An application currently runs on a single Amazon EC2 instance in one Availability Zone. What is the most effective way to make it highly available within the same AWS Region?
Easy · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: C. High availability within a Region is achieved by distributing workload across multiple Availability Zones, because AZs are designed to be isolated from each other's failures. Placing the instances behind an Elastic Load Balancer lets traffic be routed only to healthy targets, so the loss of an entire AZ does not take the application offline.
A. All those instances share the same AZ. A failure affecting that Availability Zone would take down every instance at once.
B. A larger instance type provides more capacity (vertical scaling), but it is still a single instance in a single AZ and therefore still a single point of failure.
D. S3 versioning protects object data from accidental overwrite or deletion. It does nothing for the availability of the compute layer.
22
A team creates an Amazon S3 bucket in the us-east-1 Region and assumes that AWS will automatically keep a copy of the objects in the eu-west-1 Region for resilience. Which statement is correct?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: B. AWS Regions are designed to be isolated from each other so that a problem in one Region does not affect another, and so that customers retain control over where their data resides. AWS does not move or copy customer content between Regions unless the customer configures a feature that does so, such as S3 Cross-Region Replication or a snapshot copy.
A. No automatic cross-Region copying occurs, and cross-Region replication incurs both storage and data transfer charges when it is enabled.
C. A bucket is created in one Region and its data resides there. Although bucket names are globally unique, the bucket itself is a Regional resource.
D. There is no continent-level automatic replication. Multi-Region resilience is always an explicit customer configuration.
23
An application has a web tier and a database tier that exchange a high volume of chatty, latency-sensitive traffic. The business requires the application to survive the loss of an entire data center, but it wants to avoid cross-Region data transfer charges and added network latency between the tiers. What should the architect do?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: A. Availability Zones are physically separate facilities with independent power, cooling, and networking, so spreading the tiers across two or more Availability Zones survives the loss of an entire data center. Because Availability Zones in a Region are linked by high-bandwidth, low-latency private networking, inter-tier chatter stays fast, and no cross-Region data transfer charges are incurred.
B. Splitting tiers across Regions puts hundreds or thousands of miles between the web and database tiers, which adds latency to every query and incurs cross-Region data transfer charges. Multi-Region designs replicate whole stacks rather than splitting a single stack.
C. Edge locations serve cached content and do not host an application's web tier, and leaving the database in one Availability Zone still leaves a single point of failure.
D. A single Availability Zone is a single data center location, so the design fails the requirement. Snapshots help recovery but do not keep the application running.
24
A hospital must keep certain patient processing workloads physically inside its own building to satisfy regulators, but it wants to use the same AWS services, APIs, and management tools it uses in the cloud. Which AWS offering meets this requirement?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: C. AWS Outposts delivers AWS-designed and AWS-managed infrastructure racks or servers to the customer's own data center or colocation space. It runs a consistent set of AWS services locally and uses the same APIs, control plane, and tools as the AWS Region, which makes it the fit for data that must physically remain on premises.
A. Storage Gateway provides on-premises access to cloud storage, but it addresses only storage, not the compute workload the hospital must run locally.
B. Amazon Lightsail is a simplified way to run virtual servers within an AWS Region. It has no on-premises deployment option.
D. AWS Direct Connect provides a dedicated private network link from the hospital to an AWS Region. It moves traffic to AWS rather than allowing the workload itself to run inside the hospital building.
25
Which TWO of the following are valid reasons for a company to deploy the same workload in more than one AWS Region? (Choose TWO.)
Intermediate · Select 2 answers
Explanation
Answer: D and E. Regions are isolated from one another, so running in more than one Region is the standard approach to surviving a Region-wide event as part of a disaster recovery strategy. Multiple Regions also let a company place data in a specific country to satisfy data sovereignty or residency laws, and they can reduce latency for users spread across the world.
A. Amazon S3 pricing varies by Region and is not discounted simply because a customer uses more than one Region.
B. Replication across Regions protects against a Region failure, but it also replicates accidental deletions and corruption. Backups remain necessary.
C. IAM is a global service, but permissions and resource policies still have to be designed and applied for the resources in every Region. Nothing is removed.
26
A gaming company runs UDP-based multiplayer game servers on Amazon EC2 in three AWS Regions. It needs two static IP addresses that never change, wants player traffic to enter the AWS global network as close to the player as possible, and needs near-instant failover if a Regional endpoint becomes unhealthy. Which service should it use?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: B. AWS Global Accelerator provides two static anycast IP addresses that act as a fixed front door for the application. Traffic enters the AWS global network at the edge location nearest the user and is routed over the AWS backbone to the healthiest endpoint. It supports TCP and UDP, and because clients keep using the same static IPs, failover between Regions does not depend on DNS caching.
A. An Application Load Balancer is Regional and operates at Layer 7 for HTTP and HTTPS. It neither handles UDP nor provides a global entry point.
C. Amazon CloudFront is optimized for cacheable HTTP and HTTPS content. It does not front UDP game traffic.
D. Route 53 is DNS-based. Failover depends on TTL expiry and client-side DNS caching, so it is not near-instant, and it does not provide static anycast IP addresses.
27
A European company must guarantee that its customer records are never stored outside the European Union. Which action most directly enforces this requirement?
Hard · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: D. AWS Regions are isolated from one another, and customers choose the Region in which their data is stored. AWS does not replicate or move customer content out of the selected Region unless the customer explicitly configures a service to do so. Therefore, selecting EU Regions is the direct control for an EU data residency requirement.
A. Encryption protects data confidentiality. It has no effect on the geographic location where the data physically resides.
B. CloudFront caches content at edge locations worldwide, which could actually place copies of content outside the EU rather than restrict it.
C. Support plans provide technical guidance and faster response times. They do not change where data is stored, and no case is needed because Region selection is a customer setting.
28
A solutions architect is choosing which AWS Region to deploy a new workload into. Which TWO factors are most relevant to that decision? (Choose TWO.)
Hard · Select 2 answers
Explanation
Answer: B and C. The four standard Region selection criteria are latency (proximity to users), service availability (not every service or feature launches in every Region at the same time), pricing (service prices differ by Region), and compliance or data governance requirements. Proximity to users and service availability are two of these.
A. IAM is a global service and is not limited per Region in this way. IAM user quotas are account-level, not Region-level.
D. The AWS CLI is a client-side tool. Its version is not determined by the Region.
E. Edge locations are part of the separate global edge network and are not a property of a Region. They are not counted when choosing a Region for a workload.
29
A company hosts a static marketing website on Amazon S3 in the us-east-1 Region. Users in Australia and Japan report slow page loads, while users in the United States are satisfied. Which change addresses the problem with the least cost and operational effort?
Hard · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: D. CloudFront caches the static assets at edge locations around the world, so users in Australia and Japan are served from a nearby edge rather than from us-east-1. This is the standard, low-effort way to reduce latency for globally distributed users of static content, and it also reduces load and data transfer costs at the origin.
A. Global Accelerator improves routing for non-cacheable and non-HTTP workloads. It does not cache content, so it is not the right tool for static website acceleration and would not help as much as CloudFront.
B. The site is served from S3, not EC2, so there are no instances to resize. Compute size is not the bottleneck; geographic distance is.
C. Replicating into multiple Regions works but introduces ongoing synchronization, DNS, and cost overhead. It is far more operational effort than a CDN for static content.
30
Which statement about Availability Zones within a single AWS Region is TRUE?
Hard · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: D. Availability Zones in a Region are physically separated by a meaningful distance to reduce the chance that a single event affects more than one, yet they are close enough to be linked by high-bandwidth, low-latency, fully redundant, dedicated metro fiber. That combination is what makes synchronous replication across AZs practical.
A. Inter-AZ traffic travels over the AWS private network, not the public internet.
B. Every AWS Region contains multiple Availability Zones. Design guidance for high availability depends on there being more than one.
C. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security precisely so that a failure in one does not cascade to another.