commerce company operates a monolithic application on Amazon EC2 instances that processes millions of customer orders daily. The application is experiencing frequent performance bottlenecks during peak sales events, leading to slow order processing and customer dissatisfaction. The company wants to incrementally modernize the application without a complete rewrite, focusing on the order processing module first. The new order processing module will be developed as a microservice. Which architectural pattern should the company adopt to integrate the new microservice with the existing monolith while ensuring continuous operation?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  44. 44.A global manufacturing company operates a critical enterprise resource planning (ERP) application on-premises, using a proprietary database and application server. The application is essential for daily operations, but its infrastructure is aging, making it difficult to patch, scale, and recover from failures. The company wants to migrate this ERP system to AWS to improve reliability, reduce maintenance burden, and enable future innovation, but they have a strict requirement that the application and database must remain tightly coupled and managed as a single unit, similar to their current setup, to simplify operations and support. A full re-architecture into microservices is not an immediate option. Which AWS migration strategy should the Solutions Architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  45. 45.A company is migrating a critical, high-performance web application to AWS. The application uses a custom caching layer that stores session data and frequently accessed database query results. The company wants to modernize this caching layer to be highly available, scalable, and fully managed to reduce operational overhead. Which AWS service should be used?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  46. 46.A global manufacturing company operates a critical enterprise resource planning (ERP) application on-premises. The application is highly sensitive to latency and requires high availability. The company wants to migrate this application to AWS while minimizing downtime during the migration and ensuring business continuity. The current database is a commercial relational database. What is the MOST appropriate strategy for migrating this application and its database to AWS?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  47. 47.A media company has an existing video transcoding workflow that uses on-premises servers. This workflow is inefficient, with long processing times, and requires manual scaling to handle fluctuating demand. The company wants to migrate this workflow to AWS to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and achieve dynamic scalability. The solution must support various video formats, prioritize urgent transcoding jobs, and integrate with existing storage in Amazon S3. Which AWS services should be used to design this improved workflow?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  48. 48.A global healthcare provider operates a critical patient record application on-premises. The application is a monolithic Java application with a PostgreSQL database. The provider wants to migrate this application to AWS to improve scalability and reliability, but they have a strict requirement that the application must remain highly available during the migration with minimal downtime. They also need to ensure data consistency between the on-premises and AWS environments throughout the migration. Which approach should the Solutions Architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  49. 49.A global enterprise has a legacy application that stores sensitive customer data in a database on an Amazon EC2 instance. The company's security policy requires that all sensitive data at rest and in transit must be encrypted with customer-managed keys, and these keys must be rotated annually. The current setup uses AWS-managed encryption keys for EBS volumes and S3 buckets. The company needs to implement a solution that provides full control over the encryption keys, allows auditability of key usage, and supports mandatory annual key rotation for all new and existing data stores. Which AWS service, combined with existing services, should a Solutions Architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  50. 50.A logistics company uses a legacy batch processing system that runs on an on-premises server. This system processes daily shipping manifests, taking several hours to complete and often failing due to resource constraints. The company wants to migrate this workload to AWS to improve reliability, scalability, and reduce operational overhead. The solution must ensure that jobs can be retried automatically on failure and scale compute resources based on the number of manifests to process. Which AWS services should be used together to meet these requirements?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions