Question 1

A company that uses electronic health records is running a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances with an Amazon Linux operating system. As part of patient privacy requirements, the company must ensure continuous compliance for patches for operating system and applications running on the EC2 instances. How can the deployments of the operating system and application patches be automated using a default and custom repository?

Accepted Answer

The answer of A company that uses electronic health records...

Question 2

An e-commerce company is running a web application in an AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment. In recent months, the average load of the Amazon EC2 instances has been increased to handle more traffic. The company would like to improve the scalability and resilience of the environment. The Development team has been asked to decouple long-running tasks from the environment if the tasks can be executed asynchronously. Examples of these tasks include confirmation emails when users are registered to the platform, and processing images or videos. Also, some of the periodic tasks that are currently running within the web server should be offloaded. What is the most time-efficient and integrated way to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

The answer of An e-commerce company is running a web...

Question 3

A retail company wants to use AWS Elastic Beanstalk to host its online sales website running on Java. Since this will be the production website, the CTO has the following requirements for the deployment strategy: Zero downtime. While the deployment is ongoing, the current Amazon EC2 instances in service should remain in service. No deployment or any other action should be performed on the EC2 instances because they serve production traffic. A new fleet of instances should be provisioned for deploying the new application version. Once the new application version is deployed successfully in the new fleet of instances, the new instances should be placed in service and the old ones should be removed. The rollback should be as easy as possible. If the new fleet of instances fail to deploy the new application version, they should be terminated and the current instances should continue serving traffic as normal. The resources within the environment (EC2 Auto Scaling group, Elastic Load Balancing, Elastic Beanstalk DNS CNAME) should remain the same and no DNS change should be made. Which deployment strategy will meet the requirements?

Accepted Answer

The answer of A retail company wants to use AWS...

Question 4

A DevOps Engineer is developing a deployment strategy that will allow for data-driven decisions before a feature is fully approved for general availability. The current deployment process uses AWS CloudFormation and blue/green-style deployments. The development team has decided that customers should be randomly assigned to groups, rather than using a set percentage, and redirects should be avoided. What process should be followed to implement the new deployment strategy?

Accepted Answer

This option allows for random assignment of users to different versions without using redirects, by setting a cookie with Lambda@Edge and returning the corresponding version directly.

Question 5

A defect was discovered in production and a new sprint item has been created for deploying a hotfix. However, any code change must go through the following steps before going into production: Scan the code for security breaches, such as password and access key leaks. Run the code through extensive, long running unit tests. Which source control strategy should a DevOps Engineer use in combination with AWS CodePipeline to complete this process?

Accepted Answer

The answer of A defect was discovered in production and...

Question 6

A DevOps Engineer manages a large commercial website that runs on Amazon EC2. The website uses Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to collect and process web logs. The Engineer manages the Kinesis consumer application, which also runs on EC2. Spikes of data cause the Kinesis consumer application to fall behind, and the streams drop records before they can be processed. What is the FASTEST method to improve stream handling?

Accepted Answer

Horizontally scaling the Kinesis consumer application by adding more EC2 instances based on the GetRecord.IteratorAgeMiliseconds Amazon CloudWatch metric and increasing the Kinesis Data Streams retention period are the fastest methods to improve stream handling.

Question 7

A company runs an application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The instances run in an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones in us-east1. The application stores data in an Amazon RDS MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. A DevOps Engineer wants to modify the current solution and create a hot standby of the environment in another region to minimize downtime if a problem occurs in us-east-1. Which combination of steps should the DevOps Engineer take to meet these requirements? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

The answer of A company runs an application on Amazon...

Question 8

A company's web application will be migrated to AWS. The application is designed so that there is no server-side code required. As part of the migration, the company would like to improve the security of the application by adding HTTP response headers, following the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) secure headers recommendations. How can this solution be implemented to meet the security requirements using best practices?

Accepted Answer

The answer of A company's web application will be migrated...

Question 9

A company has a website in an AWS Elastic Beanstalk load balancing and automatic scaling environment. This environment has an Amazon RDS MySQL instance configured as its database resource. After a sudden increase in traffic, the website started dropping traffic. An administrator discovered that the application on some instances is not responding as the result of out-of-memory errors. Classic Load Balancer marked those instances as out of service, and the health status of Elastic Beanstalk enhanced health reporting is degraded. However, Elastic Beanstalk did not replace those instances. Because of the diminished capacity behind the Classic Load Balancer, the application response times are slower for the customers. Which action will permanently fix this issue?

Accepted Answer

Changing the health check setting to Elastic Load Balancing will ensure that instances are replaced when they are marked as unhealthy, and increasing the capacity will help handle more traffic.

Question 10

A company is using AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, and AWS CodePipeline to deploy applications automatically to an Amazon EC2 instance. A DevOps Engineer needs to perform a security assessment scan of the operating system on every application deployment to the environment. How should this be automated?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Events can be used to monitor AWS CodeDeploy notifications of a successful code deployment, and then trigger an Amazon Inspector scan to perform a security assessment of the operating system.

Question 11

A DevOps team needs to query information in application logs that are generated by an application running multiple Amazon EC2 instances deployed with AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Instance log streaming to Amazon CloudWatch Logs was enabled on Elastic Beanstalk. Which approach would be the MOST cost-efficient?

Accepted Answer

The answer of A DevOps team needs to query information...

Question 12

A Development team creates a build project in AWS CodeBuild. The build project invokes automated tests of modules that access AWS services. Which of the following will enable the tests to run the MOST securely?

Accepted Answer

The answer of A Development team creates a build project...

Question 13

A DevOps Engineer encountered the following error when attempting to use an AWS CloudFormation template to create an Amazon ECS cluster: An error occurred (InsufficientCapabilitiesException) when calling the CreateStack operation. What caused this error and what steps need to be taken to allow the Engineer to successfully execute the AWS CloudFormation template?

Accepted Answer

The error "InsufficientCapabilitiesException" occurs when the CloudFormation stack requires IAM resources to be created, but the necessary capabilities (CAPABILITY_IAM and CAPABILITY_NAMED_IAM) were not acknowledged. The engineer needs to specify these capabilities when executing the template.

Question 14

A DevOps Engineer is building a multi-stage pipeline with AWS CodePipeline to build, verify, stage, test, and deploy an application. There is a manual approval stage required between the test and deploy stages. The development team uses a team chat tool with webhook support. How can the Engineer configure status updates for pipeline activity and approval requests to post to the chat tool?

Accepted Answer

AWS CloudWatch Events (now known as Amazon EventBridge) can be used to detect changes in AWS resources. By creating a rule that filters on "CodePipeline Pipeline Execution State Change," you can forward these events to an SNS topic. An AWS Lambda function subscribed to this SNS topic can then process the events and send them to the chat webhook URL, providing the necessary integration for status updates and approval requests.

Question 15

A company is beginning to move to the AWS Cloud. Internal customers are classified into two groups according to their AWS skills: beginners and experts. The DevOps Engineer needs to build a solution to allow beginners to deploy a restricted set of AWS architecture blueprints expresses as AWS CloudFormation templates. Deployment should only be possible on predetermined Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). However, expert users should be able to deploy blueprints without constraints. Experts should also be able to access other AWS services, as needed. How can the Engineer implement a solution to meet these requirements with the LEAST amount of overhead?

Accepted Answer

Using AWS Service Catalog allows the creation of a portfolio of products with constraints, such as limiting VPCs for beginners, while experts can have broader access. This approach minimizes overhead by leveraging AWS Service Catalog's built-in features for managing permissions and constraints.

Question 16

A DevOps Engineer uses Docker container technology to build an image-analysis application. The application often sees spikes in traffic. The Engineer must automatically scale the application in response to customer demand while maintaining cost effectiveness and minimizing any impact on availability. What will allow the FASTEST response to spikes in traffic while fulfilling the other requirements?

Accepted Answer

The answer of A DevOps Engineer uses Docker container technology...

Question 17

A company hosts parts of a Python-based application using AWS Elastic Beanstalk. An Elastic Beanstalk CLI is being used to create and update the environments. The Operations team detected an increase in requests in one of the Elastic Beanstalk environments that caused downtime overnight. The team noted that the policy used for AWS Auto Scaling is NetworkOut . Based on load testing metrics, the team determined that the application needs to scale CPU utilization to improve the resilience of the environments. The team wants to implement this across all environments automatically. Following AWS recommendations, how should this automation be implemented?

Accepted Answer

Using ebextensions to configure the option setting MeasureName to CPUUtilization within the aws:autoscaling:trigger namespace is the recommended way to automatically adjust the scaling policy across all environments.

Question 18

A company is testing a web application that runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The instances run in an Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. The company uses a blue/green deployment process with immutable instances when deploying new software. During testing, users are being automatically logged out of the application at random times. Testers also report that, when a new version of the application is deployed, all users are logged out. The Development team needs a solution to ensure users remain logged in across scaling events and application deployments. What is the MOST efficient way to ensure users remain logged in?

Accepted Answer

Storing session information in Amazon ElastiCache allows for centralized session management, ensuring that user sessions are maintained across scaling events and deployments.

Question 19

A DevOps Engineer manages an application that has a cross-region failover requirement. The application stores its data in an Amazon Aurora on Amazon RDS database in the primary region with a read replica in the secondary region. The application uses Amazon Route 53 to direct customer traffic to the active region. Which steps should be taken to MINIMIZE downtime if a primary database fails?

Accepted Answer

Using RDS Event Notification and AWS Lambda allows for automated monitoring and failover by promoting the read replica and updating Route 53 to redirect traffic, minimizing downtime.

Question 20

A company is hosting a web application in an AWS Region. For disaster recovery purposes, a second region is being used as a standby. Disaster recovery requirements state that session data must be replicated between regions in near-real time and 1% of requests should route to the secondary region to continuously verify system functionality. Additionally, if there is a disruption in service in the main region, traffic should be automatically routed to the secondary region, and the secondary region must be able to scale up to handle all traffic. How should a DevOps Engineer meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

The answer of A company is hosting a web application...

Exam 12: AWS DevOps Engineer - Professional (DOP-C01)

A Development team creates a build project in AWS CodeBuild. The build project invokes automated tests of modules that access AWS services. Which of the following will enable the tests to run the MOST securely?