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Minoltan Issack
Minoltan Issack

Posted on • Originally published at issackpaul95.Medium

AWS Cloud Practitioner Questions | High availability & Scalability

Question 1:

Scaling an EC2 instance from r4.large to r4.4xlarge is called .....................

Correct Answer: (2) Scaling an EC2 instance from a smaller size (r4.large) to a larger one (r4.4xlarge) is an example of upgrading the resources of a single instance, which defines vertical scalability. This concept focuses on increasing the capacity of existing hardware rather than adding more instances.


Question 2:

Running an application on an Auto Scaling Group that scales the number of EC2 instances in and out is called .....................

Correct Answer: (1) Running an application on an Auto Scaling Group involves adding or removing instances to handle changes in demand, which perfectly exemplifies the concept of horizontally scaling by increasing capacity through multiple instances rather than upgrading a single instance's resources.


Question 3:

Elastic Load Balancers provide a .......................

Correct Answer: (2) Elastic Load Balancers provide a constant endpoint for your application, allowing you to manage changes in the underlying infrastructure without affecting how your users connect to your services. This ensures reliability and accessibility, aligning with best practices in application scalability.


Question 4:

You are running a website on 10 EC2 instances fronted by an Elastic Load Balancer. Your users are complaining about the fact that the website always asks them to re-authenticate when they are moving between website pages. You are puzzled because it's working just fine on your machine and in the Dev environment with 1 EC2 instance. What could be the reason?

Correct Answer: (3) Sticky Sessions enabled on the Elastic Load Balancer, user requests may be routed to different EC2 instances, causing loss of session data and prompting re-authentication. This feature ensures that users are consistently directed to the same instance, maintaining their session state as they navigate the website.


Question 5:

You are using an Application Load Balancer to distribute traffic to your website hosted on EC2 instances. It turns out that your website only sees traffic coming from private IPv4 addresses which are in fact your Application Load Balancer's IP addresses. What should you do to get the IP address of clients connected to your website?

Correct Answer: (2) To get the client IP address from the X-Forwarded-For header" is correct because the Application Load Balancer (ALB) uses this header to forward the original client's IP address to your EC2 instances, enabling accurate tracking of user traffic. This capability is essential for effective logging, analytics, and security measures on your site.


Question 6:

You hosted an application on a set of EC2 instances fronted by an Elastic Load Balancer. A week later, users begin complaining that sometimes the application just doesn't work. You investigate the issue and found that some EC2 instances crash from time to time. What should you do to protect users from connecting to the EC2 instances that are crashing?

Correct Answer: (1) This feature allows the Elastic Load Balancer to automatically monitor the health of your EC2 instances. By doing so, it prevents routing traffic to any instances that are unhealthy or crashed, ensuring a better experience for your users.


Question 7:

You are working as a Solutions Architect for a company and you are required to design an architecture for a high-performance, low-latency application that will receive millions of requests per second. Which type of Elastic Load Balancer should you choose?

Correct Answer: (2) It is designed to handle millions of requests per second, delivering the highest performance and lowest latency, making it ideal for high-performance applications. This choice aligns with the objective of optimizing application efficiency in demanding environments.


Question 8:

Application Load Balancers support the following protocols, EXCEPT:

Correct Answer: (3) Application Load Balancers are specifically designed to support application-layer protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, and WebSocket, but do not support transport-layer protocols like TCP. This distinction is crucial for understanding how different load balancers operate based on the protocols they manage.


Question 9:

Application Load Balancers can route traffic to different Target Groups based on the following, EXCEPT:

Correct Answer: (1) Application Load Balancers do not route traffic based on geographic location; instead, they can route based on criteria like URL Path and Hostname. This distinction helps clarify how ALBs function in managing traffic efficiently.


Question 10:

Registered targets in a Target Groups for an Application Load Balancer can be one of the following, EXCEPT:

Correct Answer: (2) Registered targets in an Application Load Balancer's Target Groups can only include EC2 Instances, Private IP Addresses, and Lambda Functions, but not other load balancers. This distinction highlights the specific roles each service plays within the AWS ecosystem.


Question 11:

For compliance purposes, you would like to expose a fixed static IP address to your end-users so that they can write firewall rules that will be stable and approved by regulators. What type of Elastic Load Balancer would you choose?

Correct Answer: (2) It allows you to attach an Elastic IP address, providing a stable and fixed static IP for compliance purposes, which is essential for your end-users. This capability makes it an ideal choice for ensuring consistency in firewall rules and regulatory approval.


Question 12:

You want to create a custom application-based cookie in your Application Load Balancer. Which of the following you can use as a cookie name?

Correct Answer: (2) it is a valid cookie name you can define for your custom application-based cookies in an Application Load Balancer, while the other options are reserved names used by AWS. This distinction helps ensure you create custom cookies effectively for managing user sessions in your application.


Question 13:

You have a Network Load Balancer that distributes traffic across a set of EC2 instances in us-east-1. You have 2 EC2 instances in us-east-1b AZ and 5 EC2 instances in us-east-1e AZ. You have noticed that the CPU utilization is higher in the EC2 instances in us-east-1b AZ. After more investigation, you noticed that the traffic is equally distributed across the two AZs. How would you solve this problem?

Correct Answer: (1) It ensures that traffic is distributed evenly across all your EC2 instances in different Availability Zones, helping to balance the CPU utilization among them. This effectiveness directly addresses the issue of uneven resource usage in your load-balanced environment.


Question 14:

Which feature in both Application Load Balancers and Network Load Balancers allows you to load multiple SSL certificates on one listener?

Correct Answer: (2) It is the feature that allows multiple SSL certificates to be bound to a single listener in both Application Load Balancers and Network Load Balancers. This capability enables you to host multiple secure domains on the same IP address, making it efficient and cost-effective for managing SSL certificates.


Question 15:

You have an Application Load Balancer that is configured to redirect traffic to 3 Target Groups based on the following hostnames: users.example.com, api.external.example.com, and checkout.example.com. You would like to configure HTTPS for each of these hostnames. How do you configure the ALB to make this work?

Correct Answer: (3) SNI allows you to assign multiple SSL certificates to different hostnames on the same Application Load Balancer listener, making it possible to securely configure HTTPS for all your specified domains efficiently. This aligns with your learning objective of understanding how to manage SSL certificates in a load-balanced environment.


Question 16:

You have an application hosted on a set of EC2 instances managed by an Auto Scaling Group that you configured both desired and maximum capacity to 3. Also, you have created a CloudWatch Alarm that is configured to scale out your ASG when CPU Utilization reaches 60%. Your application suddenly received huge traffic and is now running at 80% CPU Utilization. What will happen?

Correct Answer: (1) The maximum capacity of your Auto Scaling Group is set to 3, which means it cannot scale beyond this limit regardless of the increased CPU utilization. This reinforces your understanding of Auto Scaling Group configurations and their constraints.


Question 17:

You have an Auto Scaling Group fronted by an Application Load Balancer. You have configured the ASG to use ALB Health Checks, then one EC2 instance has just been reported unhealthy. What will happen to the EC2 instance?

Correct Answer: (3) Auto Scaling Group (ASG) uses Application Load Balancer (ALB) health checks to monitor instance health. When an instance is marked unhealthy by the ALB, the ASG terminates it and launches a new instance to maintain the desired capacity and reliability.


Question 18:

Your boss asked you to scale your Auto Scaling Group based on the number of requests per minute your application makes to your database. What should you do?

Correct Answer: (1) Standard CloudWatch metrics do not capture requests per minute for database connections. This approach allows you to effectively monitor your application's needs and scale the Auto Scaling Group accordingly, aligning with your objective of understanding dynamic scaling based on application performance.


Question 19:

An application is deployed with an Application Load Balancer and an Auto Scaling Group. Currently, you manually scale the ASG and you would like to define a Scaling Policy that will ensure the average number of connections to your EC2 instances is around 1000. Which Scaling Policy should you use?

Correct Answer: (3) It allows you to automatically adjust the number of EC2 instances in your Auto Scaling Group to maintain a specific metric, such as the average number of connections, close to your target of 1000. This approach effectively simplifies scaling based on real-time performance metrics, aligning directly with your objective of automating resource management.


Question 20:

You have an ASG and a Network Load Balancer. The application on your ASG supports the HTTP protocol and is integrated with the Load Balancer health checks. You are currently using the TCP health checks. You would like to migrate to using HTTP health checks, what do you do?

Correct Answer: (2) The Network Load Balancer (NLB) is capable of using HTTP health checks, which are more tailored for applications supporting the HTTP protocol. This ensures more accurate monitoring of application availability and performance.


Question 21:

You have a website hosted in EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling Group fronted by an Application Load Balancer. Currently, the website is served over HTTP, and you have been tasked to configure it to use HTTPS. You have created a certificate in ACM and attached it to the Application Load Balancer. What you can do to force users to access the website using HTTPS instead of HTTP?

Correct Answer: (2) By configuring the Application Load Balancer to redirect HTTP to HTTPS, you ensure that all traffic to your website is securely encrypted, enhancing user privacy and site security. This action directly meets the learning objective of effectively managing web application traffic and implementing security best practices within AWS environments.


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