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AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional practice questions

214 free questions with answers and explanations.

Practice test
  1. 101.A global media company uses a content management system (CMS) that stores large media files (up to several terabytes each) in an Amazon S3 bucket. Content creators frequently upload new files and update existing ones. The company wants to improve the efficiency of content ingestion by allowing content creators to upload directly to S3 without exposing AWS credentials to their client applications, while also ensuring that large files can be uploaded reliably even over unstable network connections. Which solution would meet these requirements effectively?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  2. 102.A global enterprise has a legacy application that stores sensitive customer data in a database. The company wants to migrate this database to Amazon RDS and ensure that all data at rest is encrypted using customer-managed encryption keys (CMKs) with strong auditability and control over key usage. The security team requires that the encryption keys are never exposed outside of AWS KMS. Which encryption solution should be implemented?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  3. 103.An international media company has an existing video transcoding workflow that runs on a fleet of on-premises servers. This setup is expensive to maintain, has limited scalability, and requires significant manual intervention for job scheduling and error handling. The company needs to migrate this workflow to AWS to reduce operational costs, achieve elastic scalability, and improve efficiency through automation. The solution must support a wide range of input and output formats, handle high-volume concurrent jobs, and integrate seamlessly with their existing S3-based content library. Which AWS service is best suited for modernizing this video transcoding process?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  4. 104.A global online gaming company's backend microservices communicate synchronously via HTTP API calls. During peak gaming events, a sudden surge in player activity leads to cascading failures across services due to overloaded downstream dependencies, resulting in a degraded user experience. The company wants to improve the resilience and scalability of its microservices communication to handle traffic spikes and prevent cascading failures without significantly re-architecting their individual microservices. Which AWS service should the Solutions Architect recommend?Continuously Improve Existing Solutions
  5. 105.A global manufacturing company is planning to migrate its on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to AWS. The ERP system is a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) application that requires a highly consistent, low-latency shared file system for its application servers. The company's compliance requirements mandate that all data remain within a single AWS Region. Which AWS storage service should be recommended to meet these requirements efficiently?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  6. 106.A global manufacturing company is migrating its critical enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to AWS. The ERP system consists of a complex, tightly coupled monolithic application running on Windows Server with a SQL Server database. The company requires minimal downtime during the migration and wants to modernize the application over time without a full re-architecture upfront. Which migration strategy is most appropriate for this scenario?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  7. 107.A multinational corporation has multiple business units, each operating in its own AWS account and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) within the same AWS Region. They need to establish secure and efficient network connectivity between these VPCs and a shared services VPC (e.g., for Active Directory, logging, monitoring) without creating a mesh of peering connections. The solution must also allow for centralized network inspection and routing policies. Which AWS networking service should a Solutions Architect recommend?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  8. 108.A software company is developing a new serverless application that processes sensitive customer data. The application needs to comply with strict regulatory requirements for data encryption, access control, and auditing. The solutions architect must design a solution that ensures all data is encrypted at rest and in transit, access is restricted to authorized services and personnel, and all actions are logged for auditing purposes. The solution should also follow the principle of least privilege. Which combination of AWS services should be used?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  9. 109.A large pharmaceutical company operates a hybrid environment with critical on-premises applications that exchange sensitive research data with applications running in AWS. They are experiencing intermittent network latency and packet loss when transferring large datasets, impacting research timelines. The current connectivity uses a site-to-site VPN over the public internet. The company requires a dedicated, consistent, and secure network connection with predictable performance between their on-premises data centers and AWS, while also ensuring high availability. Which solution should an architect recommend?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  10. 110.A global media company has multiple development teams, each managing its own AWS accounts and deploying applications using various CI/CD pipelines. They frequently share data, APIs, and microservices across accounts and need to establish secure, high-bandwidth, and low-latency connectivity between these accounts and to a central shared services VPC. The solution must also allow for centralized network visibility and control. Which AWS networking service should be primarily used to meet these requirements?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  11. 111.A large banking institution needs to migrate its core monolithic banking application to AWS. This application processes millions of transactions daily and has strict uptime and performance requirements. The current on-premises database is Oracle RAC, and the application servers run on WebLogic. The institution wants to minimize code changes and leverage managed services as much as possible to reduce operational overhead. Which migration strategy and AWS services would be most appropriate for this scenario?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  12. 112.A large e-commerce company is migrating its customer loyalty program application from an on-premises data center to AWS. The application is a legacy Java monolith with a tightly coupled Oracle database. The company wants to gradually modernize the application without disrupting existing customer services. The new architecture should leverage cloud-native services where possible for scalability and operational efficiency. Which approach should the Solutions Architect recommend for the database migration?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  13. 113.A large enterprise is migrating a complex, multi-tiered application from an on-premises data center to AWS. The application has strict latency requirements and utilizes a proprietary messaging queue that cannot be easily replaced or re-architected. The enterprise needs to ensure seamless communication between on-premises components and AWS-hosted components with minimal disruption during the migration. Which solution provides the most efficient and reliable connectivity for this hybrid architecture?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  14. 114.A global software company is developing a new serverless application on AWS that will process sensitive customer data. The application uses AWS Lambda functions, Amazon S3 for data storage, and Amazon DynamoDB for its database. The company has a strict security policy that mandates all data at rest must be encrypted with keys that are managed within a FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated hardware security module. Additionally, key usage must be centrally auditable. Which AWS service should the Solutions Architect recommend for key management?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  15. 115.A global healthcare provider needs to migrate petabytes of patient medical imaging data (e.g., X-rays, MRIs) from an on-premises PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) to AWS. These images are large, require high throughput for ingestion, and must be accessible with low latency for diagnostic purposes by clinicians. Data governance policies mandate strict access controls and auditability. The company needs a highly scalable, durable, and cost-effective solution for this unstructured data. Which AWS solution should be recommended?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  16. 116.A global banking institution operates a mission-critical, mainframe-based payment processing system that cannot be immediately migrated to AWS due to its complexity and regulatory constraints. However, they want to integrate new cloud-native microservices with this mainframe to build modern customer-facing features. The integration requires reliable, asynchronous communication with guaranteed message delivery and exactly-once processing to ensure financial transaction integrity. Which AWS service should a Solutions Architect recommend to facilitate this hybrid integration?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  17. 117.A global enterprise is migrating a critical financial reporting application from on-premises to AWS. This application generates large, complex PDF reports that require significant computational resources and memory to produce. The company needs to minimize operational overhead, scale processing capacity dynamically based on demand, and ensure high availability. The reports are generated asynchronously in response to user requests. Which AWS compute service is most suitable for processing these reports?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  18. 118.A global logistics company is migrating its highly coupled, monolithic freight management application to AWS. The application processes millions of real-time shipment updates, generates complex reports, and has stringent uptime requirements (99.99%). The company wants to break down the monolith into microservices over time, but needs to first establish a robust, highly available, and scalable environment in AWS. They also require a mechanism to ensure transactional consistency across distributed services during the refactoring process. Which design approach should the Solutions Architect recommend to facilitate this transition?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  19. 119.A global financial institution is migrating a legacy mainframe application that processes millions of transactions daily to AWS. The application relies heavily on synchronous, high-throughput messaging for inter-service communication within the mainframe environment. The institution requires a solution that minimizes changes to the application's messaging logic while providing a managed, highly available, and scalable messaging service on AWS. The solution must also support integration with existing on-premises systems during a phased migration. Which AWS service best meets these requirements?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  20. 120.A multinational corporation has a business-critical application hosted on-premises that uses a proprietary messaging system for inter-service communication. The company plans to gradually migrate parts of this application to AWS using a microservices architecture. During the migration period, the AWS-based microservices need to reliably exchange messages with the on-premises services, ensuring message ordering and guaranteed delivery even during network disruptions. The solution must minimize changes to the existing on-premises messaging system and allow for eventual full migration to cloud-native messaging. Which hybrid messaging solution should an architect recommend?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  21. 121.A large enterprise is migrating a complex, multi-tiered application from an on-premises data center to AWS. The application has strict latency requirements (sub-10ms) for its database interactions and requires dedicated, high-throughput network connectivity to the AWS VPC. The on-premises infrastructure includes a robust network backbone. Which AWS service should be recommended for connecting the on-premises data center to the AWS VPC?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  22. 122.A large banking institution operates a mission-critical, high-transaction, mainframe-based core banking system on-premises. They aim to modernize this system by gradually migrating components to AWS while maintaining full transactional consistency and immediate rollback capability for any migrated component. The migration must ensure that both on-premises and cloud components can process transactions concurrently during the transition phase. Which migration pattern supports this requirement for gradual modernization with stringent consistency and rollback needs?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  23. 123.A large e-commerce company operates a complex microservices architecture on AWS. They need to implement a robust tracing and observability solution to quickly identify performance bottlenecks and errors across their distributed services. The solution must support thousands of services, integrate with various AWS services, and provide end-to-end visibility from user requests to backend database calls. Which AWS service combination is best suited for this requirement?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  24. 124.A multinational financial services company is developing a new, highly sensitive application that will process customer financial data. This application must meet stringent compliance requirements, including data residency within specific AWS Regions and encryption of all data at rest and in transit. The company requires full control over the encryption keys and wants to ensure that key usage is auditable. Which AWS service should be used to manage the encryption keys?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  25. 125.A multinational conglomerate is undergoing a data center exit strategy, aiming to migrate all on-premises applications to AWS. They have a large portfolio of custom-built Java applications running on JBoss application servers and Oracle databases. Many of these applications have dependencies on specific Java versions and legacy libraries that are difficult to update. The company wants to minimize application code changes during the migration while leveraging AWS managed services as much as possible for scalability and operational efficiency. Which migration strategy and service combination should the Solutions Architect recommend?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  26. 126.A global media company is migrating its entire on-premises data center to AWS. They have several petabytes of archival data stored on tape libraries and Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices that rarely need to be accessed but must be retained for compliance reasons for 10 years. The company wants to move this data to the most cost-effective and durable storage solution on AWS while ensuring it can be retrieved if necessary. Which AWS service and configuration should a Solutions Architect recommend?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  27. 127.A global manufacturing company has multiple production facilities worldwide, each with its own on-premises network and applications. They need to establish secure, high-bandwidth, and low-latency connectivity between these facilities and a central AWS Region where their core enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is hosted. The company also requires redundant connections to ensure business continuity. Which networking solution should a Solutions Architect recommend?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  28. 128.A large enterprise is migrating a monolithic application to AWS. The application uses a relational database that is highly sensitive to latency and requires strong consistency. The current on-premises database is Oracle. The company wants to refactor the application to a microservices architecture over time but needs an initial migration strategy that minimizes changes to the application code and database schema, while providing significant scalability and performance improvements. Which migration strategy and database combination should be recommended?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  29. 129.A media streaming company is experiencing sudden spikes in traffic during popular live events, leading to performance degradation and outages for their on-demand content. The company wants to ensure that its on-demand streaming service remains highly available and performs optimally even during such traffic surges. The solution must be cost-effective and require minimal operational overhead. Which architectural pattern and AWS services should be implemented?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  30. 130.A global financial institution is migrating a legacy mainframe application that processes millions of transactions daily to AWS. The mainframe uses a proprietary queuing system for inter-application communication and batch processing. The new AWS-based microservices architecture needs to integrate with existing on-premises applications that still rely on this mainframe queue for some time. The integration must be highly reliable, ensure message ordering, and be able to handle potential network disruptions without data loss. Which architectural approach should be implemented?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  31. 131.A financial institution is migrating a legacy monolithic application to AWS. The application currently processes millions of transactions daily and requires extremely low latency and high throughput. The institution also has a strict requirement for data to be encrypted at rest and in transit, and for all data access to be audited. The solutions architect needs to design a solution that provides high availability and scalability, while ensuring strict security and compliance. Which architecture pattern and AWS services should be recommended?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  32. 132.A large pharmaceutical company is undergoing a digital transformation. They have hundreds of legacy applications, some running on outdated operating systems and hardware, spread across multiple on-premises data centers globally. The company needs to rapidly assess and categorize these applications to determine the most suitable migration strategy for each, aiming to move 80% of them to AWS within two years. They lack a comprehensive inventory and understanding of application dependencies. Which approach should the Solutions Architect recommend to efficiently achieve this goal?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  33. 133.A global construction company has a highly customized, business-critical application that manages project bids and resource allocation. This application is tightly integrated with various on-premises systems, including an Active Directory for authentication, a proprietary budgeting tool, and a document management system (DMS). The company wants to migrate this application to AWS while maintaining seamless integration with the existing on-premises tools and minimizing changes to the application's authentication flow. They also need to ensure high availability and disaster recovery for the migrated application. Which solution best addresses these complex integration and availability requirements?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  34. 134.A global manufacturing company is migrating its legacy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to AWS. The ERP system is a monolithic application built on a proprietary database (DB1) and uses specific reporting tools that rely on direct SQL queries to an operational data store (DB2). The company wants to migrate DB1 to Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition. However, the reporting tools cannot be immediately refactored and must continue to access the operational data store (DB2), which will also be migrated to AWS. The goal is to minimize refactoring of the reporting tools while leveraging AWS managed services for DB2, ensuring data consistency between DB1 and DB2. Which approach should be taken for DB2?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  35. 135.A global media company is migrating its video transcoding pipeline to AWS. The existing on-premises solution uses a custom batch processing system that generates hundreds of terabytes of intermediate files during the transcoding process. These files require high-throughput, low-latency access from compute instances for sequential read/write operations and must be shared across thousands of parallel transcoding jobs. The company wants to optimize for performance and cost while leveraging a fully managed service. Which AWS storage solution should be recommended?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  36. 136.A global media company has a large archive of video content stored in an on-premises data center. They need to analyze this data for content categorization, metadata extraction, and compliance auditing using machine learning services in AWS. The data volume is in the petabytes, and the analysis process is compute-intensive. The company also wants to ensure that the data transfer to AWS is secure, reliable, and optimized for large datasets, minimizing network costs. Which solution should an architect recommend?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  37. 137.A multinational e-commerce company is expanding its operations into new geographical regions. They need to deploy their existing web application, which is containerized using Docker, to these new regions. The application requires high availability, automatic scaling based on traffic, and minimal operational overhead for container orchestration. The company also wants to maintain consistent deployment practices across all regions. Which AWS service combination should be recommended for deploying and managing this application?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  38. 138.A global manufacturing company has multiple production facilities worldwide, each with its own on-premises Active Directory (AD) domain. The company is migrating several applications to AWS and requires these applications to authenticate users and resources against the on-premises ADs. The solution must ensure high availability, minimize latency for authentication requests, and simplify management across multiple distinct AD forests without establishing complex two-way trusts between all forests. Which AWS service should be used to extend Active Directory to AWS?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  39. 139.A company is migrating a critical enterprise application to AWS. The application has extremely low latency requirements (sub-millisecond) for its database interactions and a read-to-write ratio of 10:1. The database is currently a proprietary, high-performance relational database. The solutions architect needs to choose an AWS database service that can meet these performance demands, scale automatically for reads, and be highly available across multiple Availability Zones. Which AWS database service should be recommended?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  40. 140.A global e-commerce company is migrating its customer-facing web application to AWS. The application experiences unpredictable traffic spikes during flash sales and seasonal events, requiring dynamic scaling. It relies on a relational database for transactional data and a caching layer for frequently accessed product information. The company wants to ensure the application remains highly available and performs optimally during these peak loads, while also optimizing costs. Which architecture best meets these requirements?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  41. 141.A global retail company is migrating its legacy inventory management system to AWS. The system consists of a monolithic application running on an on-premises server and a relational database. The company wants to minimize downtime during the migration and ensure data consistency. They plan to use AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) for the database. Which migration strategy for the application component should be recommended to reduce downtime and allow for gradual cutover?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  42. 142.A global media company operates a content delivery platform with a mix of on-premises and AWS resources. They need to implement a robust, highly available, and secure solution for managing DNS resolution across their hybrid environment. The solution must allow on-premises clients to resolve DNS queries for AWS resources (e.g., EC2 instances, RDS endpoints) using their existing on-premises DNS servers, and AWS resources to resolve DNS queries for on-premises resources. They also need to ensure that specific DNS queries for a custom domain (e.g., internal.example.com) are routed directly to on-premises DNS servers, without exposing the entire on-premises network to AWS. Which AWS service combination should be recommended?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  43. 143.A global pharmaceutical company is planning to migrate a critical, on-premises legacy application to AWS. This application relies heavily on shared file storage that uses the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol for Windows-based servers and requires low-latency access from both on-premises and AWS environments. The company also needs to maintain strict data residency requirements for certain patient data. Which AWS service should a Solutions Architect recommend to meet these requirements efficiently?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  44. 144.A global manufacturing company has an on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that is critical to its operations. The system runs on a relational database and requires high availability with an RPO of minutes and an RTO of less than an hour. The company wants to implement a disaster recovery (DR) solution in AWS, leveraging cloud capabilities while minimizing costs for the standby environment. Which DR strategy and AWS services should be recommended?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  45. 145.A multinational corporation has multiple business units, each with its own AWS accounts. They want to implement a centralized network architecture that allows secure and controlled communication between all accounts and on-premises data centers, while also enabling internet access for specific applications. The solution must simplify network management, enforce security policies consistently, and support future expansion. Which networking construct should a solutions architect recommend?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  46. 146.A global research institution is migrating a legacy high-performance computing (HPC) cluster to AWS. The cluster consists of hundreds of compute nodes that require ultra-low latency, high-throughput network connectivity to shared parallel file systems for large dataset processing. The institution needs to maintain POSIX-compliant file system access and wants to minimize changes to existing applications. They also require robust data protection and backup capabilities. Which AWS service combination provides the optimal solution for the shared file system?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  47. 147.A global telecommunications company has a vast amount of historical call detail record (CDR) data stored in an on-premises Hadoop cluster. This data is critical for regulatory compliance and advanced analytics, but it is accessed infrequently by data scientists and auditors. The company wants to migrate this petabyte-scale data to AWS to reduce on-premises infrastructure costs and enable more flexible, serverless analytics. The solution must be cost-effective for long-term storage and support ad-hoc querying. Which AWS solution should a Solutions Architect recommend?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  48. 148.A large enterprise has a mission-critical application hosted on-premises that uses a proprietary messaging queue system. The enterprise wants to migrate this application to AWS, but a hard dependency on the existing messaging queue makes a direct 'lift-and-shift' impossible without significant downtime. The solutions architect needs to design a strategy that allows for a phased migration, where parts of the application can run in AWS while still communicating with the on-premises messaging queue, minimizing disruption. Which approach should be recommended?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  49. 149.A global automotive manufacturer needs to migrate a legacy product lifecycle management (PLM) system from an on-premises data center to AWS. The PLM system is a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) application with a complex, multi-terabyte Oracle database. The manufacturer has a strict data residency requirement that mandates the database must remain within a specific geographical region, and they need to minimize the database migration downtime to less than one hour. The application servers can be replatformed to EC2 instances. Which combination of services and strategies should the Solutions Architect recommend for migrating the Oracle database while meeting the stringent requirements?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
  50. 150.A large enterprise has several applications running in different AWS accounts and on-premises data centers. Each AWS account has its own VPCs, and the on-premises networks need to securely and efficiently communicate with specific application tiers in these VPCs. The current setup involves multiple site-to-site VPNs and complex routing tables, leading to management overhead and potential network bottlenecks. The company needs a centralized network connectivity solution that simplifies routing, provides high bandwidth, and supports thousands of connections across VPCs and on-premises networks. Which AWS service should be implemented?Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity