Which TWO statements correctly describe the difference between an Amazon EC2 instance store and an Amazon EBS volume? (Choose TWO.)
Hard · Select 2 answers
Explanation
Answer: B and D. An instance store provides temporary block-level storage physically attached to the host computer. Its data survives a reboot but is lost when the instance stops, hibernates, or terminates, or if the underlying disk fails. An Amazon EBS volume is network-attached and has its own lifecycle, so it persists when the instance stops and can be backed up using point-in-time snapshots that are stored in Amazon S3.
A. Instance store data is not replicated by AWS at all. Any redundancy must be implemented by the application.
C. This reverses the two. EBS volumes are persistent; instance store volumes are ephemeral.
E. Instance store volumes are tied to the physical host and cannot be detached and reattached. That capability belongs to EBS volumes.
22
A hospital stores medical images that must be retained for at least a year. Each image is accessed roughly once per quarter, but when it is accessed a clinician needs it in milliseconds. Which Amazon S3 storage class is the most cost-effective fit?
Hard · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: B. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval is designed for long-lived archive data that is accessed about once per quarter but needs millisecond retrieval. It offers lower storage cost than S3 Standard-IA while still providing immediate access, with a 90-day minimum storage duration that a one-year retention easily satisfies.
A. S3 Standard provides millisecond access but is the most expensive per gigabyte and is designed for frequently accessed data, so it wastes money on quarterly access.
C. S3 Glacier Deep Archive has retrieval times measured in hours, so a clinician could not open the image on demand.
D. S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval requires a restore request and delivers data in minutes to hours, which does not meet a millisecond access requirement.
23
An enterprise wants to define one set of backup policies and schedules and apply them centrally across Amazon EBS volumes, Amazon RDS databases, Amazon DynamoDB tables, and Amazon EFS file systems, with compliance reporting. Which AWS service should it use?
Hard · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: A. AWS Backup is a fully managed, centralized backup service. Backup plans define schedules, retention, and lifecycle rules, and they are applied across supported AWS services including EBS, RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, EFS, FSx, and Storage Gateway. It also provides audit and compliance reporting through AWS Backup Audit Manager.
B. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery continuously replicates servers for rapid recovery after a disaster. It is a DR replication tool rather than a policy-based backup catalog.
C. Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager automates the creation and retention of EBS snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs only. It does not cover RDS, DynamoDB, or EFS.
D. S3 Versioning protects objects within a single S3 bucket. It applies to no other service.
24
Which statement about Amazon EBS volumes is TRUE?
Hard · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: A. An EBS volume is created in a specific Availability Zone and is automatically replicated within that zone to protect against component failure. Snapshots are incremental point-in-time backups stored durably in Amazon S3, and a snapshot can be copied to another Region, which is the standard way to move an EBS volume across Regions or Availability Zones.
B. EBS volumes do not span Availability Zones. Cross-zone resilience must be built at the application layer or by restoring a snapshot into another zone.
C. A volume can only be attached to an instance in the same Availability Zone. To use it elsewhere you take a snapshot and create a new volume in the target zone.
D. Snapshots are stored in Amazon S3, managed by AWS, and are entirely independent of the instance's lifecycle.
25
Which AWS service uses machine learning to identify objects, people, text, scenes, and activities in images and videos without requiring the customer to build a model?
Easy · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: D. Amazon Rekognition is a pre-trained computer vision service. It analyzes images and videos through a simple API to detect objects, scenes, activities, text in images, and faces, and to perform facial comparison and content moderation, with no machine learning expertise required.
A. Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing service that analyzes text for sentiment, entities, key phrases, and language. It does not process images.
B. Amazon Polly converts text into lifelike speech. It generates audio rather than analyzing visual content.
C. Amazon Textract extracts printed text, handwriting, forms, and tables from scanned documents. It is document-focused rather than general scene and object recognition.
26
An e-learning company wants to turn its written course material into natural-sounding spoken audio in multiple languages and voices. Which AWS service should it use?
Easy · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: A. Amazon Polly is a text-to-speech service. It converts written text into lifelike speech using deep learning, offers many languages and voices including neural voices, and returns standard audio formats that can be played or stored.
B. Amazon Translate performs machine translation of text between languages. It produces text, not audio, although it is often paired with Polly.
C. Amazon Transcribe performs the reverse operation, converting speech in audio files or streams into written text.
D. Amazon Lex builds conversational interfaces such as chatbots using automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding. It is not a bulk text-to-speech service.
27
Which AWS service lets an analyst run standard SQL queries directly against data stored in Amazon S3, with no infrastructure to provision and charges based on the data scanned by each query?
Easy · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: C. Amazon Athena is a serverless, interactive query service. You point it at data in Amazon S3, define a table schema, and run standard SQL. There are no clusters or servers to manage, and you pay for the amount of data each query scans, which makes it well suited to ad hoc analysis.
A. AWS Glue is an ETL and data cataloging service. Its Data Catalog supplies table definitions that Athena can use, but Glue itself is not the interactive SQL query engine.
B. Amazon EMR runs managed big data frameworks such as Apache Spark and Hadoop on clusters that the customer sizes and pays for while they are running.
D. Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse. Data is normally loaded into the warehouse, and the customer provisions a cluster or uses Redshift Serverless capacity.
28
An insurance company receives thousands of scanned claim forms as PDFs each day and needs to automatically extract the printed text along with the form fields and table contents. Which AWS service is designed for this?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: C. Amazon Textract goes beyond simple optical character recognition. It extracts printed text and handwriting and, importantly, preserves the structure of forms as key-value pairs and of tables as rows and columns, which is exactly what processing scanned claim forms requires.
A. Amazon Rekognition can detect text in images, but it returns detected text elements without understanding form field relationships or table structure.
B. Amazon Transcribe converts speech in audio and video into text. It processes audio, not scanned document images.
D. Amazon Comprehend analyzes text that has already been extracted. It is commonly used after Textract rather than instead of it.
29
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.
30
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.