Which statement most accurately distinguishes the reliability pillar from the operational excellence pillar?
Hard · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: D. Reliability is a property of the system: does it do the right thing consistently, and does it recover when something breaks. Operational excellence is a property of the organization around the system: can it deploy safely, observe what is happening, respond to events, and improve its own procedures. The two are closely linked, because good operations are how reliability is sustained over time, but they answer different questions.
A. Encryption is a security pillar concern. Operational excellence covers operations as code, change practices, and learning from events.
B. Both pillars apply across environments. Non-production reliability matters for delivery flow, and operational practice governs production most of all.
C. Both pillars describe customer responsibilities within the shared responsibility model. AWS supplies reliable infrastructure, but the customer architects and operates the workload.
12
A team claims that migrating a workload to AWS Fargate improves both cost optimization and sustainability. Which reasoning best supports that claim?
Hard · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: D. The same mechanism serves both pillars. Cost optimization's consumption model means paying only for the resources a task actually uses rather than for instances that idle between jobs. Sustainability's use managed services and maximize utilization principles note that sharing services across a broad customer base drives higher utilization of the underlying hardware, so less physical infrastructure is needed for the same work.
A. Data transfer charges apply to serverless services in the same way as to other compute. No exemption exists.
B. There is no sustainability discount. The savings come from consuming fewer resource-hours, which shows up in the normal usage-based bill.
C. Serverless still runs on physical servers; the customer simply does not manage them. The gain is higher utilization of that shared hardware, not its disappearance.
13
Which TWO statements correctly describe the AWS Well-Architected Framework? (Choose TWO.)
Hard · Select 2 answers
Explanation
Answer: B and D. The framework gives architects a consistent way to evaluate designs and identify improvements, structured as questions and best practices across the six pillars. AWS positions it as an ongoing practice: workloads and requirements change, new services appear, and reviews are meant to be repeated so the improvement plan stays current.
A. There is no AWS certification for a workload. The Well-Architected Tool produces a self-assessment and an improvement plan rather than a pass or fail verdict.
C. The shared responsibility model always applies. A review helps a customer meet their side of it rather than transferring any part of it to AWS.
E. No architecture is immune to outages. The framework reduces risk and improves recovery; it does not promise perfection.
14
During a Well-Architected review, an architect proposes automating the security controls that were previously applied by hand at each release. Which statement best explains why this improves security rather than merely saving time?
Hard · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: B. The security pillar's "automate security best practices" principle makes exactly this argument: software-based security mechanisms let you scale more rapidly and cost-effectively, and defining controls as code in version-controlled templates means every environment gets the same control, changes are reviewable, and nothing depends on a person remembering a step.
A. Encryption at rest is a configuration choice on the relevant service. Automation can enforce that choice, but it is not an automatic side effect.
C. Automating a control does not move it across the shared responsibility boundary. The customer still owns the control and the outcome.
D. Identity and access management is the strong identity foundation the pillar begins with. Automation applies and enforces it rather than replacing it.
15
A company runs a workload that meets its performance targets today. Which Well-Architected general design principle most directly justifies continuing to collect and review metrics after the workload is in production?
Hard · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: B. Drive architectures using data means collecting information on how architectural choices affect workload behavior and making fact-based decisions from it. Meeting today's targets says nothing about tomorrow's, and only continuous measurement reveals whether a change improved or degraded the workload as demand and the design evolve.
A. Stop guessing your capacity needs concerns scaling to actual demand rather than forecasting. It is one application of data-driven decisions rather than the general principle.
C. Considering evolutionary architectures is about allowing the design to change over time so the business can adopt innovations as standard practice. Data informs those changes but the principle describes the willingness to change.
D. Automating with experimentation in mind is about creating and replicating workloads cheaply and being able to audit and revert automation changes.
16
An architect must explain why the sustainability pillar is not simply a restatement of the cost optimization pillar. Which statement provides the strongest justification?
Hard · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: B. Eliminating idle resources helps both, which is why the two pillars are often aligned. But the measures differ: sustainability optimizes resources and energy per unit of work, while cost optimization optimizes currency per unit of business value. Moving to a Region with a lower carbon intensity, or adopting newer more efficient hardware, can improve impact while costing more.
A. Sustainability is a shared responsibility. AWS handles sustainability of the cloud, and the customer handles sustainability in the cloud through workload efficiency.
C. Customers are expected to act. The pillar's principles ask them to measure impact, set goals, maximize utilization, and reduce downstream impact.
D. Both pillars apply to every resource type. Neither is limited to a category of service.
17
A company transfers a large VMware-based estate to a managed VMware environment in AWS, keeping the same hypervisor platform and requiring no changes to the virtual machines. Which migration strategy best describes this?
Hard · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: C. Relocate covers transferring a large number of servers or applications from an on-premises platform to a cloud version of that same platform, or moving instances to a different VPC, Region, or account. Because the hypervisor platform is preserved, the virtual machines move without conversion, which is what distinguishes relocate from rehost.
A. Rehost also moves the application unchanged, but it typically converts the workload onto native cloud compute rather than preserving the source platform. The preservation of the platform is the deciding detail.
B. Refactor changes the application architecture significantly, which is explicitly not happening.
D. Replatform introduces some optimization during the move, such as adopting a managed service. Nothing is optimized here.
18
Which statement most accurately distinguishes the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework from the AWS Well-Architected Framework?
Hard · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: D. The two frameworks operate at different levels. AWS CAF is organizational: it identifies capability gaps across six perspectives so the business, its people, and its governance are ready to transform. The Well-Architected Framework is architectural: it evaluates a specific workload against six pillars and produces an improvement plan for that workload. A company typically uses both, for different questions.
A. This inverts them. AWS CAF is the broader business and organizational framework, and the Well-Architected Framework is the one that examines technical architecture in detail.
B. They are distinct frameworks with different structures: six perspectives and 47 foundational capabilities for AWS CAF, six pillars and their design principles for Well-Architected.
C. AWS CAF covers cloud transformation broadly, including new build and modernization, and the Well-Architected Framework applies to migrated workloads just as much as to new ones.
19
During an AWS CAF assessment, a company finds it has no defined process for restoring service quickly after an outage and no way to track recurring underlying causes. Which perspective and capability does this gap belong to?
Hard · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: B. Incident and problem management is an operations perspective capability, described as quickly restoring service operations and minimizing adverse business impact. The two halves matter: incident management restores service now, and problem management identifies and removes the underlying causes so the same incident stops recurring.
A. Platform engineering is about building and operating the enterprise cloud platform and its reusable components, not about running the incident process.
C. Incident response is a security perspective capability, and it applies to security events such as a suspected compromise. The gap described is a general availability outage.
D. Risk management is a governance capability concerned with using the cloud to lower the organization's overall risk profile, not with the operational mechanics of restoring a failed service.
20
A company is migrating an on-premises Microsoft SQL Server database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. Which statement correctly describes the role of the AWS Schema Conversion Tool in this heterogeneous migration?
Hard · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: D. In a heterogeneous migration the source and target engines differ, so the schema cannot simply be copied. AWS SCT converts tables, views, stored procedures, and functions into the target engine's dialect and produces an assessment report identifying the objects it cannot convert automatically, which is what lets the team estimate the manual effort involved.
A. Ongoing change replication is performed by AWS DMS. The two tools are used together: SCT for the schema, DMS for the data.
B. Discovering server dependencies is the role of AWS Application Discovery Service.
C. Building a data-driven business case with projected AWS costs is what Migration Evaluator does.