A company runs identical copies of its web application in three AWS Regions. It wants Amazon Route 53 to send each user to the Regional endpoint that gives that user the fastest response. Which routing policy should be configured?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: D. A latency routing policy is used when resources exist in multiple AWS Regions and you want traffic served from the Region that provides the lowest network latency for the requester. Route 53 uses measured latency data between users and Regions, so the choice reflects actual network performance rather than geography alone.
A. Weighted routing splits traffic across endpoints in proportions you define. It ignores latency entirely.
B. Simple routing returns a single record with no logic for choosing between multiple endpoints.
C. Geolocation routing sends users to endpoints based on the geographic location the DNS query originates from. The nearest geographic endpoint is not always the lowest-latency one.
42
A company maintains a primary application stack in one AWS Region and a standby stack in a second Region. It wants Amazon Route 53 to send all traffic to the primary while it is healthy and to switch to the standby automatically when a health check fails. Which routing policy should be used?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: C. A failover routing policy implements an active-passive design. The primary record serves all traffic while its associated Route 53 health check passes, and Route 53 begins answering with the secondary record when the primary is judged unhealthy.
A. Multivalue answer routing returns up to eight healthy records at random. It spreads traffic across all healthy endpoints instead of preferring a designated primary.
B. IP-based routing maps user IP address ranges (CIDR blocks) to endpoints. It is used for network-based traffic engineering, not failover.
D. Geoproximity routing routes based on the geographic location of resources and users, with an optional bias to shift traffic. It is not an active-passive failover mechanism.
43
Which AWS service allows developers to create, publish, monitor, and secure REST, HTTP, and WebSocket APIs at any scale, acting as a managed front door to backend services such as AWS Lambda and Amazon EC2?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: A. Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service for creating, publishing, maintaining, monitoring, and securing APIs. It handles traffic management, authorization and access control, throttling, and API versioning, and it integrates natively with Lambda, EC2, and other AWS and HTTP backends.
B. AWS Amplify helps developers build and host frontend web and mobile applications and their backends. It is aimed at frontend delivery rather than at publishing, throttling, and securing APIs for arbitrary backends.
C. Elastic Load Balancing distributes network connections across targets. It does not provide API keys, usage plans, request throttling, or API lifecycle management.
D. CloudFront caches and delivers content at the edge. It can sit in front of an API but does not create or manage API definitions.
44
Which statement about Amazon VPC subnets is TRUE?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: C. A VPC is a Regional construct that spans all Availability Zones in its Region, but each subnet is created inside exactly one Availability Zone. This is why highly available designs create at least one subnet in each of two or more Availability Zones and distribute resources across them.
A. A VPC can contain many subnets, and they may be public or private depending on their route table configuration.
B. Subnets never span Availability Zones. Spanning zones is achieved by creating multiple subnets, one per zone.
D. VPCs and subnets are Regional. A subnet cannot exist in two Regions; cross-Region designs use separate VPCs connected by peering or Transit Gateway.
45
A company stores a large set of objects in Amazon S3 but cannot predict how often each object will be accessed, and the pattern changes over time. It wants to reduce storage cost automatically without operational overhead or retrieval charges. Which storage class should it use?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: A. S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves objects between access tiers based on observed access patterns, with no retrieval fees and no performance impact for the automatic tiers. It is designed exactly for data with unknown, changing, or unpredictable access patterns, in exchange for a small per-object monitoring and automation charge.
B. S3 Standard-IA charges a per-GB retrieval fee and has a 30-day minimum storage duration. If objects turn out to be accessed frequently, the retrieval charges can exceed any storage savings.
C. S3 One Zone-IA stores data in a single Availability Zone and also charges retrieval fees. It does not adapt to changing access patterns.
D. S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval requires objects to be restored before access, with retrieval times from minutes to hours. That is unsuitable for objects that may be needed immediately.
46
A company wants Amazon S3 to automatically move log objects to a cheaper storage class 30 days after creation and permanently delete them after seven years, with no application code changes. What should be configured?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: A. An S3 Lifecycle configuration is a set of rules that define actions Amazon S3 applies to a group of objects. Transition actions move objects to another storage class after a defined age, and expiration actions delete them. This is a native bucket-level setting that requires no application or scripting changes.
B. Cross-Region Replication copies objects to a bucket in another Region for resilience or latency. It neither changes storage class over time nor deletes aged data.
C. Versioning preserves multiple variants of an object to protect against accidental overwrite and deletion. It does not transition or expire objects on a schedule by itself.
D. A custom scheduled script would work but adds code, permissions, and operational overhead that the built-in lifecycle feature already handles.
47
A company is migrating Windows applications that rely on SMB file shares, NTFS permissions, and Active Directory integration. Which AWS storage service should it use?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: D. Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides a fully managed native Microsoft Windows file system built on Windows Server. It supports the SMB protocol, NTFS access control lists, Distributed File System namespaces, and integration with AWS Directory Service or a self-managed Active Directory, which is precisely what these applications expect.
A. Amazon EBS attaches to one instance at a time and provides block storage, not a shared network file share for multiple Windows servers.
B. Amazon EFS uses NFS and is designed for Linux workloads. It does not natively provide SMB shares with NTFS permissions.
C. Amazon S3 is object storage. Windows applications that expect a mounted SMB share cannot use it directly.
48
A genomics research team runs high performance computing simulations that require a shared file system delivering sub-millisecond latency and hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput, with the ability to link to data sets stored in Amazon S3. Which service should they use?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: A. Amazon FSx for Lustre is a fully managed implementation of the Lustre parallel file system, purpose-built for compute-intensive workloads such as high performance computing, machine learning, and genomics. It provides sub-millisecond latency and very high throughput, and it can be linked to an Amazon S3 bucket so that objects appear as files.
B. FSx for Windows File Server targets Windows SMB workloads and does not provide a parallel HPC file system.
C. Accessing S3 objects directly over HTTPS gives high aggregate throughput but object semantics and higher per-request latency, which HPC simulation software expecting POSIX file access cannot use directly.
D. Amazon EFS is a general-purpose NFS file system. It is elastic and convenient but is not designed for the extreme parallel throughput HPC workloads require.
49
An on-premises application must continue writing to a local file share for low-latency access, while the data is durably stored in Amazon S3 so cloud analytics tools can use it. Which AWS service provides this hybrid capability?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: B. AWS Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage service. The file gateway presents an SMB or NFS share on premises, caches frequently accessed data locally for low-latency reads, and stores the data durably as objects in Amazon S3, where other AWS services can consume it.
A. Mounting EFS over the internet is not the intended access path, and it would provide no local cache, so every read would incur wide-area latency.
C. AWS DataSync is an online data transfer service that copies data between on-premises storage and AWS on a scheduled or one-time basis. It does not present an ongoing local cached file share.
D. Calling Amazon S3 directly would require rewriting the application to use the S3 API, and every read would cross the internet with no local cache, which fails the low-latency requirement.
50
An insurance company receives thousands of scanned claim forms as PDFs each day and needs to automatically extract the printed text along with the form fields and table contents. Which AWS service is designed for this?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: C. Amazon Textract goes beyond simple optical character recognition. It extracts printed text and handwriting and, importantly, preserves the structure of forms as key-value pairs and of tables as rows and columns, which is exactly what processing scanned claim forms requires.
A. Amazon Rekognition can detect text in images, but it returns detected text elements without understanding form field relationships or table structure.
B. Amazon Transcribe converts speech in audio and video into text. It processes audio, not scanned document images.
D. Amazon Comprehend analyzes text that has already been extracted. It is commonly used after Textract rather than instead of it.