Assessment Exam Flashcards by Ryan Weiler

Which of the following steps does the most to protect your AWS account?

A. Deleting unused Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies
B. Revoking unnecessary access for IAM users
C. Rotating root access keys
D. Restricting access to S3 buckets
E. Rotating Secure Shell (SSH) key pairs

B. Revoking unnecessary access for IAM users

Revoking unnecessary access for IAM users is the most effective of the listed measures for protecting your AWS account

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Which of the following can be used to encrypt the operating system of an EC2 instance?
A. AWS Secrets Manager
B. CloudHSM
C. AWS Key Management Service (KMS)
D. AWS Security Token Service (STS)

C. AWS Key Management Services (KMS)

KMS can be used to encrypt Elastic Block Store volumes that store an instance’s operating system.

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What is a difference between a token generated by the AWS Security Token Service (STS) and an IAM access key?
A. The token generated by STS can’t be used by an IAM principal.
B. An IAM access key is unique.
C. The token generated by STS can be used only once.
D. The token generated by STS expires.

D. The token generated by STS expires

STS tokens expire and IAM access keys do not

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You created a virtual private cloud (VPC) using the Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) block 10.0.0.0/24. You need to connect to this VPC from your internal network, but the IP addresses in use on your internal network overlap with the CIDR. Which of the following is a valid way to address this problem?
A. Remove the CIDR and use IPv6 instead.
B. Change the VPC’s CIDR.
C. Create a new VPC with a different CIDR.
D. Create a secondary CIDR for the VPC.

C. Create a new VPC with a different CIDR

You can’t change the the primary CIDR for a VPC, so you must create a new one to connect it to your internal network.

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Which of the following services can alert you to malware on an EC2 instance?
A. AWS GuardDuty
B. AWS Inspector
C. AWS Shield
D. AWS Web Application Firewall

A. AWS GuardDuty

GuardDuty looks for potentially malicious activity

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True/false: An EC2 instance must be in a public subnet to access the Internet.
A. True
B. False

B. False

An EC2 instance can access the Internet from a private subnet provided it uses a NAT gateway or NAT instance.

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True/false: If versioning is enabled on an S3 bucket, applying encryption to an unencrypted object in that bucket will create a new, encrypted version of that object.

A. True

Applying encryption to an unencrypted object will create a new, encrypted version of that object. Previous versions will remain unencrypted

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True/false: The EBS Lifecycle Manager can take snapshots of volumes that were once attached to terminated instances.

A. True

The EBS Lifecycle Manager can take scheduled snapshots of any EBS volume, regardless of attachment state.

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You’re designing an application that takes multiple image files and combines them into a video file that users on the Internet can download. Which of the following can help you quickly implement your application in the fastest, most highly available, and most cost-effective manner?

B. Lambda

Lambda is a highly available, reliable, “serverless” compute platform that runs functions as needed and scales elastically to meet demand.

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You configured a CloudWatch alarm to monitor CPU utilization for an EC2 instance. The alarm began in the INSUFFICIENT_DATA state and then entered the ALARM state. What can you conclude from this?
A. The instance recently rebooted.
B. CPU utilization is too high.
C. The CPU utilization metric crossed the alarm threshold.
D. The instance is stopped.

C. The CPU utilization metric crossed the alarm threshold

The transition to the ALARM state simply implies that the metric crossed a threshold but doesn’t tell you what the threshold is. Newly created alarms start out in the INSUFFICIENT_DATA state.

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Which instance type will, if left running, continue to incur costs?
A. Spot
B. Standard reserved
C. On-demand
D. Convertible reserved

C. On-demand

On-demand instances will continue to run and incur costs. Reserved instances cost the same whether they’re running or stopped. Spot instances will be terminated when the spot price exceeds your bid price.

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True/false: The Developer Support plan provides access to a support application programming interface (API).

B. False

The Business Plan offers access to support API, but the Developer plan does not.

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Which of the following is not an AWS service?
A. CloudFormation
B. Puppet
C. OpsWorks
D. Snowball

B. Puppet

Puppet is a configuration management platform that AWS offers via OpsWorks but is not itself an AWS service

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True/false: The route table for a public subnet must have a default route pointing to an Internet gateway as a target.

A. True

The definition of a public subnet is a subnet that has a default route pointing to an Internet gateway as a target. Otherwise, it’s a private subnet.

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Which ElastiCache engine can persistently store data?
A. MySQL
B. Memcached
C. MongoDB
D. Redis

D. Redis

ElastiCache supports Memcached and Redis, but only Redis can store data persistently

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True/false: Enabling point-in-time RDS snapshots is sufficient to give you a recovery point objective (RPO) of less than 10 minutes.

A. True

Enabling point-in-time recover gives you an RPO of about five minutes. The recovery time objective (RTO) depends on the amount of data to restore

Which of the following lets you spin up new web servers the quickest?
A. Lambda
B. Auto Scaling
C. Elastic Container Service
D. CloudFront

C. Elastic Container Service

Elastic Container Service lets you run containers that can launch in a matter of seconds. EC2 instances take longer. Lambda is “serverless”, so you cant use it to run a webserver. CloudFront provides caching but isn’t a webserver.

True/false: EC2 Auto Scaling automatically replaces group instances directly terminated by the root user.

A. True

Auto Scaling always attempts to maintain the minimum group size, or, if set, the desired capacity.

True/false: You can use a Quick Start Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to create any instance type.

A. True

A Quick Start AMI is independent of the instance type.

Which of the following services can you deactivate on your account?
A. Security Token Service (STS)
B. CloudWatch
C. virtual private cloud (VPC)
D. Lambda

A. Security Token Service (STS)

You can deactivate STS for all regions except US East

True/false: After uploading a new object to S3, there will be a slight delay (one to two seconds) before the object is available.

B. False

S3 uses a read-after write consistency model for new objects, so once you upload an object to S3, it’s immediately available.

True/false: EC2 sends instance memory utilization metrics to CloudWatch every five minutes.

B. False

EC2 doesn’t track instance memory utilization.

An application you want to run on EC2 requires you to license it based on the number of physical CPU sockets and cores on the hardware you plan to run the application on. Which of the following tenancy models should you specify?

A. Dedicated host
B. Dedicated instance
C. Shared tenancy
D. Bring your own license

A. Dedicated Host

The dedicated host option lets you see the number of physical CPU sockets and cores on a host.

Which S3 encryption option does not require AWS persistently storing the encryption keys it uses to decrypt data?
A. Client-side encryption
B. SSE-KMS
C. SSE-S3
D. SSE-C

D. SSE-C

With SSE-C you provide your own keys for Amazon to use to decrypt and encrypt your data. AWS doesn’t persistently store the keys

True/false: An EC2 instance in a private subnet can resolve an “A” resource record for a public hosted zone hosted in Route 53.

A. True An EC2 instance in a private subnet still has access to Amazon's private DNS servers, which can resolve records stored in public hosted zones.

True/false: Durability measures the percentage of likelihood that a given object will not be inadvertently lost by AWS over the course of a year.

A. True Durability corresponds to an average annual expected loss objects stored on S3, not including objects you delete. Availabilty measures the amount of time S3 will be available to let you retrieve those objects

You’re using EC2 Auto Scaling and want to implement a scaling policy that adds one extra instance only when the average CPU utilization of each instance exceeds 90 percent. However, you don’t want it to add more than one instance every five minutes. Which of the following scaling policies should you use? A. Simple B. Step C. Target tracking D. PercentChangeInCapacity

A. Simple A simple scaling policy changes the group size and then has a cooldown period before doing so again. Step scaling policies don't have cooldown periods. Target tracking policies attempt to keep a metric at a set value. PercentChangeInCapacity is a simple scaling adjustment type, not a scaling policy.

True/false: Changing the instance type of an EC2 instance will change its elastic IP address.

B. False An elastic IP address will not change. A public IP address attached to an instance will change if the instance is stopped, as would happen when changing the instance type.

True/false: You can use an existing domain name with Route 53 without switching its registration to AWS.

A. True Route 53 is a true DNS service in that it can host zones for any domain name. You can also register domain names with or transfer them to Route 53

True/false: S3 cross-region replication uses transfer acceleration.

B. False S3 cross-region replication transfers objects between different buckets. Transfer acceleration uses a CloudFront edge location to speed up transfers between S3 and the internet.

Where do AWS Config and CloudTrail store their logs? A. S3 buckets B. CloudWatch Logs C. CloudTrail Events D. DynamoDB E. Amazon Athena

A. S3 buckets Both store their logs in S3 buckets.

True/false: You can create a DynamoDB global secondary index for an existing table at any time.

A. True You can create a global secondary index for an existing table at any time. You can create a local secondary index only when you create the table

Which of the following use cases is well suited for DynamoDB? A. Running a MongoDB database on AWS B. Storing large binary files exceeding 1 GB in size C. Storing JSON documents that have a consistent structure D. Storing image assets for a website

C. Storing JSON documents that have a consistent structure DynamoDB is a key-value store that can be used to store items up to 400 KB in size.

Which of the following services is most useful for decoupling the components of a monolithic application? A. SNS B. KMS C. SQS D. Glacier

C. SQS (Simple Queue Service) Simple Queue Service (SQS) allows for event-driven messaging within distributed systems that can decouple while coordinating the discrete steps of a larger process

True/false: AWS is responsible for managing the network configuration of your EC2 instances.

B. False Customers are responsible for managing the network configuration of EC2 instances. AWS is responsible for the physical network infrastructure

True/false: CloudFormation stack names are case-sensitive.

A. True Almost everything in CloudFormation is case sensitive