CSLB General Building (B) — All Questions

Which AWS service provides resizable virtual servers in the cloud on which you can run applications?

• a.Amazon S3
• b.Amazon RDS
• c.Amazon EC2✓
• d.AWS Lambda

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) provides resizable virtual servers, called instances, where you control the operating system and software. S3 is object storage, RDS is a managed database, and Lambda runs code without provisioning servers.

Which AWS service provides highly durable object storage designed for 11 nines of durability?

• a.Amazon S3✓
• b.Amazon EC2
• c.Amazon VPC
• d.AWS IAM

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is object storage designed for 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability by redundantly storing data across multiple facilities. It is commonly used for backups, static websites, data lakes, and media.

Which service lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers, charging only for the compute time consumed?

• a.Amazon EC2
• b.Amazon RDS
• c.Amazon EBS
• d.AWS Lambda✓

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute. You pay only for the requests and the compute time your code uses.

Which service is a managed relational database that supports engines such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server?

• a.Amazon DynamoDB
• b.Amazon RDS✓
• c.Amazon S3
• d.Amazon ElastiCache

Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) is a managed service for relational databases, handling tasks like patching, backups, and failover for engines such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and SQL Server. DynamoDB, by contrast, is a NoSQL database.

Which AWS service is a fully managed NoSQL key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at scale?

• a.Amazon DynamoDB✓
• b.Amazon RDS
• c.Amazon Redshift
• d.Amazon Aurora

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database offering fast, consistent performance at any scale with no servers to manage. It is well suited for high-traffic applications needing flexible schemas.

What is an AWS Region?

• a.A single building that houses one server rack
• b.A content delivery cache at the network edge
• c.A physical geographic area containing multiple, isolated Availability Zones✓
• d.A billing category for support plans

An AWS Region is a separate geographic area, each containing multiple Availability Zones. Customers choose Regions based on factors such as latency, data-residency requirements, and service availability.

What is an Availability Zone (AZ)?

• a.A global DNS service
• b.A type of EC2 instance
• c.A billing report
• d.One or more discrete data centers with redundant power and networking within a Region✓

An Availability Zone consists of one or more discrete data centers with independent power, cooling, and networking, isolated from failures in other AZs. Deploying across multiple AZs increases availability and fault tolerance.

Why should a highly available application be deployed across multiple Availability Zones?

• a.To reduce the AWS bill to zero
• b.So the application can continue running if one AZ experiences a failure✓
• c.Because a single AZ cannot run any instances
• d.To avoid using load balancers

Spreading resources across multiple AZs means that if one zone fails, the application can continue serving traffic from the others. AZs are physically isolated, so this design improves availability and fault tolerance.

Which service is a content delivery network (CDN) that caches content at edge locations to reduce latency for users?

• a.Amazon CloudFront✓
• b.Amazon RDS
• c.AWS Lambda
• d.Amazon EBS

Amazon CloudFront is a CDN that caches copies of content at edge locations around the world, delivering it to users from the nearest location to reduce latency. It integrates with services like S3 and load balancers as origins.

Which service automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets such as EC2 instances?

• a.Amazon Route 53
• b.AWS Lambda
• c.Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)✓
• d.Amazon S3

Elastic Load Balancing automatically spreads incoming traffic across multiple healthy targets, such as EC2 instances in different AZs. This improves fault tolerance and helps applications scale.

Which service automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances to match demand based on defined policies?

• a.Amazon CloudFront
• b.Amazon S3
• c.AWS IAM
• d.Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling✓

EC2 Auto Scaling adds or removes instances automatically according to demand and your scaling policies, helping maintain performance while controlling cost. Combined with a load balancer, it supports elastic, resilient architectures.

Which storage service provides persistent block-level volumes that can be attached to EC2 instances?

• a.Amazon EBS✓
• b.Amazon S3
• c.Amazon CloudFront
• d.Amazon Route 53

Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) provides durable block storage volumes for use with EC2 instances, similar to a virtual hard disk. Volumes persist independently of the instance lifecycle and can be snapshotted to S3.

Which service provides scalable, shared file storage that multiple Linux EC2 instances can mount simultaneously?

• a.Amazon EBS
• b.Amazon EFS✓
• c.Amazon S3 Glacier
• d.Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) is a managed, elastic NFS file system that many EC2 instances can mount concurrently. Unlike EBS, which attaches to a single instance at a time, EFS supports shared access.

Which AWS service is a scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service used to route users to applications?

• a.Amazon CloudFront
• b.Amazon VPC
• c.Amazon Route 53✓
• d.AWS Direct Connect

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable DNS service that routes end users to applications by translating domain names into IP addresses. It also supports domain registration and health checks.

Which service lets you provision a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where you define your own IP ranges, subnets, and routing?

• a.Amazon S3
• b.AWS Lambda
• c.Amazon CloudWatch
• d.Amazon VPC✓

Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) lets you create an isolated virtual network in AWS where you control IP address ranges, subnets, route tables, and gateways. It gives you networking control similar to a traditional data center.

Which service provides monitoring and observability, collecting metrics, logs, and alarms for AWS resources and applications?

• a.Amazon CloudWatch✓
• b.Amazon Route 53
• c.AWS Artifact
• d.Amazon Cognito

Amazon CloudWatch collects metrics, logs, and events, and can trigger alarms and actions based on thresholds. It is the primary monitoring service for gaining operational visibility into AWS resources and applications.

Which service lets you model and provision AWS infrastructure as code using templates?

• a.Amazon CloudWatch
• b.AWS CloudFormation✓
• c.Amazon Inspector
• d.AWS Shield

AWS CloudFormation lets you define infrastructure in templates and provision it automatically and repeatably as 'stacks.' This infrastructure-as-code approach makes environments consistent and easy to replicate.

A developer wants to deploy a web application without manually configuring the underlying compute, load balancing, and scaling. Which service handles this?

• a.Amazon EC2
• b.Amazon VPC
• c.AWS Elastic Beanstalk✓
• d.Amazon S3

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a platform-as-a-service that deploys and manages applications, automatically handling capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and health monitoring. Developers simply upload code while retaining control of the resources.

Which fully managed message queuing service decouples components by letting them send and receive messages asynchronously?

• a.Amazon CloudFront
• b.Amazon RDS
• c.Amazon EFS
• d.Amazon SQS✓

Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service) is a managed message queue that lets application components communicate asynchronously, improving decoupling and resilience. Producers send messages to a queue and consumers process them independently.

Which service is a fully managed publish/subscribe messaging service used to send notifications to subscribers or other services?

• a.Amazon SNS✓
• b.Amazon EBS
• c.Amazon Route 53
• d.Amazon Redshift

Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service) is a pub/sub messaging service that delivers messages to multiple subscribers such as email, SMS, or other AWS services. It is often used for fan-out notifications and event-driven architectures.

Which service is a fully managed data warehouse designed for running complex analytic queries over large datasets?

• a.Amazon DynamoDB
• b.Amazon Redshift✓
• c.Amazon EFS
• d.Amazon SQS

Amazon Redshift is a managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse optimized for analytical queries using columnar storage and parallel processing. It is designed for business intelligence workloads rather than transactional processing.

A company needs a dedicated, private network connection from its on-premises data center to AWS that bypasses the public internet. Which service should it use?

• a.Amazon CloudFront
• b.Amazon Route 53
• c.AWS Direct Connect✓
• d.Amazon SNS

AWS Direct Connect establishes a dedicated private network connection between on-premises and AWS, providing more consistent network performance than the public internet. It is often used for large data transfers and hybrid architectures.

Which option lets you create an encrypted connection over the public internet between your on-premises network and your VPC?

• a.Amazon CloudFront distribution
• b.S3 Transfer Acceleration
• c.An Elastic IP address
• d.AWS Site-to-Site VPN✓

AWS Site-to-Site VPN creates an encrypted tunnel over the internet between your network and your VPC. Unlike Direct Connect, it uses the public internet but is quick to set up and encrypted.

Which purchasing option is best for a fault-tolerant, flexible workload that can handle interruptions and wants the lowest EC2 price?

• a.Spot Instances✓
• b.On-Demand Instances
• c.Dedicated Hosts
• d.Reserved Instances with no flexibility

Spot Instances let you use spare EC2 capacity at steep discounts but can be reclaimed by AWS with short notice. They are ideal for fault-tolerant, flexible workloads such as batch processing.

Which AWS database service is MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible and offers higher performance and availability as part of RDS?

• a.Amazon DynamoDB
• b.Amazon Aurora✓
• c.Amazon ElastiCache
• d.Amazon Neptune

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, offering greater throughput and built-in high availability compared to standard engines. It is part of the Amazon RDS family.

Which service provides in-memory caching to improve the performance of read-heavy applications, supporting engines like Redis and Memcached?

• a.Amazon Redshift
• b.Amazon RDS
• c.Amazon ElastiCache✓
• d.Amazon EFS

Amazon ElastiCache provides managed in-memory data stores using Redis or Memcached to reduce latency and offload databases. It is commonly used to cache frequently accessed data for faster reads.

Which S3 storage class is designed for long-term archival where retrieval times of minutes to hours are acceptable at very low cost?

• a.S3 Standard
• b.S3 Standard-Infrequent Access
• c.S3 Intelligent-Tiering
• d.S3 Glacier✓

The S3 Glacier storage classes are designed for low-cost, long-term archival where data is accessed rarely and some retrieval delay is acceptable. S3 Standard, by contrast, is for frequently accessed data with immediate retrieval.

Which S3 feature automatically moves objects between access tiers based on changing access patterns to optimize cost?

• a.S3 Intelligent-Tiering✓
• b.S3 Transfer Acceleration
• c.S3 Versioning
• d.S3 Cross-Region Replication

S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves data between frequent and infrequent access tiers based on usage, optimizing storage costs without performance impact or operational overhead. It is useful when access patterns are unknown or changing.

A team wants to run Docker containers on AWS without managing the underlying EC2 servers. Which combination is most appropriate?

• a.Amazon RDS with EBS
• b.Amazon ECS or EKS with AWS Fargate✓
• c.Amazon Route 53 with CloudFront
• d.Amazon SNS with SQS

AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that works with Amazon ECS and EKS, removing the need to provision or manage EC2 instances. It lets teams run containers while AWS handles the underlying infrastructure.

Which service can migrate large amounts of data into AWS by shipping a physical, ruggedized storage device when network transfer would be too slow?

• a.Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration
• b.AWS Direct Connect
• c.AWS Snowball✓
• d.Amazon CloudFront

AWS Snowball is a physical data transport device used to move large datasets into or out of AWS when transferring over the network would take too long or be too costly. AWS ships the device, you load data, and return it for import.

Which statement correctly describes edge locations in the AWS global infrastructure?

• a.They are used only for storing relational databases
• b.They replace Availability Zones
• c.They are where the root user signs in
• d.They are sites used to cache content closer to users, primarily for services like CloudFront✓

Edge locations are part of the content delivery network and cache content closer to end users to reduce latency. They are distinct from Regions and Availability Zones, which host the core compute and storage infrastructure.

Which service allows you to register domain names and configure routing policies such as latency-based or weighted routing?

• a.Amazon Route 53✓
• b.Amazon VPC
• c.AWS CloudFormation
• d.Amazon EBS

Amazon Route 53 supports domain registration and advanced DNS routing policies, including latency-based, weighted, geolocation, and failover routing. This helps direct users to the best endpoint for their needs.

What is the main advantage of a serverless architecture using services like Lambda and DynamoDB?

• a.You must manually patch and scale servers
• b.You focus on code and data while AWS manages provisioning and scaling of the infrastructure✓
• c.You pay a fixed monthly fee regardless of usage
• d.You cannot integrate with other AWS services

Serverless services remove the need to provision, patch, and scale servers, letting developers focus on application logic while AWS handles the underlying infrastructure. Billing is typically based on actual usage rather than pre-provisioned capacity.

Which compute option provides physically dedicated servers for a customer, often used to meet licensing or compliance requirements?

• a.Spot Instances
• b.AWS Lambda
• c.Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts✓
• d.Amazon S3

Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts provide physical servers dedicated to a single customer, which can help address software licensing that is tied to physical cores or specific compliance needs. They give visibility and control over the underlying hardware.