A retailer wants to analyze thousands of free-text customer reviews to determine whether each is positive, negative, neutral, or mixed, and to identify the products and brands mentioned. Which AWS service should be used?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: B. Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing service that uses machine learning to find insights in text. It performs sentiment analysis, entity recognition, key phrase extraction, language detection, and topic modeling without requiring the customer to train a model.
A. Amazon Translate converts text from one language to another. It does not determine sentiment or extract entities.
C. Amazon Quick Sight (formerly Amazon QuickSight) is a business intelligence service for building dashboards and visualizations. It presents results but does not perform the natural language analysis.
D. Amazon Polly converts written text into lifelike speech. It produces audio and performs no sentiment or entity analysis.
52
A data team needs a serverless service that can discover and catalog data sources, infer their schemas, and run extract, transform, and load jobs to prepare data for analytics. Which AWS service provides this?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: D. AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service. Crawlers scan data stores, infer schemas, and populate the AWS Glue Data Catalog, which acts as a central metadata repository. Glue then runs ETL jobs, with no clusters for the customer to provision or manage.
A. Amazon Athena queries data in place using SQL. It consumes the Glue Data Catalog rather than creating it, and it does not run transformation pipelines.
B. Amazon EMR runs big data frameworks such as Apache Spark and Hadoop on clusters the customer sizes and manages. It can perform transformations but is not serverless and does not provide the central Data Catalog.
C. Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse. It stores and analyzes data that has been loaded into it, rather than crawling external sources to infer schemas and run transformation pipelines.
53
A team of data scientists needs a managed environment in which to prepare data, build, train, tune, and then deploy a custom fraud detection model to a hosted endpoint. Which AWS service is designed for this end-to-end workflow?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: D. Amazon SageMaker AI (previously named Amazon SageMaker) is the AWS platform for the complete machine learning lifecycle. It provides managed notebooks, built-in algorithms, distributed training, automatic model tuning, and one-click deployment to managed inference endpoints, which is what building a custom model requires.
A. Amazon Athena is a SQL query service for data in Amazon S3. It can prepare data for machine learning but does not train or host models.
B. Amazon Rekognition is a pre-trained vision service. It cannot train an arbitrary fraud detection model on tabular transaction data.
C. Amazon Comprehend is a pre-trained natural language service. Its custom classification features are text-specific and do not provide a general model development platform.
54
When a customer places an order, a company needs the same order event to be delivered simultaneously to an email notification system, an AWS Lambda function, and an Amazon SQS queue for the warehouse. Which AWS service provides this fan-out pattern?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: C. Amazon SNS is a publish and subscribe service. A message published to an SNS topic is pushed to every subscriber of that topic, and supported subscriber types include email, AWS Lambda functions, Amazon SQS queues, HTTP endpoints, and mobile push. That one-to-many delivery is exactly the fan-out pattern described.
A. Amazon SES sends and receives email. It handles only the email destination, not delivery to Lambda and SQS.
B. Step Functions defines a sequenced workflow with explicit state transitions. It is not a broadcast messaging service.
D. Amazon SQS delivers each message to a single consumer that polls the queue. Achieving fan-out with SQS alone would require the producer to write to several queues itself.
55
A company wants to trigger automated actions when events occur in AWS services and in third-party SaaS applications, and it also needs to run some of those actions on a fixed schedule. Which service is designed as this serverless event bus?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: A. Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus. It receives events from AWS services, custom applications, and integrated SaaS partners, matches them against rules, and routes them to targets such as Lambda functions, Step Functions state machines, and SQS queues. EventBridge Scheduler also supports time-based rules using cron and rate expressions.
B. AWS CloudTrail records API activity for governance and auditing. It can emit events that EventBridge acts on, but it does not route events to targets itself.
C. CloudWatch Logs stores and searches log data. Metric filters can raise alarms, but it is not a general event bus with SaaS integrations.
D. Amazon SQS stores messages for a consumer to poll. It has no rule-based routing, no SaaS event sources, and no scheduling capability.
56
A company purchased three-year Reserved Instances but expects its application's instance requirements to change during the term. It wants the ability to exchange the reservation itself for one with different instance attributes. Which Reserved Instance type should it have purchased?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: C. Convertible Reserved Instances can be exchanged for another Convertible Reserved Instance with different attributes, such as a different instance family, operating system, or tenancy, as long as the exchange results in a reservation of equal or greater value. That flexibility is bought at the cost of a smaller discount than a Standard Reserved Instance provides. Convertible is the correct choice whenever the workload's shape is expected to change within the term.
A. Zonal versus regional describes the scope of a Reserved Instance, which controls capacity reservation and flexibility of application. Scope is a separate attribute from whether the reservation is Standard or Convertible.
B. Regional scope gives Availability Zone flexibility and, under certain conditions, instance size flexibility, but it does not allow the reservation to be exchanged for a different instance family.
D. Standard Reserved Instances provide the deepest Reserved Instance discount but explicitly cannot be exchanged. They can be modified within limits, for example changing Availability Zone or scope, but not exchanged for a different instance family.
57
A team needs both a billing discount on Amazon EC2 and a guaranteed reservation of capacity in one specific Availability Zone. Which purchase should it make?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: B. A Reserved Instance purchased with zonal scope reserves capacity in the Availability Zone specified, in addition to providing the billing discount. This is the only one of the listed options that does both. The trade-off is rigidity: a zonal Reserved Instance applies only to the exact instance family, size, and Availability Zone specified, with no size or Availability Zone flexibility.
A. A regional Reserved Instance provides a billing discount and applies across any Availability Zone in the Region, but AWS documentation is explicit that it does not reserve capacity. This is one of the most commonly missed distinctions on the exam.
C. Savings Plans of every type are purely billing constructs. A Compute Savings Plan lowers the rate on eligible EC2, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda usage but never reserves capacity.
D. An EC2 Instance Savings Plan commits to a specific instance family in a specific Region for a lower rate, but like all Savings Plans it provides no capacity reservation.
58
Under which condition does a regional Reserved Instance discount apply across different instance sizes within the same instance family?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: D. Instance size flexibility lets a regional Reserved Instance discount apply across sizes in the same family using normalization factors, so a reservation for one size can cover several smaller instances or part of a larger one. AWS limits this benefit to Amazon Linux/Unix Reserved Instances with default tenancy. Reservations for other platforms, such as Windows, or for dedicated tenancy do not receive size flexibility.
A. Zonal scope removes flexibility rather than granting it. A zonal Reserved Instance applies only to the exact family, size, and Availability Zone specified.
B. The payment option affects only how much of the cost is paid in advance and therefore the size of the discount. It has no bearing on whether the discount flexes across instance sizes.
C. Convertible Reserved Instances allow the reservation to be exchanged for different attributes, which is a different mechanism from automatic size flexibility within a family.
59
A company runs a steady Amazon EC2 workload that will stay on one instance family in a single AWS Region for the next three years. It does not run AWS Lambda or AWS Fargate. Which Savings Plans type provides the deepest discount for this profile?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: C. EC2 Instance Savings Plans commit to a specific instance family in a specific Region and, in exchange for that narrower scope, offer the deepest Savings Plans discount at up to 72% off On-Demand. Within that family and Region the plan still flexes across instance size, operating system, and tenancy, which is enough flexibility for a workload whose family and Region are fixed.
A. Compute Savings Plans are the most flexible type, automatically applying across EC2, Lambda, and Fargate usage regardless of instance family, size, Region, operating system, or tenancy. That flexibility costs discount depth, capping at up to 66%.
B. SageMaker AI Savings Plans apply to Amazon SageMaker AI machine learning instance usage and would not cover this company's general-purpose EC2 workload at all.
D. Database Savings Plans apply to managed database services such as Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, and Amazon DynamoDB. They do not cover EC2 compute.
60
Which statement correctly describes AWS Compute Savings Plans?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: A. Compute Savings Plans are the most flexible commitment AWS offers. The plan is a dollars-per-hour commitment that is applied automatically to eligible usage across EC2 instance families, sizes, Regions, operating systems, and tenancies, and across AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda as well. Because the discount follows the workload rather than a fixed configuration, Compute Savings Plans suit organizations that expect to modernize or shift workloads during the term.
B. There is no resale marketplace for Savings Plans. A limited resale mechanism exists for certain Reserved Instances, not for Savings Plans.
C. Being locked to one instance family and Region describes EC2 Instance Savings Plans, which trade that narrower scope for a deeper discount of up to 72%.
D. No Savings Plan reserves capacity. Capacity assurance in a specific Availability Zone comes from zonal Reserved Instances or On-Demand Capacity Reservations.