Mixed practice exam 1

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.

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.

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.

Explanation

Answer: A. Rehost means moving the application from the source environment to the AWS Cloud without changing it. Because the application is untouched, rehosting is usually the fastest and lowest-risk strategy, which is why large migrations often rehost first and modernize afterwards once the workload is running on AWS.

• B. Repurchase, sometimes called "drop and shop," means replacing the application with a different product, typically moving from a traditional license to a software as a service offering.
• C. Refactor, also called re-architect, means changing the application's architecture to take advantage of cloud-native features. It is the most complex and expensive strategy, not a lift and shift.
• D. Retire means decommissioning or archiving an application that is no longer needed, so nothing is moved at all.

Explanation

Answer: B. Retire means decommissioning or archiving applications that are no longer needed, which includes shutting down the servers in that application stack. Discovery routinely finds a meaningful share of the estate in this state, and retiring it removes migration effort and ongoing cost at the same time.

• A. Relocate means transferring servers or applications to a cloud version of the existing platform, or moving instances to a different VPC, Region, or account. It still keeps the workload running.
• C. Retain means deliberately keeping an application in the source environment or postponing its migration, which implies the application is still needed.
• D. Replatform means moving the application to the cloud while making some optimizations, so the application continues to be used.

Explanation

Answer: C. AWS CAF groups its foundational capabilities into six perspectives: business, people, governance, platform, security, and operations. The first three are largely business perspectives concerned with strategy, culture, and control, while the last three are largely technical perspectives concerned with building, protecting, and running the environment.

• A. This list is invented. None of these are AWS CAF perspectives.
• B. Technology, process, organization, and product are the four AWS CAF transformation domains, not the perspectives. They describe what is being transformed rather than which stakeholder capability supports it.
• D. These are the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which evaluates workload architecture rather than organizational readiness for cloud adoption.

Explanation

Answer: D. AWS DMS migrates data into, out of, and between databases. It supports both a one-time full load and ongoing change data capture replication, so the source keeps serving users while the target is brought up to date. That is what allows cutover downtime to be reduced to a minimum.

• A. Migration Evaluator builds a data-driven business case for migration, including projected AWS costs. It is a planning and financial tool, not a data replication engine.
• B. AWS Migration Hub gives a single place to track the progress of migrations across AWS and partner tools. It reports on migrations rather than performing them.
• C. AWS Application Discovery Service collects configuration, usage, and dependency data from on-premises servers to support migration planning. It does not move data.

Explanation

Answer: A. AWS Migration Hub gives a single place to discover the existing estate, group servers into applications, and track migration status across tools such as AWS Application Migration Service and AWS DMS, as well as supported partner tools. It answers the portfolio-level question of how far the overall migration has progressed.

• B. AWS Control Tower sets up and governs a secure multi-account environment. It is about landing zone governance rather than migration tracking.
• C. AWS Config records resource configurations and evaluates compliance. It reports on what exists in AWS, not on migration progress.
• D. AWS Systems Manager operates and manages nodes, handling patching, automation, and remote command execution. It does not track migration waves.

Explanation

Answer: C. Repurchase, sometimes called "drop and shop," means abandoning the current product in favor of a different one, most often a commercial software as a service subscription. A company replacing a self-hosted customer relationship management system with a SaaS equivalent is repurchasing.

• A. Rewriting the application to exploit cloud-native features is refactoring or re-architecting.
• B. Moving the application unchanged is rehosting. Optimizing during the move is replatforming.
• D. Deliberately leaving the application where it is describes retain.

Explanation

Answer: B. Replatform, also described as "lift, tinker, and shift," means moving the workload to the cloud while introducing some optimization to operate more efficiently, reduce cost, or take advantage of cloud capabilities. Swapping a self-managed database for a managed one is the classic example: the application is untouched, but the operating model changes.

• A. Rehost would mean running the same MySQL server software on a virtual machine in AWS with no change to how it is operated.
• C. Refactor means changing the application's architecture, for example decomposing it into microservices or moving to a different data model. The application here is unchanged.
• D. Repurchase means replacing the product with a different one, which is not what happens when the same database engine continues to run as a managed service.