Question 1

A SysOps Administrator maintains several Amazon EC2 instances that do not have access to the public internet. To patch operating systems, the instances require outbound internet connectivity. For security reasons, the instances should not be reachable from the public Internet. The Administrator deploys a NAT instance, updates the security groups, and configures the appropriate routes within the route table. However, the instances are still unable to reach the Internet. What should be done to resolve the issue?

Accepted Answer

A)  Assign Elastic IP addresses to the instances and create a route from the private subnets to the internet gateway 
B)  Delete the NAT instance and replace it with AWS WAF 
C)  Disable source/destination checks on the NAT instance 
D)  Start/stop the NAT instance so it is launched on a different host

Question 2

A web-commerce application stores its data in an Amazon Aurora DB cluster with an Aurora replica. The application displays shopping cart information by reading data from the reader endpoint. When monitoring the Aurora database, the SysOps Administrator sees that the AuroraReplicaLagMaximum metric for a single replica is high. What behavior is the application MOST likely exhibiting to users?

Accepted Answer

A)  Users cannot add any items to the shopping cart. 
B)  Users intermittently notice that the cart is not updated correctly. 
C)  Users cannot remove any items from the shopping cart. 
D)  Users cannot use the application because it is falling back to an error page.

Question 3

A SysOps Administrator is creating an Amazon EC2 instance and has received an InsufficientInstanceCapacity error. What is the cause of the error and how can it be corrected?

Accepted Answer

A)  AWS does not currently have enough capacity to service the request for that instance type. A different Availability Zone or instance type must be used. 
B)  The account has reached its concurrent running instance limit. An EC2 limit increase request must be filed with AWS Support. 
C)  The APIs that service the EC2 requests have received too many requests and capacity has been reached. The request should be attempted again in a few minutes. 
D)  The Administrator did not specify the correct size of the instance to support the capacity requirements of the workload. Select a bigger instance.

Question 4

An application running on Amazon EC2 needs login credentials to access a database. The login credentials are stored in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store as secure string parameters. What is the MOST secure way to grant the application access to the credentials?

Accepted Answer

A)  Create an IAM EC2 role for the EC2 instances and grant the role permission to read the Systems Manager parameters 
B)  Create an IAM group for the application and grant the group permissions to read the Systems Manager parameters 
C)  Create an IAM policy for the application and grant the policy permission to read the Systems Manager parameters 
D)  Create an IAM user for the application and grant the user permission to read the Systems Manager parameters

Question 5

A user is trying to understand the ACL and policy for an S3 bucket. Which of the below mentioned policy permissions is equivalent to the WRITE ACL on a bucket?

Accepted Answer

A)  s3:GetObjectAcl 
B)  s3:GetObjectVersion 
C)  s3:ListBucketVersions 
D)  s3:DeleteObject

Question 6

Which of the following does Amazon S3 provide?

Accepted Answer

A)  A virtual server in the cloud 
B)  A highly-scalable cloud storage 
C)  A highly encrypted virtual disk in the cloud 
D)  A transient storage in the cloud

Question 7

A SysOps Administrator manages an Amazon RDS MySQL DB instance in production. The database is accessed by several applications. The Administrator needs to ensure minimal downtime of the applications in the event the database suffers a failure. This change must not impact customer use during regular business hours. Which action will make the database MORE highly available?

Accepted Answer

A)  Contact AWS Support to pre-warm the database to ensure that it can handle any unexpected spikes in traffic 
B)  Create a new Multi-AZ RDS DB instance. Migrate the data to the new DB instance and delete the old one 
C)  Create a read replica from the existing database outside of business hours 
D)  Modify the DB instance to outside of business hours to be a Multi-AZ deployment

Question 8

An application is running on Amazon EC2 instances behind a Classic Load Balancer. The instances run in an Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. Occasionally multiple incoming requests will receive a 5xx HTTP response when making a request to the Classic Load Balancer. From the Amazon CloudWatch metrics, a SysOps Administrator observes the Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) SpillOverCount metric to be greater than zero during these occasions. These errors can be avoided by triggering scaling actions on which ELB metric?

Accepted Answer

A)  HealthyHostCount 
B)  BackendConnectionErrors 
C)  SurgeQueueLength 
D)  UnHealthyHostCount

Question 9

A web application accepts orders from online users and places the orders into an Amazon SQS queue. Amazon EC2 instances in an EC2 Auto Scaling group read the messages from the queue, process the orders, and email order confirmations to the users. The Auto Scaling group scales up and down based on the queue depth. At the beginning of each business day, users report confirmation emails are delayed. What action will address this issue?

Accepted Answer

A)  Create a scheduled scaling action to scale up in anticipation of the traffic. 
B)  Change the Auto Scaling group to scale up and down based on CPU utilization. 
C)  Change the launch configuration to launch larger EC2 instance types. 
D)  Modify the scaling policy to deploy more EC2 instances when scaling up.

Question 10

A user has created a VPC with CIDR 20.0.0.0/16. The user has created one subnet with CIDR 20.0.0.0/16 in this VPC. The user is trying to create another subnet with the same VPC for CIDR 20.0.0.1/24. What will happen in this scenario?

Accepted Answer

A)  The VPC will modify the first subnet CIDR automatically to allow the second subnet IP range 
B)  It is not possible to create a subnet with the same CIDR as VPC 
C)  The second subnet will be created 
D)  It will throw a CIDR overlaps error

Question 11

A user has launched an EC2 instance. The user is planning to setup the CloudWatch alarm. Which of the below mentioned actions is not supported by the CloudWatch alarm?

Accepted Answer

A)  Notify the Auto Scaling launch config to scale up 
B)  Send an SMS using SNS 
C)  Notify the Auto Scaling group to scale down 
D)  Stop the EC2 instance

Question 12

An Administrator has an Amazon EC2 instance with an IPv6 address. The Administrator needs to prevent direct access to this instance from the Internet. The Administrator should place the EC2 instance in a:

Accepted Answer

A)  Private Subnet with an egress-only Internet Gateway attached to the subnet and placed in the subnet Route Table. 
B)  Public subnet with an egress-only Internet Gateway attached to the VPC and placed in the VPC Route Table. 
C)  Private subnet with an egress-only Internet Gateway attached to the VPC and placed in the subnet Route Table. 
D)  Public subnet and a security group that blocks inbound IPv6 traffic attached to the interface.

Question 13

A company wants to identify specific Amazon EC2 instances that are underutilized and the estimated cost savings for each instance. How can this be done with MINIMAL effort?

Accepted Answer

A)  Use AWS Budgets to report on low utilization of EC2 instances. 
B)  Run an AWS Systems Manager script to check for low memory utilization of EC2 instances. 
C)  Run Cost Explorer to look for low utilization of EC2 instances. 
D)  Use Amazon CloudWatch metrics to identify EC2 instances with low utilization.

Question 14

When an EC2 instance that is backed by an S3-based AMI Is terminated, what happens to the data on me root volume?

Accepted Answer

A)  Data is automatically saved as an E8S volume. 
B)  Data is automatically saved as an ESS snapshot. 
C)  Data is automatically deleted. 
D)  Data is unavailable until the instance is restarted.

Question 15

A user has launched an EC2 instance from an instance store backed AMI. If the user restarts the instance, what will happen to the ephemeral storage data?

Accepted Answer

A)  All the data will be erased but the ephemeral storage will stay connected 
B)  All data will be erased and the ephemeral storage is released 
C)  It is not possible to restart an instance launched from an instance store backed AMI 
D)  The data is preserved

Question 16

A user has created a VPC with a subnet and a security group. The user has launched an instance in that subnet and attached a public IP. The user is still unable to connect to the instance. The Internet gateway has also been created. What can be the reason for the error?

Accepted Answer

A)  The internet gateway is not configured with the route table 
B)  The private IP is not present 
C)  The outbound traffic on the security group is disabled 
D)  The internet gateway is not configured with the security group

Question 17

What does Amazon SES stand for?

Accepted Answer

A)  Simple Elastic Server 
B)  Software Email Solution 
C)  Software Enabled Server 
D)  Simple Email Service

Question 18

Where is an object stored in Amazon S3?

Accepted Answer

A)  in a Bucket 
B)  in a Collector 
C)  in an Archive 
D)  in a Vault

Question 19

You have a web application leveraging an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) In front of the web servers deployed using an Auto Scaling Group Your database is running on Relational Database Service (RDS) The application serves out technical articles and responses to them in general there are more views of an article than there are responses to the article. On occasion, an article on the site becomes extremely popular resulting in significant traffic Increases that causes the site to go down. What could you do to help alleviate the pressure on the infrastructure while maintaining availability during these events? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

A)  Leverage CloudFront for the delivery of the articles. 
B)  Add RDS read-replicas for the read traffic going to your relational database 
C)  Leverage ElastiCache for caching the most frequently used data. 
D)  Use SOS to queue up the requests for the technical posts and deliver them out of the queue. 
E)  Use Route53 health checks to fail over to an S3 bucket for an error page.

Question 20

A user has enabled instance protection for his Auto Scaling group that has spot instances. If Auto Scaling wants to terminate an instance in this Auto Scaling group due to a CloudWatch trigger unre-lated to bid price, what will happen?

Accepted Answer

A)  Auto Scaling will notify the user for the next action 
B)  Auto Scaling will remove the instance from the Auto Scaling Group 
C)  Auto Scaling overwrites the instance termination attribute and terminates the instances 
D)  The EC2 instance will not be terminated since instance protection from scale-in is enabled.

Exam 13: AWS Certified SysOps Administrator (SOA-C01)