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AWS Certified Solutions Architect study material: Resilient architecture

130 questions of the 500 in the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate quiz. Each opens with its answer, the reasoning and where that is written down.

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The questions

1. 151. Why should a failover procedure depend only on data plane operations?
2. 152. A well-architected, highly available workload must survive the loss of a single data centre. Which disaster recovery strategy is sufficient?
3. 153. Which service continuously validates whether a workload is still likely to meet its RTO and RPO targets?
4. 154. A team plans a backup-and-restore strategy into a second Region. Which two things must be restored besides the data? Choose two.
5. 155. What determines the recovery point a backup-based strategy can actually achieve?
6. 156. Which weakness does continuous replication have compared with point-in-time backups?
7. 157. S3 replication is running to a recovery Region and someone deletes an object in the source bucket. What happens to the replica?
8. 158. Which two capabilities does AWS Backup add over per-service backup tools? Choose two.
9. 159. A team wants restores from AWS Backup to run automatically each night. What must they build?
10. 160. Why is running a periodic restore in advance of any disaster considered good practice?
11. 161. In a pilot light strategy, which components stay running in the recovery Region?
12. 162. What is the essential difference between pilot light and warm standby?
13. 163. Which two AWS features provide continuous cross-Region asynchronous data replication? Choose two.
14. 164. A workload uses RDS read replicas across Regions. What must happen before the recovery Region can accept writes?
15. 165. Which two advantages does an Aurora global database offer over cross-Region RDS read replicas? Choose two.
16. 166. How can one CloudFormation template deploy full capacity to the primary Region and a scaled-down stack to the recovery Region?
17. 167. Why do many teams keep failover initiation manual while automating every step behind it?
18. 168. Which mechanism gives an operator a highly available data plane switch to shift traffic between Regions?
19. 169. How does CloudFront origin failover differ from a Region-level failover?
20. 170. Which two statements about AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery are correct? Choose two.
21. 171. Before a recovery Region can be scaled to production capacity, what must be checked?
22. 172. A team provisions the recovery Region at full production capacity rather than relying on Auto Scaling during failover. What is this arrangement called?
23. 173. How does multi-site active/active differ from hot standby?
24. 174. Which two behaviours does Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling provide without any manual intervention? Choose two.
25. 175. An application process hangs but the EC2 instance still passes its system checks. What lets Auto Scaling replace it?
26. 176. An SQS consumer receives a message and takes longer than expected to process it. What happens when the visibility timeout expires before the message is deleted?
27. 177. Which SQS action extends the visibility timeout for a message that needs more processing time?
28. 178. What is the default visibility timeout on a new SQS queue?
29. 179. Which two constraints apply to an SQS dead-letter queue? Choose two.
30. 180. What risk does attaching a dead-letter queue to a FIFO queue introduce?
31. 181. Which setting names a source queue's dead-letter queue and the number of failed receives that send a message there?
32. 182. After fixing the fault that sent messages to a dead-letter queue, how are those messages returned for processing?
33. 183. Which two endpoint types can subscribe to an Amazon SNS topic? Choose two.
34. 184. What role does an SNS topic play between publishers and subscribers?
35. 185. Which EventBridge feature suits routing events from many sources to many targets?
36. 186. A team needs events from one DynamoDB stream delivered to one target, with enrichment applied on the way. Which EventBridge feature fits?
37. 187. Which EventBridge component runs recurring tasks defined by cron and rate expressions?
38. 188. Which two characteristics describe a Step Functions Standard workflow? Choose two.
39. 189. A workload ingests IoT telemetry at a very high event rate through Step Functions. Which workflow type suits it?
40. 190. In Step Functions, what is a single running instance of a workflow called?
41. 191. How can work in a Step Functions task be performed by a worker that does not run on AWS?
42. 192. A Multi-AZ DB instance deployment is in place and the team wants the standby to serve read traffic. What must change?
43. 193. Why can an RDS read replica return slightly stale data?
44. 194. Which two benefits does Amazon RDS Proxy give an application? Choose two.
45. 195. A traffic surge sends RDS Proxy more connection requests than its pool can serve. What happens first?
46. 196. Across how many Availability Zones is an Aurora cluster volume spread?
47. 197. What happens when an Aurora cluster's primary instance becomes unavailable?
48. 198. Which two statements about DynamoDB global tables are correct? Choose two.
49. 199. How does S3 versioning protect against an accidental delete?
50. 200. Two clients write the same object key to a versioning-enabled bucket at the same moment. What does S3 do?
51. 201. Which AWS Backup feature protects against an insider threat or a compromised account?
52. 202. A backup strategy must reach every account in an organization without duplicating plans by hand. What does AWS Backup offer?
53. 203. What is a prerequisite for AWS Backup cross-account management and cross-account backup?
54. 204. Which two things does AWS Backup Audit Manager do? Choose two.
55. 205. How does AWS Backup keep frequent backups affordable for supported resource types?
56. 206. A compliance team asks whether AWS Backup governs the EBS snapshots a developer takes directly in the EC2 console. What is the answer?
57. 207. How is one AWS Backup plan applied consistently to a whole group of resources across applications?
58. 208. Which two statements about AWS X-Ray are correct? Choose two.
59. 209. On which platforms is the X-Ray daemon already included?
60. 210. An application must process long-running jobs pulled from an SQS queue on Elastic Beanstalk. Which environment type fits?
61. 211. Which two things can a Route 53 health check monitor? Choose two.
62. 212. Which Route 53 routing policy arranges active-passive failover between a primary resource and a standby?
63. 213. How many healthy records does a Route 53 multivalue answer routing policy return?
64. 214. How does an operator learn immediately that a Route 53 health check has changed status?
65. 215. Which two endpoint types can sit behind a standard AWS Global Accelerator? Choose two.
66. 216. A team disables a Global Accelerator to save cost and later deletes it. What happens to its static IP addresses?
67. 217. Why does a VPC peering connection introduce no single point of failure?
68. 218. How many tunnels does a single AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection provide?
69. 219. Which two placement group strategies reduce the chance that one hardware failure takes several instances at once? Choose two.
70. 220. Instances are launched without any placement group. How does EC2 place them?
71. 221. Which signal warns that a Spot Instance faces a raised risk of interruption?
72. 222. How does reserved concurrency protect the resources behind a Lambda function?
73. 223. A team needs replicas that are byte-for-byte identical to the source objects, keeping creation times and version IDs. What does S3 replication offer?
74. 224. What service level does S3 Replication Time Control commit to?
75. 225. A team enables Replication Time Control and expects it to cover a Batch Replication job. What actually happens?
76. 226. Which Elastic Load Balancing component decides how a request reaches the registered targets?
77. 227. Which two statements about Application Load Balancer listener rules are correct? Choose two.
78. 228. At what level are Elastic Load Balancing health checks configured?
79. 229. A Network Load Balancer has two Availability Zones enabled but traffic is uneven because one zone holds fewer targets. What setting evens it out?
80. 230. What does enabling an Availability Zone on a load balancer create?
81. 231. A target must receive traffic from two different applications with different health requirements. What makes this possible?
82. 232. Which generation of Elastic Load Balancing does AWS recommend migrating away from?
83. 233. How does adding or removing targets behind a load balancer affect in-flight application traffic?
84. 234. Which two statements about API Gateway API types are correct? Choose two.
85. 235. Which API Gateway API type routes incoming messages according to their content?
86. 236. A workload must survive an Availability Zone failure. Which design choice addresses this directly?
87. 237. Besides lowering latency, what does caching objects at many CloudFront edge locations achieve?
88. 238. How quickly does Global Accelerator react to an endpoint becoming unhealthy?
89. 239. Which two workloads suit Amazon Kinesis Data Streams? Choose two.
90. 240. How does pushing logs directly into a Kinesis stream improve durability compared with batching them on the server?
91. 241. Which two destinations can Amazon Data Firehose deliver streaming data to? Choose two.
92. 242. What must a team build to use Amazon Data Firehose?
93. 243. Which of the six Well-Architected Framework pillars addresses recovering from failure?
94. 244. What is the purpose of the AWS Well-Architected Framework?
95. 245. What does Amazon OpenSearch Service do when a node in a managed domain fails?
96. 246. Why is a daily automatic backup of an FSx for Windows file system file-system-consistent?
97. 247. A multipart upload loses one part to a network error. What must be retransmitted?
98. 248. Across what scope is EBS snapshot data replicated?
99. 249. Who is responsible for backing up the data on an EBS volume?
100. 250. How can a team follow the progress and status of EBS snapshots programmatically?
101. 251. Which two statements distinguish an Aurora Replica from an RDS read replica? Choose two.
102. 252. Which mechanism does RDS use to build a read replica?
103. 253. What access do clients have to an RDS read replica?
104. 254. How much application change does adopting Amazon RDS Proxy usually require?
105. 255. Which two models does DynamoDB offer for global tables?
106. 256. How many broad disaster recovery strategies does AWS describe?
107. 257. In an active/passive disaster recovery design, when does the recovery site begin serving traffic?
108. 258. Which two AWS resources offer point-in-time backup for a disaster recovery plan? Choose two.
109. 259. What does versioning in the destination bucket add to an S3 Cross-Region Replication strategy?
110. 260. An AMI is created from a running EC2 instance. What does it capture?
111. 261. AWS Backup records extra EC2 metadata such as instance type, VPC and IAM role. When is that metadata used?
112. 262. Which two practices does AWS recommend when adopting a pilot light strategy? Choose two.
113. 263. Which Aurora capability confirms that a secondary cluster is staying inside the target recovery point window?
114. 264. How does an Image Builder pipeline support a multi-Region recovery plan?
115. 265. Why is changing Route 53 weighted routing weights a weaker failover mechanism than routing controls?
116. 266. Adjusting Global Accelerator traffic dials to shift traffic during a failover has which characteristic?
117. 267. A company runs applications and databases on EC2 and wants continuous block-level replication into a recovery Region. Which service fits?
118. 268. Besides EC2 instances, which two resources can EC2 Auto Scaling adjust within a Region? Choose two.
119. 269. Which change brings a recovery Region's Auto Scaling group up to full production capacity?
120. 270. Multi-site active/active brings recovery time close to zero. Which failure still leaves a non-zero recovery point?
121. 271. Which two values bound the size of an EC2 Auto Scaling group? Choose two.
122. 272. Which Elastic Load Balancing behaviour keeps a failing target from receiving requests?
123. 273. An SQS consumer needs one particular message hidden for longer than the queue's default, without changing the queue. What is possible?
124. 274. How is a processed SQS message removed from the queue?
125. 275. What is the purpose of collecting failed messages in a dead-letter queue?
126. 276. Which characteristic of EventBridge makes an event-driven architecture loosely coupled?
127. 277. A pipe reads from a DynamoDB stream and delivers to an event bus. What does this pattern achieve?
128. 278. In Step Functions, what does a Task state represent?
129. 279. How many primary instances does an Aurora DB cluster have?
130. 280. Two buckets in the same AWS Region must be kept in sync automatically. Which feature does this?