A development team already runs Kubernetes on-premises and wants to move to AWS while continuing to use standard Kubernetes tooling and manifests, without operating the Kubernetes control plane themselves. Which service should they use?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: D. Amazon EKS is a managed service that runs upstream, certified conformant Kubernetes. AWS operates the control plane across multiple Availability Zones, while the team keeps using standard Kubernetes APIs, manifests, and ecosystem tooling such as kubectl and Helm.
A. Amazon ECS is AWS's own container orchestrator. It is simpler for teams starting fresh, but it does not use Kubernetes APIs, so existing manifests and tooling would not carry over.
B. Elastic Beanstalk deploys applications onto managed EC2 environments. It is not a Kubernetes platform.
C. EC2 Auto Scaling manages the number of EC2 instances. It provides no container orchestration.
42
A team wants to run containerized microservices on AWS without provisioning, patching, or right-sizing any Amazon EC2 instances. Which service provides this?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: C. AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that works with both Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS. You specify the CPU and memory each task or pod needs, and AWS provisions and manages the underlying compute, so there are no EC2 instances to launch, patch, or scale.
A. Elastic Beanstalk provisions EC2 instances into the customer's account, so the customer still owns the servers.
B. Amazon ECR stores container images. It does not run them.
D. Using the ECS-optimized AMI means the customer is explicitly running and managing EC2 container instances, which is the opposite of the requirement.
43
A research organization submits thousands of independent computational jobs that each run for several hours. It wants AWS to queue the jobs, dynamically provision the right amount and type of compute, and shut the compute down when the queue is empty. Which service is purpose-built for this?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: C. AWS Batch is a fully managed batch computing service. It plans, schedules, and runs batch jobs, and it dynamically provisions the optimal quantity and type of compute resources (including EC2 and Fargate, with Spot support) based on the volume and requirements of the submitted jobs, then scales back down when work is finished.
A. Step Functions orchestrates the sequence and state of a workflow. It coordinates steps but does not itself provision batch compute capacity.
B. EC2 Auto Scaling scales an instance group against metrics. It has no concept of a job queue, job definitions, or job dependencies.
D. Lambda functions are capped at a 15-minute execution time, so jobs running for several hours cannot use it.
44
Which TWO outcomes does Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling directly help a company achieve? (Choose TWO.)
Intermediate · Select 2 answers
Explanation
Answer: C and D. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling performs health checks on the instances in a group and replaces any that become unhealthy, which improves fault tolerance and availability. It also scales in when demand drops, so the company stops paying for capacity it no longer needs, which supports cost optimization.
A. Capacity reservations and discounts come from On-Demand Capacity Reservations, Reserved Instances, or Savings Plans. Auto Scaling is a capacity management mechanism, not a pricing model.
B. EBS encryption is configured on the volume or as an account-level default setting. Auto Scaling does not enable it.
E. Patching the guest operating system remains the customer's responsibility under the shared responsibility model. AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager is the tool for that, not Auto Scaling.
45
A company operates a high-volume financial trading platform that handles millions of TCP requests per second, requires ultra-low latency, and must present a static IP address per Availability Zone so that client firewalls can allow-list it. Which load balancer should be used?
Hard · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: A. The Network Load Balancer operates at Layer 4 and is designed to handle millions of requests per second at ultra-low latency. It supports TCP, UDP, and TLS, and it provisions a static IP address per enabled Availability Zone, with the option to assign Elastic IP addresses, which is exactly what client firewall allow-listing requires.
B. CloudFront is a content delivery network for HTTP and HTTPS traffic and does not serve as a Layer 4 load balancer for a trading platform.
C. The Gateway Load Balancer is used to deploy and scale third-party virtual network appliances such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems. It is not a front door for application clients.
D. The Application Load Balancer works at Layer 7 for HTTP and HTTPS with features such as path-based and host-based routing. It uses a DNS name backed by changing IP addresses, so it cannot satisfy a static IP requirement.
46
A company holds legacy database licenses that are tied to physical sockets and cores and require the license auditor to see the exact physical server the software runs on. Which Amazon EC2 option satisfies this?
Hard · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: D. An EC2 Dedicated Host is a physical server allocated for the customer's exclusive use, and it exposes visibility into the number of sockets and physical cores. That visibility, plus host affinity so the same instance returns to the same host, is what per-socket, per-core, and bring-your-own-license models require.
A. Placement groups influence how instances are physically placed relative to each other for networking or resilience reasons. They do not provide dedicated hardware or licensing visibility.
B. Dedicated Instances also run on hardware dedicated to a single customer, but they do not give the customer visibility or control over the specific physical host, its socket count, or its core count, so socket-based licensing cannot be satisfied.
C. Capacity Reservations guarantee that capacity is available in an Availability Zone. They say nothing about physical server isolation or license visibility.
47
Which TWO statements about AWS Lambda are TRUE? (Choose TWO.)
Hard · Select 2 answers
Explanation
Answer: A and D. Lambda pricing has two components: the number of requests and the duration, where duration is measured in milliseconds and multiplied by the memory allocated to the function. Lambda also scales horizontally on its own, starting additional concurrent execution environments as the event rate rises and scaling back to zero when there is no work.
B. The maximum Lambda timeout is 15 minutes, not 24 hours.
C. Auto Scaling groups apply to EC2 instances. Lambda concurrency scaling is built in and requires no scaling group.
E. Under the shared responsibility model, AWS manages the operating system and runtime patching for Lambda. That is a defining benefit of the serverless model.
48
Which AWS service is a fully managed NoSQL key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at virtually any scale, with no servers to manage?
Easy · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: B. Amazon DynamoDB is a serverless, fully managed NoSQL database supporting key-value and document data models. It provides consistent single-digit millisecond response times, automatically spreads data across multiple Availability Zones, and requires no instance provisioning or patching.
A. Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse designed for complex analytical queries over large volumes of structured data, not for low-latency operational key-value lookups.
C. Amazon Neptune is a graph database optimized for storing and traversing highly connected data such as social networks and fraud rings.
D. Amazon RDS for MySQL is a managed relational database. It uses SQL tables with fixed schemas and runs on database instances the customer selects.
49
Which AWS service makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud, supporting engines that include MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and Db2?
Easy · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: D. Amazon RDS is the managed relational database service. It handles provisioning, operating system and database patching, backups, and failure detection and recovery, and it supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and Db2, in addition to Amazon Aurora.
A. Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL database. It does not run any of the listed relational engines.
B. AWS DMS migrates data into or between databases. It does not host the database itself.
C. Amazon ElastiCache is an in-memory caching and data store service compatible with Valkey, Memcached, and Redis OSS. It is not a relational database.
50
A company needs a database optimized for storing and navigating highly connected data, such as identifying relationships in a social network or detecting fraud rings. Which AWS database service should it use?
Easy · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: B. Amazon Neptune is a fully managed graph database service. It stores data as vertices and edges and supports graph query languages, which makes traversing relationships across billions of connections fast. Social networking, recommendation engines, knowledge graphs, and fraud detection are its canonical use cases.
A. Aurora is a relational engine. Deep relationship traversal in SQL requires repeated self-joins that scale poorly.
C. Amazon ElastiCache is an in-memory caching and data store service. It accelerates reads for other databases but does not model or traverse graph relationships.
D. DynamoDB is a key-value and document store. Traversing many-to-many relationships would require expensive application-side joins.