Mixed practice exam 2

Explanation

Answer: D. The envision phase focuses on demonstrating how the cloud will accelerate business outcomes by identifying and prioritizing transformation opportunities across each of the four transformation domains, in line with strategic business objectives. It is where the business case for change is framed before any capability gap analysis or delivery begins.

• A. The align phase focuses on identifying capability gaps across the six AWS CAF perspectives, surfacing cross-organizational dependencies, and bringing stakeholder concerns and challenges into the open.
• B. The launch phase focuses on delivering pilot initiatives in production and demonstrating incremental business value.
• C. The scale phase focuses on expanding those production pilots to the desired scale and ensuring the expected business benefits are realized and sustained.

Explanation

Answer: C. AWS Application Discovery Service gathers configuration, performance, and network dependency information from on-premises servers. Understanding which servers talk to which is what allows applications to be grouped correctly into migration waves, so that tightly coupled components move together rather than being split across a cutover.

• A. AWS Application Migration Service performs the migration itself, replicating source servers into AWS and cutting them over. It executes rather than plans.
• B. AWS Transit Gateway is a network hub for connecting VPCs and on-premises networks. It has no discovery function.
• D. AWS SCT converts database schemas and code objects from one engine to another. Its scope is the database, not the server estate.

Explanation

Answer: A and B. AWS states that key business outcomes of cloud transformation include reduced business risk, improved environmental, social, and governance performance, and increased revenue and operational efficiency. Reduced risk and improved ESG performance are two of that set, and the framework is explicitly organized to help an organization pursue them.

• C. Compliance is never automatic. AWS provides compliant infrastructure and evidence, but meeting a regulation depends on how the customer configures and operates the workload.
• D. Third-party licensing continues to apply. Customers either bring their own licenses or consume license-included offerings.
• E. AWS makes no headcount claim. The people perspective is about workforce transformation and building new skills, not about reducing staff numbers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Explanation

Answer: B and E. Retire decommissions or archives an application, and retain deliberately leaves it in the source environment; in both cases no application is migrated to AWS in that wave, though for opposite reasons. Replatform, described as "lift, tinker, and shift," moves the workload while introducing some optimization to operate more efficiently, reduce cost, or exploit cloud capabilities, with the application itself broadly untouched.

• A. Software as a service carries subscription costs, and repurchasing also brings data migration, integration rework, and retraining. It is not automatically cheaper.
• C. A portfolio is assessed application by application, and a realistic migration mixes several strategies across the estate.
• D. Refactoring is the most complex and effort-intensive strategy. For large migrations AWS suggests rehosting, relocating, or replatforming first, then modernizing after the migration is complete.

Explanation

Answer: D. Migration Evaluator builds a data-driven business case for migrating to AWS. It takes a snapshot of the existing on-premises footprint using an agentless collector, identifies over-provisioned servers, and presents projected AWS costs, including cost comparisons of bringing existing licenses versus buying licenses from AWS. That licensing comparison is the detail that distinguishes it here.

• A. AWS Migration Hub tracks migration progress across tools. It reports on execution once a migration is underway.
• B. AWS Application Migration Service replicates and cuts over source servers to AWS. It performs the migration rather than justifying it.
• C. AWS Control Tower automates the setup and governance of a multi-account landing zone. It has no costing or business case function.

Explanation

Answer: B and E. AWS CAF organizes its foundational capabilities into six perspectives: business, people, and governance address strategy, culture, and control, while platform, security, and operations address building, protecting, and running the environment. The framework is used to find where capability is missing and where organizational dependencies lie, most explicitly in the align phase, so those gaps can be closed before they stall delivery.

• A. The framework is designed to be used from the earliest envision phase onward, well before any workload moves.
• C. Portfolio assessment against the migration strategies remains necessary. AWS CAF addresses organizational readiness; the strategy assessment addresses what happens to each application.
• D. AWS CAF describes capabilities and outcomes, not a mandated service adoption sequence. Which services an organization uses depends on its own workloads and goals.