Cloud Technology and Services

Answer: A. Infrastructure as code defines resources in a template that can be stored in version control and applied repeatedly. The console is an interactive interface whose actions are not reusable. Marketplace distributes third-party software. The Health Dashboard reports service events.

Answer: A. The CLI and SDKs expose the AWS APIs to scripts and applications. The console is a browser interface for interactive use. The Support Center is for raising cases. The Pricing Calculator estimates cost.

Answer: C. A hybrid deployment combines on-premises infrastructure with cloud resources connected together. A cloud deployment runs entirely on AWS. An on-premises deployment runs entirely in the company's own facilities. Multi-tenancy describes how a service shares infrastructure between customers rather than where a workload runs.

Answer: D. Direct Connect provisions a dedicated physical circuit between a customer location and AWS. A Site-to-Site VPN is an encrypted tunnel over the public internet rather than a dedicated connection. CloudFront caches content at edge locations. Transfer Family provides managed file transfer endpoints.

Answer: A. A genuine one-off is performed most efficiently in the console. A template, a pipeline, and a catalog product all pay an authoring cost that is recovered only through repetition.

Answer: C. Outposts delivers AWS-managed racks installed in the customer's own facility. Local Zones place AWS infrastructure near large population centres in AWS facilities. CloudFront caches content at edge locations. Wavelength embeds infrastructure in telecommunications providers' networks.

Answer: A. An Availability Zone is one or more discrete data centers with independent power and networking, and AZs within a Region are connected by low-latency links, so spreading across AZs survives a data center failure while staying in one geographic area. Multiple Regions on separate continents exceed the stated scope and add latency and data-residency complexity. A single AZ with larger instances leaves the data center as a single point of failure. CloudFront edge locations cache content; they do not host the application tier.

Answer: C. CloudWatch is the monitoring and observability service, holding metrics, alarms, dashboards, and log groups. CloudTrail records API activity for audit purposes. Config tracks resource configuration and compliance. Trusted Advisor offers periodic best-practice recommendations rather than continuous telemetry.

Answer: C. Marketplace is the catalogue for discovering and purchasing third-party software with billing through the AWS account. Service Catalog publishes an organization's own approved products internally. Config evaluates resource compliance. Artifact distributes AWS compliance documents.

Answer: D. The Well-Architected Tool guides a structured review against the framework's pillars and generates an improvement plan. Trusted Advisor performs automated best-practice checks without the structured review. Compute Optimizer recommends resource sizing. Config evaluates configuration compliance.

Answer: A. The AWS Health Dashboard shows account-specific events including scheduled maintenance affecting the customer's resources. A public status page shows general service status without account context. CloudWatch alarms monitor the customer's own metrics. Trusted Advisor gives best-practice recommendations.

Answer: C. Lambda executes functions on demand with no instances to manage and bills by request count and execution duration. EC2 requires the customer to choose, launch, and maintain instances. Lightsail simplifies provisioning but still gives the customer a virtual server to manage. AWS Batch on EC2 schedules jobs onto instances the customer's account still runs.

Answer: A. EKS runs and maintains the Kubernetes control plane so customers do not operate it themselves. ECS is AWS's own container orchestrator and does not use the Kubernetes API. Fargate is a serverless compute engine that runs containers for either ECS or EKS but is not itself an orchestrator. EMR runs big data frameworks such as Spark and Hadoop.

Answer: A. Lightsail bundles an instance, storage, and data transfer at a fixed monthly price aimed at simpler workloads. EC2 offers granular control with usage-based pricing. Fargate runs containers serverlessly. Batch schedules batch computing jobs.

Answer: B. Fargate is the serverless compute engine for containers, removing instance management for both ECS and EKS. The ECS EC2 launch type and EKS self-managed nodes both require the customer to run instances. Installing Docker on EC2 is fully self-managed.

Answer: B. Bedrock exposes foundation models from several providers behind one serverless API. SageMaker AI is the platform for building and hosting custom models. Comprehend performs specific natural language tasks. Lambda runs customer code.

Answer: B. Amazon RDS is the managed relational database service; it automates backups, minor version patching, and Multi-AZ failover, which is precisely the overhead the team wants to avoid. Installing MySQL on EC2 preserves full control but leaves every one of those tasks with the customer. DynamoDB is a NoSQL key-value store and would require rewriting the data model. Redshift is a columnar data warehouse built for analytics, not for transactional MySQL workloads.

Answer: B. DynamoDB is the managed key-value and document store designed for consistent single-digit millisecond response at scale. RDS provides managed relational engines with a different data model. Redshift is a columnar data warehouse tuned for analytical queries. Neptune is a graph database for highly connected data.

Answer: A. Aurora is AWS's own engine, wire-compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL, and designed for substantially greater throughput than the community versions. DynamoDB is NoSQL and not compatible with either. ElastiCache is an in-memory cache, not a durable relational database. DocumentDB is compatible with MongoDB workloads.

Answer: B. Memory optimized families provide a high ratio of RAM to vCPU for in-memory databases and large caches. Compute optimized families favour CPU. Storage optimized families provide high local disk throughput. Accelerated computing families provide GPUs and other accelerators.

Answer: D. MemoryDB is an in-memory database offering microsecond reads with durability. RDS is a managed relational service. DynamoDB is a key-value and document store with single-digit millisecond latency. Neptune is a graph database.

Answer: D. Self-managing on EC2 is chosen when operating system access or an unsupported engine is required. Automatic patching, backups, reduced operational effort, and built-in failover are all reasons to choose a managed service instead.

Answer: A. The Schema Conversion Tool converts schema and code objects between database engines. Database Migration Service moves the data itself. Application Migration Service replicates servers. DataSync transfers files between storage systems.

Answer: B. CloudFront is the AWS content delivery network; it caches content at edge locations near viewers, cutting latency and absorbing requests that would otherwise reach the origin. Direct Connect is a dedicated private link between a data center and AWS, unrelated to public content distribution. Route 53 resolves DNS and can route users to endpoints but does not cache content. Global Accelerator improves availability and performance for TCP and UDP traffic using the AWS backbone and anycast IPs, but it does not cache static objects.

Answer: B. Infrastructure as code makes provisioning repeatable, reviewable, and versioned. It does not change resource pricing, Regional availability, or the permissions required.

Answer: B. Amazon VPC is the customer-defined virtual network, including CIDR range, subnets, route tables, and gateways. Direct Connect provides a private link into AWS but does not define the network itself. Route 53 is DNS. Organizations manages multiple AWS accounts and their policies.

Answer: C. A NAT gateway permits outbound-initiated connections while blocking inbound attempts. An internet gateway permits traffic in both directions and makes a subnet public. A virtual private gateway terminates VPN connections. A VPC endpoint reaches AWS services privately.

Answer: B, D. Security groups operate at the resource level and network ACLs at the subnet level, and both filter network traffic. Hosted zones hold DNS records. Bucket policies control access to S3 objects. IAM roles grant permissions to principals rather than filtering traffic.

Answer: C. Route 53 is the AWS Domain Name System service. CloudFront caches and delivers content from edge locations. Global Accelerator provides static anycast addresses that route over the AWS network. Amazon VPC is the virtual network itself.

Answer: A. S3 Glacier Deep Archive has the lowest storage price of any S3 class and is designed for data retained for years and accessed once or twice annually, with retrieval measured in hours — matching both the retention period and the tolerated latency. S3 Standard is priced for frequent access. Standard-IA suits infrequent access that still needs millisecond retrieval, so it costs more than necessary. Intelligent-Tiering adds a monitoring charge and is aimed at unpredictable access patterns, whereas this pattern is well understood.

Answer: C. EC2 Auto Scaling adds and removes instances according to scaling policies and keeps the group at its desired capacity. Elastic Load Balancing distributes traffic across whatever instances exist but never changes their number. CloudFront caches content at edge locations. S3 is object storage and has no instance count to scale.

Answer: B. Snowball Edge ships a physical device, which is the practical way to move tens of terabytes when the available link would take months. DataSync and Transfer Acceleration both optimize network transfer but remain bounded by the bandwidth the company does not have. Storage Gateway provides ongoing hybrid storage access rather than a bulk one-time migration.

Answer: B. An EBS volume is network-attached block storage whose data survives stopping or terminating the instance, subject to the delete-on-termination setting. S3 is object storage accessed over an API rather than as a block device. EFS is a shared file system mountable by many instances. Instance store is physically attached, ephemeral, and lost when the instance stops.

Answer: D. Instance store is ephemeral local disk whose data does not survive stopping or terminating the instance. EBS volumes persist independently of the instance lifecycle. EFS is a durable shared file system. S3 is durable object storage.

Answer: B. Elastic Beanstalk provisions and manages the environment while leaving the underlying resources visible and adjustable. Lambda runs functions with no instances at all. S3 static hosting serves files without an application runtime. CloudFormation provisions infrastructure from templates but does not manage the application platform.

Answer: C. Athena runs SQL queries against data in S3 with no infrastructure to manage and no loading step. Redshift is a data warehouse that generally loads data into cluster storage, though Spectrum can query S3. RDS is a transactional database requiring data to be loaded. Glue performs ETL and catalogues metadata.

Answer: C. Lifecycle rules transition objects to different storage classes or expire them based on age or other criteria. Versioning preserves prior object versions. Replication copies objects to another bucket. Object Lock prevents deletion for a retention period.

Answer: B. QuickSight is the managed business intelligence service for dashboards and visualizations. Athena queries data with SQL but does not build dashboards. DataBrew prepares and cleans data visually. CloudWatch visualizes operational metrics rather than business data.

Answer: C. Polly performs text-to-speech synthesis. Transcribe performs the reverse, converting speech to text. Comprehend analyses text for entities and sentiment. Translate converts text between languages.

Answer: D. Connect is the managed cloud contact centre service. Chime provides meetings and communications. Lex builds conversational interfaces that can be used within a contact centre but is not the contact centre itself. Pinpoint handles customer engagement campaigns.

Answer: D. SQS is the managed queue service where each message is processed by a single consumer. SNS is a publish and subscribe notification service that delivers to many subscribers. Kinesis is a streaming data service. Step Functions orchestrates workflow steps.

Answer: D. EMR provisions and manages clusters running Spark, Hadoop, and related big data frameworks. Redshift is a columnar data warehouse. DataBrew performs visual data preparation. Athena runs SQL queries against S3 without clusters.

Answer: A. CloudFormation reads a declarative template and creates, updates, or deletes the described resources together as a stack. Systems Manager operates and configures resources that already exist. CodeDeploy delivers application code to compute targets. EventBridge routes events between services.

Answer: D. SNS publishes each message to every subscriber of a topic, which is the fan-out pattern described. SQS holds messages in a queue where each is processed by a single consumer. Step Functions orchestrates workflow steps. A queue in Amazon MQ likewise delivers each message to one consumer.

Answer: B. WorkSpaces delivers persistent managed virtual desktops. AppStream streams individual applications rather than a full persistent desktop. EC2 with Remote Desktop is a self-managed approach. Directory Service provides directory infrastructure that WorkSpaces may use.

Answer: A. Amazon SNS is a publish and subscribe service that delivers each message to every subscriber. SQS is a queue where each message is processed by a single consumer. EventBridge routes events by pattern. Step Functions orchestrates workflow steps.

Answer: B. Amplify builds and hosts frontend web and mobile applications. AppConfig manages application configuration. CodeArtifact hosts software packages. AppStream streams desktop applications to users.

Answer: C. IoT Core connects devices to AWS and manages their messaging and security. IoT Greengrass extends AWS to edge devices so they can run local compute. Amazon Connect is a cloud contact centre. Device Farm tests mobile applications on real devices.

Answer: A. CloudShell provides a browser-based shell with the CLI already configured for the signed-in identity. Cloud9 is a browser-based integrated development environment. CodeBuild compiles and tests code. Session Manager opens a shell on a managed EC2 instance.

Answer: B. X-Ray traces a request across the services it touches and identifies where time is spent. CloudWatch Logs stores log data. CloudTrail records API activity. Config records resource configuration.

Answer: C. A cloud deployment runs entirely on AWS. Hybrid combines cloud and on-premises. On-premises runs entirely in the customer's facilities. Colocation is a facility arrangement rather than a cloud deployment model.

Answer: B. Site-to-Site VPN creates an encrypted tunnel over the internet. Direct Connect is a dedicated private circuit. CloudFront caches content. Transit Gateway connects VPCs and networks within AWS.

Answer: D. An Availability Zone is one or more discrete data centers within a Region. A Region contains Availability Zones rather than the reverse. Cache locations are edge locations. Customer facilities are not Availability Zones.

Answer: A. Multiple Availability Zones protect against the failure of one. Cost generally increases. Residency is addressed by Region choice. Latency for distant users is addressed by Regions or edge locations.

Answer: A. Region selection weighs residency, latency, available services, and price together. Zone count, launch date, and name are not the deciding criteria.

Answer: C. Edge locations cache content and serve edge services. EC2 instances, backups, and databases run in Regions.

Answer: A. Lambda runs code without server management. EC2 and Lightsail both involve instances. Batch schedules jobs onto compute the customer configures.

Answer: D. The family letter indicates the optimization category such as compute optimized or memory optimized. Zone, price, and operating system are chosen separately.

Answer: C. Elastic Load Balancing distributes traffic across targets. Auto Scaling adjusts capacity. Route 53 resolves DNS. Global Accelerator provides static addresses and routes over the AWS network.

Answer: A. Fargate runs containers with no instances to manage. The other options all involve customer-managed instances.

Answer: B. Lightsail bundles compute, storage, and networking at a predictable monthly price for simple workloads. EC2, Lambda, and ECS use usage-based pricing and require more configuration.

Answer: A. RDS manages relational engines including MySQL and PostgreSQL. DynamoDB is key-value and document oriented. Neptune is a graph database. ElastiCache is an in-memory cache.

Answer: B. DynamoDB is a managed NoSQL database with single-digit millisecond latency. RDS and Aurora are relational. Redshift is an analytical warehouse.

Answer: C. A VPC is a logically isolated virtual network. A physical connection is Direct Connect. A content delivery network is CloudFront. A managed firewall is Network Firewall or WAF.

Answer: C. The route to an internet gateway makes a subnet public. CIDR size, zone placement, and encryption do not determine it.

Answer: C. S3 is object storage designed for very high durability. EBS is block storage attached to an instance. EFS and FSx are file systems.

Answer: C. EBS volumes persist independently of the instance lifecycle. Instance store is lost when the instance stops. S3 is object storage. EFS is a shared file system rather than a single-instance attachment.

Answer: C. Storage Gateway presents cloud storage to on-premises applications through standard protocols. DataSync transfers data. Snowball ships data physically. Transfer Acceleration speeds uploads to S3.

Answer: B. Standard-Infrequent Access is for less frequently accessed data with millisecond retrieval. Standard is for frequent access. Deep Archive has long retrieval times. Express One Zone is for very high performance single-zone workloads.

Answer: A. AWS Backup centralizes backup policy across many services. S3 Lifecycle manages object transitions. Data Lifecycle Manager covers EBS snapshots and AMIs. Storage Gateway connects on-premises applications to cloud storage.

Answer: C. Bedrock provides foundation models from multiple providers through one API. SageMaker AI is for building and training models. Comprehend analyses text. Rekognition analyses images and video.

Answer: A. SageMaker AI covers the custom model lifecycle. Bedrock provides pre-built foundation models. Textract extracts text from documents. Polly converts text to speech.

Answer: C. Step Functions orchestrates steps as a visual state machine. SQS queues messages. SNS publishes to subscribers. EventBridge routes events by pattern.

Answer: C. SQS holds messages in a queue until a consumer processes them. SNS pushes to subscribers without retention for later polling in the same way. Step Functions orchestrates. Kinesis is for streaming data.

Answer: D. Amazon Connect is a cloud contact center. Chime provides meetings and communications. Pinpoint handles customer engagement campaigns. SES sends email.

Answer: A. WorkSpaces provides persistent virtual desktops. AppStream streams individual applications. EC2 provides instances. Cloud9 is a browser-based development environment.

Answer: B. The CLI and SDKs are scriptable. The console is interactive, the Support Center raises cases, and Marketplace distributes software.

Answer: A. On-premises runs entirely in the company's facilities. Cloud runs on AWS, hybrid combines both, and edge places compute near users or devices.

Answer: A. Local Zones place AWS infrastructure near large population centres. Outposts places it in the customer's facility, CloudFront caches content, and Direct Connect provides a dedicated circuit.

Answer: D. Regions contain multiple Availability Zones so workloads can span them. A single zone would provide no isolation, the count varies by Region, and it does not change daily.

Answer: D. Edge locations cache and terminate edge services; Availability Zones host workloads. They are distinct facility types.

Answer: A. Residency requirements can compel a Region choice that is not the nearest. Distance increases latency, zone count is not reduced, and transfer is still charged.

Answer: A. Direct Connect locations terminate dedicated connections. Availability Zones host workloads, edge locations cache content, and Local Zones extend infrastructure near users.

Answer: A. Wavelength Zones embed infrastructure in telecommunications networks. Caching is CloudFront, customer facilities are Outposts, and dedicated connections are Direct Connect.

Answer: D. Pricing varies by Region across many services. It is not identical, and the variation is not limited to transfer or compute.

Answer: D. Fargate runs containers serverlessly. EC2 and Lightsail involve instances, and Batch schedules jobs onto compute the customer configures.

Answer: A. An AMI supplies the template from which an instance launches. Runtime data lives on volumes, metrics are in CloudWatch, and networking is defined separately.

Answer: C. ECS is AWS's container orchestration service. EKS runs Kubernetes, Fargate is a compute engine for containers, and EC2 provides instances.

Answer: A. Lambda allocates CPU in proportion to memory. Timeout, concurrency, and package size do not affect CPU allocation.

Answer: D. EKS runs Kubernetes. ECS uses AWS orchestration, Fargate is a compute engine, and Batch schedules jobs.

Answer: A. Neptune is a graph database. DynamoDB is key-value and document, RDS is relational, and Redshift is an analytical warehouse.

Answer: A. ElastiCache provides managed Redis and Memcached. DAX caches DynamoDB specifically, MemoryDB is a durable in-memory database, and RDS is relational.

Answer: D. Redshift is an analytical data warehouse. RDS and Aurora are relational transactional services, and DynamoDB is key-value.

Answer: C. DMS migrates data with ongoing replication for a short cutover. SCT converts schema, DataSync transfers files, and Snowball ships data physically.

Answer: C. Aurora provides higher throughput with automatically scaling replicated storage. It supports fewer engines, is not always cheaper, and still requires backups.

Answer: C. DynamoDB on-demand mode requires no capacity planning. RDS, Redshift, and Neptune are provisioned services.

Answer: D. A route table directs traffic from a subnet. Security groups filter per instance, Route 53 resolves names, and load balancers distribute traffic.

Answer: C. A subnet is an address range in one Availability Zone. Firewall rules are security groups and network ACLs, on-premises connections are gateways, and DNS is Route 53.

Answer: A. Direct Connect provides a dedicated circuit. Site-to-Site VPN is encrypted over the internet, CloudFront caches content, and Transit Gateway connects networks within AWS.

Answer: D. Transit Gateway is a hub connecting many networks. Peering connects pairs, PrivateLink exposes individual services, and Route 53 resolves names.

Answer: C. Global Accelerator provides static anycast addresses routing over the AWS network. CloudFront caches content, load balancers distribute within a Region, and Route 53 resolves names.

Answer: D. Latency-based routing selects the lowest-latency endpoint. Geolocation routes by country, weighted routing distributes by proportion, and failover is active-passive.

Answer: A. A VPC endpoint provides private connectivity to AWS services. Public addressing, VPC-to-VPC connections, and dedicated lines are different mechanisms.

Answer: D. WAF inspects web requests for exploit patterns. Shield mitigates DDoS, VPC is the network itself, and Firewall Manager centrally administers policies.

Answer: B. S3 is object storage accessed over an API. EFS and FSx are file systems, and EBS is block storage.

Answer: C. Instance store data is lost when the instance stops. It does not persist, is not backed up automatically, and is not migrated.

Answer: C. FSx for Windows File Server provides SMB with Windows semantics. EFS is NFS for Linux, S3 is object storage, and EBS is block storage.

Answer: C. Lifecycle configurations transition and expire objects by age. Encryption, replication, and access control are configured separately.

Answer: B. Versioning retains previous versions on overwrite. Object Lock prevents deletion, replication copies objects, and lifecycle manages transitions.

Answer: D. EBS provides block storage volumes for instances. S3 is object storage, and EFS and FSx are file systems.

Answer: C. Storage Gateway presents cloud storage to on-premises applications. DataSync transfers data, Snowball ships it physically, and Transfer Acceleration speeds uploads.

Answer: D. Durability describes the probability of not losing data. Availability describes reachability, retrieval speed is a class characteristic, and copy count is an implementation detail.

Answer: C. SES sends email at scale. SNS publishes notifications, Pinpoint manages engagement campaigns, and Connect is a contact centre.

Answer: B. Lex builds conversational interfaces. Polly generates speech, Transcribe converts speech to text, and Comprehend analyses text.

Answer: C. Amazon MQ provides managed brokers compatible with standard protocols. SQS, SNS, and EventBridge use AWS-native APIs.

Answer: D. CodePipeline orchestrates build, test, and deployment. CodeArtifact hosts packages, CodeCommit hosts repositories, and CodeGuru reviews code.

Answer: C. CodeArtifact hosts language packages. ECR hosts container images, S3 stores objects, and CodeBuild compiles code.

Answer: D. AppStream streams individual applications. WorkSpaces provides full desktops, EC2 provides instances, and Cloud9 is a development environment.

Answer: B. EKS provides a managed Kubernetes control plane. ECS uses AWS orchestration, Fargate is a compute engine, and Batch schedules jobs.

Answer: A. Step Functions defines workflows visually with per-step state. EventBridge routes events, SQS queues messages, and Lambda runs code.

Answer: B. Amazon Q Developer assists with writing and reviewing code. CodeGuru Profiler analyses runtime performance, CodeBuild compiles, and CodeDeploy deploys.

Answer: A. IoT Core connects and manages devices. Greengrass extends AWS to edge devices, Kinesis handles streaming data, and Lambda runs code.

Answer: A. Device Farm tests applications on real devices. AppStream streams applications, Amplify builds frontends, and Pinpoint manages engagement.

Answer: D. Amazon Quick provides business intelligence dashboards. Athena queries S3 with SQL, Redshift is a warehouse, and Glue performs ETL.

Answer: B. Regions support proximity to users and jurisdictional requirements. Pricing varies by Region, service availability differs, and transfer is still charged.

Answer: B. A security group filters traffic for attached resources. Route tables direct traffic, encryption is applied by the application or service, and addressing comes from the subnet.