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AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional practice questions

214 free questions with answers and explanations.

Practice test
  1. 51.A global e-commerce company experiences seasonal traffic spikes, with order processing rates increasing by 500% during holiday sales events. Their existing application, running on a fixed number of Amazon EC2 instances, frequently becomes overloaded, leading to slow order processing, failed transactions, and frustrated customers. The company wants to improve the application's ability to handle these unpredictable traffic surges automatically and cost-effectively, ensuring consistent performance without manual intervention or over-provisioning resources during off-peak times. Which AWS design principle should the Solutions Architect prioritize to address this challenge?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  2. 52.A global online learning platform serves video content to millions of users worldwide. The platform currently hosts all video assets in a single Amazon S3 bucket, and users directly access these files. During peak hours, users in distant geographical regions experience high latency and buffering, leading to a poor user experience. The company wants to improve content delivery performance, reduce latency for global users, and offload traffic from the S3 origin while minimizing infrastructure management. Which AWS service should the Solutions Architect recommend to address these issues?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  3. 53.A large enterprise has several applications deployed on Amazon EC2 instances within a single VPC. The security team requires granular, centralized network traffic inspection and filtering for both ingress and egress traffic, including stateful inspection and intrusion prevention capabilities, across all subnets and applications in the VPC. They want to simplify network security management and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. Which AWS service should they implement?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  4. 54.A startup is building a new real-time analytics platform. Their existing data ingestion pipeline aggregates data from various sources into a single Amazon Kinesis Data Stream. They need to process this streaming data continuously, perform complex transformations, and load it into an Amazon Redshift data warehouse for reporting. The solution must be fully managed, scale automatically with the data stream volume, and minimize operational overhead. Which service should a solutions architect recommend for processing and transforming the Kinesis Data Stream data before loading it into Redshift?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  5. 55.An online gaming company's backend microservices communicate synchronously via HTTP API calls. During peak gaming events, a single slow microservice can cause a cascading failure, leading to degraded performance or complete outages for the entire system. The company needs to improve the resilience and scalability of its microservices architecture by decoupling these services, ensuring that failures in one service do not impact others, and enabling services to process requests independently and at their own pace. Which AWS messaging service should the Solutions Architect recommend to achieve this asynchronous communication?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  6. 56.A large insurance company is migrating its data warehouse from an on-premises Teradata system to AWS. The current system is petabyte-scale, requires complex SQL queries for business intelligence, and needs to scale compute and storage independently. The company wants to minimize the operational burden of managing the data warehouse infrastructure while ensuring high performance for analytical workloads. Which AWS service is the MOST appropriate for this migration?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  7. 57.A large enterprise is migrating a legacy mainframe application that processes daily batch files containing sensitive customer data. The mainframe generates these files and stores them on Network File System (NFS) shares. The enterprise needs to move these files to AWS for processing by cloud-native applications, ensuring secure, low-latency access from AWS to the NFS shares during a transition period, and eventually migrating the data to Amazon S3. Which AWS service should be used to facilitate this hybrid file storage access?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  8. 58.An e-commerce company is migrating its monolithic application to AWS. The application experiences unpredictable traffic spikes during promotional events. The company wants to break down the monolith into smaller, independently scalable services, with a focus on improving developer agility and reducing infrastructure management overhead. Which modernization approach should be recommended?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  9. 59.A large enterprise is migrating a complex, multi-tier application to AWS. The application currently relies on a Windows Server Active Directory for user authentication and authorization, and it's critical to maintain a seamless user experience during and after the migration. The enterprise wants to minimize operational overhead for directory services on AWS. Which of the following strategies provides the MOST seamless integration with existing Active Directory and minimizes management burden?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  10. 60.A global enterprise has several applications deployed on Amazon EC2 instances within a single VPC. The security team has identified a critical requirement to implement granular, stateful traffic inspection and filtering for all ingress and egress traffic across all VPC subnets, including traffic between subnets. The solution must be centrally managed and easily scalable without deploying and managing individual firewalls on each EC2 instance. Which AWS service should the Solutions Architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  11. 61.A research institution has a large dataset (hundreds of terabytes) stored on-premises that needs to be transferred to Amazon S3 for long-term archiving and occasional analysis. The institution has a 1 Gbps internet connection, but transferring over this connection would take too long and consume excessive bandwidth. The data is not actively changing and can tolerate some latency in the initial transfer. What is the most cost-effective and efficient solution for this one-time bulk transfer?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  12. 62.A global media company uses AWS Organizations to manage multiple accounts. They want to enforce consistent security policies across all accounts, such as requiring encryption for S3 buckets and preventing public access to resources, without manually configuring each account. They also need to ensure that new accounts automatically inherit these policies. Which AWS service combination should be used to achieve this?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  13. 63.An online gaming company's backend microservices communicate synchronously, leading to cascading failures and increased latency during peak player activity. The company wants to improve the resilience and responsiveness of its microservices architecture. Which architectural improvement should a solutions architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  14. 64.A global media company is migrating a large video archive (hundreds of petabytes) from on-premises to AWS. The data is rarely accessed (less than once a year), but when accessed, retrieval times of up to 12 hours are acceptable. The company's primary goal is to minimize storage costs while maintaining data durability. Which Amazon S3 storage class is MOST cost-effective for this scenario?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  15. 65.A large e-commerce company operates a legacy order processing system that frequently experiences performance bottlenecks during peak sales events. The system is a monolithic application running on a single Amazon EC2 instance with a tightly coupled database. The company wants to improve the system's ability to handle high traffic loads efficiently and reliably, without a complete re-write. They also need to ensure that order processing remains available even if backend services are temporarily overloaded. Which solution should a Solutions Architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  16. 66.A global manufacturing company operates a critical enterprise resource planning (ERP) application on-premises. The application uses an Oracle database and several Java-based application servers. The company experiences frequent performance issues, high licensing costs, and challenges with disaster recovery planning for the on-premises infrastructure. They want to migrate this application to AWS, aiming for a fully managed, highly available, and resilient solution with reduced operational overhead and lower licensing costs, while minimizing application code changes. Which combination of AWS services should a Solutions Architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  17. 67.A global e-commerce company is modernizing its monolithic order processing system to a microservices architecture on AWS. The system experiences extreme traffic spikes during sales events, requiring rapid scaling of compute resources. The company wants to minimize infrastructure management and reduce costs associated with idle resources outside peak hours. Which AWS service combination is BEST suited for orchestrating and running these new microservices?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  18. 68.A global software development company is migrating its CI/CD pipeline from an on-premises Jenkins server to AWS. The company needs a fully managed, scalable solution that integrates with its existing Git repository (AWS CodeCommit), automatically builds code, runs tests, and deploys applications to Amazon ECS. The solution must support multiple concurrent builds and deployments. Which AWS service combination provides the MOST integrated and scalable CI/CD pipeline?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  19. 69.An e-commerce company is migrating its monolithic application to AWS. The application currently experiences performance bottlenecks during peak sales events due to a shared database. The company wants to modernize the database layer to improve scalability, reduce latency for read-heavy workloads, and offload the primary database. Which AWS service should be used to address these specific requirements?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  20. 70.A global media company is modernizing its video processing pipeline. The existing on-premises system uses a custom message queue for inter-service communication, but it struggles with scalability and reliability during peak events. The company needs a highly available, scalable, and fully managed messaging solution on AWS that supports ordered message delivery for critical processing steps and allows for message consumption by multiple independent services. Which AWS service should the company choose?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  21. 71.A media company is modernizing its video processing pipeline. The current system relies on a monolithic application running on-premises, using a proprietary queuing system to distribute tasks. The company wants to move to a serverless, event-driven architecture on AWS, replacing the queuing system and enabling asynchronous, scalable processing of video segments. Which AWS service should replace the proprietary queuing system to decouple video processing tasks?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  22. 72.A large pharmaceutical company is planning to migrate its on-premises data lake (petabytes of data) to AWS. The data lake stores sensitive research data that requires strict compliance and security. The company wants to minimize the time taken for the initial bulk data transfer while maintaining data integrity and security. Which AWS service provides the most efficient and secure solution for the initial transfer?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  23. 73.A multinational corporation is migrating hundreds of applications from its on-premises data centers to AWS. These applications are hosted in multiple AWS accounts and VPCs across several regions. The company requires secure, high-bandwidth connectivity between all VPCs and the on-premises network, with simplified network management and centralized control. Which AWS networking solution BEST meets these requirements?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  24. 74.A media company has an existing video transcoding workflow that uses on-premises servers. This setup is struggling to keep up with increasing demand for various video formats and resolutions, leading to long processing queues and missed delivery deadlines. The company wants to migrate this workflow to AWS to achieve high scalability, reduce operational costs, and support a wide range of output formats efficiently. Which AWS service is best suited for migrating and improving this video transcoding process?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  25. 75.A global logistics company uses a legacy batch processing system that runs on an on-premises server. This system processes millions of shipping manifests daily, but it is highly inefficient, takes over 12 hours to complete, and frequently fails, requiring manual restarts. The company wants to modernize this process on AWS to improve reliability, reduce processing time to under 2 hours, and minimize operational overhead, while also ensuring that failed jobs can be automatically retried and monitored effectively. Which combination of AWS services should the Solutions Architect recommend for this modernized batch processing workflow?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  26. 76.A global media company uses AWS Organizations to manage multiple accounts. They want to ensure that all data stored in Amazon S3 buckets across all accounts is encrypted at rest using server-side encryption with AWS Key Management Service (SSE-KMS) and that encryption cannot be disabled for any new or existing S3 objects. They also need to restrict access to S3 buckets only from specific VPC endpoints. What is the MOST efficient way to enforce these security requirements across all organizational accounts?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  27. 77.A company is migrating a legacy application that relies heavily on shared file storage accessible via NFS. The application needs to be modernized to run on Amazon EC2 instances and potentially containerized in the future. The solution must provide high availability, scalability, and maintain the file-system interface. Which AWS service should be used for the shared file storage?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  28. 78.A research institution has a large dataset (hundreds of terabytes) stored on-premises that needs to be transferred to Amazon S3 for long-term archival and occasional analysis. The institution has limited internet bandwidth, making direct online transfer impractical. The data transfer must be highly secure and verifiable. Which AWS service is the MOST suitable for this data migration?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  29. 79.A global media company is migrating a large video archive (hundreds of petabytes) from on-premises tape libraries to AWS. The archive is rarely accessed, but when it is, retrieval must be possible within a few hours. Cost optimization for storage is the primary concern, followed by reliable retrieval. Which AWS storage service and strategy should be employed?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  30. 80.A financial institution uses an on-premises data warehouse that struggles to scale with increasing data volumes and query complexity. Data analysts frequently experience long query times, impacting reporting and decision-making. The institution wants to migrate its data warehouse to AWS to improve query performance, scalability, and reduce operational overhead. The data volume is in the petabytes, and analytical queries are complex, often involving large joins across many tables. Which AWS service is best suited for this requirement?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  31. 81.A financial institution processes millions of transactions daily. Their existing on-premises system struggles to provide real-time fraud detection and anomaly alerting due to the sheer volume and velocity of incoming data. The institution needs to build a new platform on AWS that can ingest, process, and analyze high-throughput streaming transaction data in real-time to identify suspicious activities immediately. Which combination of AWS services should a Solutions Architect recommend to meet these requirements?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  32. 82.A multinational corporation is migrating hundreds of applications from its on-premises data centers to AWS. The company has a strict security policy requiring all traffic to AWS to be inspected by a centralized firewall and intrusion detection/prevention system (IDPS) deployed in a shared services VPC. Applications are being migrated to various application VPCs. How can the company ensure all traffic from on-premises to application VPCs is routed through the centralized security VPC?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  33. 83.A media streaming company has an existing application that uses Amazon S3 for storing video assets. The application occasionally receives spikes in read requests for popular content, leading to performance degradation and increased latency for users. The company wants to improve the user experience by reducing latency for these popular assets, without modifying the existing application's S3 access patterns. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  34. 84.A healthcare provider is modernizing its patient appointment scheduling system. The existing system is a legacy Windows-based application with a SQL Server database, running on-premises. The company wants to migrate the application to AWS, improve scalability, and reduce the operational overhead associated with managing the database. Compliance requirements dictate that the database must be encrypted at rest and in transit. Which AWS database service is MOST suitable for this migration?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  35. 85.A large enterprise uses AWS Organizations to manage multiple AWS accounts. They need to enforce a mandatory security policy that prevents any IAM user or role in any account from disabling AWS CloudTrail, even for administrative users, to ensure continuous auditing and compliance. This policy must be applied centrally and universally across all accounts, including newly created ones, and must be immutable by individual account administrators. Which AWS Organizations feature should the Solutions Architect leverage?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  36. 86.A global media company has an existing video transcoding workflow that runs on a fleet of on-premises servers. The workflow is highly manual, resource-intensive, and struggles to scale with increasing demand for various video formats and resolutions. The company wants to migrate this workflow to AWS to automate the process, improve scalability, reduce operational costs, and support a wider range of output formats efficiently. Which AWS service should the Solutions Architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  37. 87.A large enterprise is planning to migrate a critical, stateful legacy application from on-premises to AWS. The application uses a custom binary protocol for inter-service communication and has strict latency requirements (sub-10ms). The enterprise wants to minimize code changes and maintain existing operational procedures as much as possible during the initial migration phase. Which AWS service is best suited to host this application to meet these requirements?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  38. 88.An analytics startup processes large volumes of streaming data from IoT devices. Their existing data ingestion pipeline uses Apache Kafka on self-managed EC2 instances, and they perform real-time analytics using a custom application that consumes from Kafka. They want to improve the reliability and scalability of their analytics processing, reduce operational overhead, and gain deeper insights from the streaming data without managing underlying infrastructure. Which AWS service should the Solutions Architect recommend for processing this real-time streaming data?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  39. 89.A media company uses a content management system (CMS) that stores large media files (up to 5 TB each) in Amazon S3. The CMS generates daily reports that require scanning the metadata of all objects in a specific S3 bucket, which can contain millions of objects. The current process uses S3 ListObjectsV2 API calls, which are slow and expensive for large buckets. The company wants a more efficient and cost-effective way to retrieve and query this object metadata. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  40. 90.A global e-commerce company uses Amazon S3 for storing product images, videos, and customer-uploaded content. The total storage volume is petabytes, and the number of objects is in the billions. The operations team needs to regularly audit storage usage, identify objects that are infrequently accessed but stored in expensive storage classes, and identify objects that lack proper metadata tags for cost allocation. Manually inspecting S3 buckets and objects is infeasible due to the sheer scale. The company requires an automated solution to generate daily reports detailing object metadata, storage class, and last access date for all objects across multiple buckets. Which AWS service should a Solutions Architect recommend to efficiently gather this information?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  41. 91.A global enterprise has a legacy application that stores sensitive customer data in a database running on an Amazon EC2 instance. The company has a strict compliance requirement to ensure that all data at rest is encrypted using keys that they fully control and can revoke at any time. They also need to integrate this encryption with their existing key management processes. Which AWS service and configuration should the Solutions Architect recommend to meet these requirements?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  42. 92.A global e-commerce company uses Amazon S3 for storing product images, videos, and customer-uploaded content. They need to regularly audit the integrity and properties of all objects in their S3 buckets, including metadata, ETag, and size, to ensure compliance and detect any unauthorized modifications. The total number of objects exceeds billions, spread across multiple buckets. Manually listing and checking objects is impractical. Which AWS service can provide a complete, auditable list of all objects and their metadata?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  43. 93.A global financial services company manages petabytes of sensitive customer data across various on-premises databases and file systems. They are currently using a homegrown encryption key management system that is difficult to audit, lacks robust key rotation policies, and does not meet new compliance requirements for data sovereignty and cryptographic module validation. The company needs to migrate this data to AWS, ensuring that all encryption keys are centrally managed, highly available, and auditable, while maintaining full control over key usage and access policies. Which AWS service and approach should be recommended to meet these requirements?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  44. 94.A financial institution is migrating a legacy mainframe application that processes daily batch transactions. The application generates large reports (hundreds of GBs) that are stored on network-attached storage (NAS) and accessed by downstream systems for auditing and analytics. The institution wants to modernize this storage layer to be more scalable, cost-effective, and integrate seamlessly with AWS services for future analytics without re-architecting the mainframe application. Which AWS storage solution is MOST appropriate for this scenario?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  45. 95.A media company has an existing video transcoding workflow that uses on-premises servers. The workflow is inefficient, with long processing times due to limited server capacity, and requires significant manual effort for scaling and maintenance. The company wants to migrate to a fully managed, scalable, and cost-effective cloud-native solution on AWS that can automatically transcode videos into multiple formats and resolutions, including adaptive bitrate streaming. The solution must also support content protection and integrate with Amazon S3 for source and output storage. Which AWS service should a Solutions Architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  46. 96.A research institution is migrating a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster to AWS. This cluster runs tightly coupled scientific simulations that require extremely low-latency, high-throughput network communication between compute nodes. The institution wants to ensure the migrated workload achieves comparable performance to its on-premises InfiniBand network. Which AWS networking feature is MOST critical to meet these requirements?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
  47. 97.A global media company operates a content management system (CMS) that stores large media files (up to several terabytes each) in Amazon S3. The CMS frequently needs to generate pre-signed URLs for users to securely upload and download these large files directly to/from S3, bypassing the CMS application server to improve performance and reduce load. However, generating these URLs for very large objects, especially for uploads, often exceeds typical HTTP request timeouts or requires complex multi-part upload logic within the application. The company wants to optimize this process, ensuring secure, efficient, and reliable direct upload/download of large files. Which approach should the Solutions Architect recommend to improve this process?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  48. 98.A global e-commerce company experiences seasonal traffic spikes, with order processing rates fluctuating significantly. Their current order processing system uses a fixed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances, leading to over-provisioning during off-peak times and under-provisioning during peak sales, resulting in high costs and poor customer experience. The company wants to improve this solution by making the order processing highly scalable and cost-efficient. Which approach should they take?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  49. 99.A media streaming company has an existing application that uses Amazon S3 for storing video content. Users worldwide are experiencing high latency and slow loading times, especially for popular videos. The company wants to improve the user experience by reducing latency and increasing content delivery speed. Which AWS service should the company use to achieve this goal?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  50. 100.A healthcare provider is modernizing its patient appointment scheduling system. The existing on-premises system uses a Microsoft SQL Server database which is heavily reliant on stored procedures, triggers, and proprietary SQL Server features for business logic. The company wants to migrate this database to AWS to improve scalability and reduce administrative overhead, while minimizing application code changes. Which AWS service is the MOST appropriate target for the migrated database?Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization