Question 1

The Accounting department would like to receive billing updates more than once a month. They would like the updates to be in a format that can easily be viewed with a spreadsheet application. How can this request be fulfilled?

Accepted Answer

AWS Cost and Usage Reports can be configured to publish billing data to an S3 bucket in CSV format, which can be easily viewed with spreadsheet applications. This can be set to update daily, fulfilling the department's request for frequent updates.

Question 2

A company would like to review each change in the infrastructure before deploying updates in its AWS CloudFormation stacks. Which action will allow an Administrator to understand the impact of these changes before implementation?

Accepted Answer

Creating a change set for the running stack allows an administrator to preview the changes AWS CloudFormation will make to the stack, providing an opportunity to understand the impact before implementation.

Question 3

A recent organizational audit uncovered an existing Amazon RDS database that is not currently configured for high availability. Given the critical nature of this database, it must be configured for high availability as soon as possible. How can this requirement be met?

Accepted Answer

Enabling the Multi-AZ option for an existing RDS instance can be done through the AWS Management Console, which configures the database for high availability by automatically creating a standby instance in a different Availability Zone.

Question 4

A company's customers are reporting increased latency while accessing static web content from Amazon S3. A SysOps Administrator observed a very high rate of read operations on a particular S3 bucket. What will minimize latency by reducing load on the S3 bucket?

Accepted Answer

Using Amazon CloudFront as a content delivery network (CDN) will cache the content at edge locations closer to the users, reducing latency and load on the S3 bucket.

Question 5

A SysOps Administrator must take a team's single existing AWS CloudFormation template and split it into smaller, service-specific templates. All of the services in the template reference a single, shared Amazon S3 bucket. What should the Administrator do to ensure that this S3 bucket can be referenced by all the service templates?

Accepted Answer

The answer of A SysOps Administrator must take a team's...

Question 6

A web-commerce application stores its data in an Amazon Aurora DB cluster with an Aurora replica. The application displays shopping cart information by reading data from the reader endpoint. When monitoring the Aurora database, the SysOps Administrator sees that the AuroraReplicaLagMaximum metric for a single replica is high. What behavior is the application MOST likely exhibiting to users?

Accepted Answer

The high AuroraReplicaLagMaximum metric indicates that there is a delay in replication to the Aurora replica. This can cause intermittent issues where the shopping cart information is not updated correctly for users.

Question 7

Based on the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, which of the following actions are the responsibility of the customer for an Aurora database?

Accepted Answer

The answer of Based on the AWS Shared Responsibility Model,...

Question 8

An organization is concerned that its Amazon RDS databases are not protected. The solution to address this issue must be low cost, protect against table corruption that could be overlooked for several days, and must offer a 30-day window of protection. How can these requirements be met?

Accepted Answer

Automated backups with an appropriate retention period can provide a 30-day window of protection against data corruption by allowing point-in-time recovery.

Question 9

A company has mandated the use of multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all IAM users, and requires users to make all API-calls using the CLI. However, users are not prompted to enter MFA tokens, and are able to run CLI commands without MFA. In an attempt to enforce MFA, the company attached an IAM policy to all users that denies API calls that have not been authenticated with MFA. What additional step must be taken to ensure that API calls are authenticated using MFA?

Accepted Answer

Users need to use temporary credentials obtained from the `get-session-token` command, which requires MFA, to sign API calls. This ensures that the API calls are authenticated using MFA.

Question 10

A company's static website hosted on Amazon S3 was launched recently, and is being used by tens of thousands of users. Subsequently, website users are experiencing 503 service unavailable errors. Why are these errors occurring?

Accepted Answer

Amazon S3 can return a 503 error if the request rate is too high, indicating that the service is being overwhelmed by too many requests.

Question 11

A SysOps Administrator is troubleshooting an AWS CloudFormation template whereby multiple Amazon EC2 instances are being created. The template is working in us-east-1, but it is failing in us-west-2 with the error code: AMI [ami-12345678] does not exist How should the Administrator ensure that the AWS CloudFormation template is working in every region?

Accepted Answer

Using the "Mappings" section in the CloudFormation template allows specifying different AMI IDs for different regions, ensuring the correct AMI is used in each region.

Question 12

A SysOps Administrator created an Amazon VPC with an IPv6 CIDR block, which requires access to the internet. However, access from the internet towards the VPC is prohibited. After adding and configuring the required components to the VPC, the Administrator is unable to connect to any of the domains that reside on the internet. What additional route destination rule should the Administrator add to the route tables?

Accepted Answer

The answer of A SysOps Administrator created an Amazon VPC...

Question 13

A Developer created an AWS Lambda function and has asked the SysOps Administrator to make this function run every 15 minutes. What is the MOST efficient way to accomplish this request?

Accepted Answer

Using Amazon CloudWatch scheduled events is the most efficient way to run an AWS Lambda function at regular intervals, such as every 15 minutes. This method does not require additional resources like EC2 instances or additional Lambda functions.

Question 14

During a security investigation, it is determined that there is a coordinated attack on the web applications deployed on Amazon EC2. The attack is performed through malformed HTTP headers. What AWS service of feature would prevent this traffic from reaching the EC2 instances?

Accepted Answer

AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) can be used to protect web applications by filtering and monitoring HTTP requests, including malformed HTTP headers, before they reach the EC2 instances.

Question 15

A company creates custom AMI images by launching new Amazon EC2 instances from an AWS CloudFormation template. It installs and configures necessary software through AWS OpsWorks, and takes images of each EC2 instance. The process of installing and configuring software can take between 2 to 3 hours, but at times, the process stalls due to installation errors. The SysOps Administrator must modify the CloudFormation template so if the process stalls, the entire stack will fail and roll back. Based on these requirements, what should be added to the template?

Accepted Answer

Conditions with a timeout set to 4 hours allow the stack to fail and roll back if the installation and configuration process stalls for more than 4 hours.

Question 16

A Systems Administrator is responsible for maintaining custom, approved AMIs for a company. These AMIs must be shared with each of the company's AWS accounts. How can the Administrator address this issue?

Accepted Answer

The Systems Administrator can share AMIs with specific AWS accounts by modifying the AMI permissions using the AWS Management Console or AWS CLI, allowing the AMIs to be used across different accounts within the company.

Question 17

After installing and configuring the Amazon CloudWatch agent on an EC2 instance, the anticipated system logs are not being received by CloudWatch Logs. Which of the following are likely to be the cause of this problem? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

The answer of After installing and configuring the Amazon CloudWatch...

Question 18

A SysOps Administrator needs to confirm that security best practices are being followed with the AWS account root user. How should the Administrator ensure that this is done?

Accepted Answer

The answer of A SysOps Administrator needs to confirm that...

Question 19

An application is being developed that will be served across a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances, which require a consistent view of persistent data. Items stored vary in size from 1KB to 300MB; the items are read frequently, created occasionally, and often require partial changes without conflict. The data store is not expected to grow beyond 2TB, and items will be expired according to age and content type. Which AWS service solution meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

The answer of An application is being developed that will...

Question 20

A company is deploying a legacy web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an ELB Application Load Balancer. The application worked well in the test environment. However, in production, users report that they are prompted to log in to the system several times an hour. Which troubleshooting step should be taken to help resolve the problem reported by users?

Accepted Answer

Enabling sticky sessions (session persistence) on the Application Load Balancer ensures that a user's session is consistently directed to the same EC2 instance, preventing repeated login prompts due to session data being lost when requests are routed to different instances.

Exam 13: AWS Certified SysOps Administrator (SOA-C01)