Sample Questions for AWS Professional Level Solutions Architect Certification Exam

April 24, 2015 | Comments(7) |

Here are some more Sample Questions for AWS Professional Level Certification Exam for Solutions Architect. Answers to these questions are given below with brief description. In case you require detailed answer or if you have any doubt please write it in the comments section below and I’ll try to answer it.

  1. Your company asked you to create a mobile app similar to Twitter. You decided to write the application in JavaScript so that it would run on the wide range of phones, browsers, and tablets. Your application should provide access to Amazon DynamoDB to store the good deed summaries,  but you observe sudden spikes in your dynamo db usage,Which option provides the most cost effective and scalable architecture for this application?
    1. Autoscale Dynamo db
    2. Increase write capacity of Dynamo db to meet the peak loads
    3. Create a service that pulls SQS messages and writes these to DynamoDB to handle sudden spikes in dynamo db
    4. Launch DynamoDB in Multi-AZ configuration with a global index to balance writes
  2. You have two teams using Redshift to analyze data of a massive application, each query issued by the first team takes approximately 1-2 hours to analyze the data while other team takes very short time to analyze the data. You don’t want the second team’s queries to wait until the already running long queries are completed. How will you solve the problem in most economical way?
    1. Create a read replica  of red shift and run second team’s queries on read replica
    2. Start another Redshift cluster from snapshot for the second team if current Redshift cluster is busy processing long queries
    3. Pause long queries and resume the queries afterwards
    4. Create two separate workload management groups and assign them to respective teams
  3. A Social media application having  a million users is serving images and videos from cloudfront, you have a requirement for high consistency e.g if an object is changed by the users in origin, it should reflect instantaneously in cloudfront. How can you achieve this?
    1. Use fast invalidate feature provided in cloudfront
    2. Set TTL to 10 seconds
    3. Set TTL to 0 seconds
    4. Dynamic content cannot be served from the cloudfront
    5. You have to contact AWS support center to enable this feature
  4. Your application is having a very high traffic, so you have enabled autoscaling in multi availability zone  to suffice the needs of your application but you observe that one of the availability zone is not receiving any traffic. What can be wrong here?
    1. Autoscaling only works for single availability zone
    2. Autoscaling can be enabled for multi AZ only in north virginia region
    3. Availability zone is not added to Elastic load balancer
    4. Instances need to manually added to availability zone
  5. You have a  massive social networking application which is already deployed on N.Virginia region with around 100 EC2 instances, you want to deploy your application to multiple regions for better availability. You don’t want to handle multiple key pairs and want to reuse existing key pairs for N.Virginia region. How will you accomplish this?
    1. Key pair is not a region level concept, all the keys are available globally
    2. Use copy key command line api to transfer key to different regions
    3. Using import key-pair feature using AWS web console
    4. Copy AMI of your EC2 machine between regions and start an instance from that AMI
  6. Suppose you are hosting a website in an S3 bucket . Your users load the website endpoint Now you want to use CSS on the web pages that is stored in different bucket which is also public . But layout on the client browser is not loading properly what might have gone wrong
    1. You can configure your bucket to explicitly enable cross-origin requests from
    2. Modify bucket policy on css bucket to able to access website bucket
    3. Modify bucket policy on website bucket to able to access css bucket
    4. Not possible
  7. A company is using 2 AWS accounts to manage its resources. One account has an active directory setup to authenticate all the users. You want the users from the other account to use this active directory what can you do to accomplish this task
    1. Whitelist all the IPs from the other account in active directory security group
    2. Use EC2 API tools with the following command “ec2-authorize”  by authorizing other-aws-account-id and  other-account-security-group-id
    3. Not possible
    4. Contact AWS support for security groups across accounts
  8. Your company has an e-commerce platform which is expanding all over the globe, you have EC2 instances deployed in multiple regions you want to monitor performance of all of these EC2 instances. How will you setup CloudWatch to monitor EC2 instances in multiple regions?
    1. Cloud watch is not a region level concept, it is available globally
    2. Register instances running on different regions to CloudWatch
    3. Have a crontab running on EC2 machines to report metrics to CloudWatch in different region
    4. Not possible
  9. You have EC2  instances in three availability zones, with a load balancer configured on all the three AZs. You observe that one availability zone is receiving more traffic as compared to other AZs, how can you solve this problem effectively
    1. Disable sticky sessions
    2. Reduce the frequency of the health checks
    3. Enable cross zone load balancer
    4. Amazon recommends to use two availability zone behind ELB


1) c
SQS can act as a buffer between your application and database to avoid throttling errors.

2) d
Workload Management (WLM) groups in Redshift allows you to run queries in parallel by queuing them up within the group.

3) c
A TTL of 0 seconds will check for “if-modified” on the origin and will copy object to edge location only when it is changed.

4) c
ELB should be configured for multi-zone balancing. AWS Management Console helps you by doing it automatically when you add an instance under load-balancer.

5) c
You can import the public part of the key to other regions using “Import Key” button on console.

6) a
CORS configuration needs to be set to use scripts from a different domain name.

7) b
You can use CLI to white-list the entire security group instead of each IP

8) c
You’ll need to create a custom cloudwatch metric and push data to it from a script

9) a
Sticky sessions interfere with even load balancing

We are also conducting a bootcamp for this certification. You can find details about the course here. If you are interested to join, please click here and fill out the form.

Disclaimer: These questions are not part of the real examination and I have posted them to give an idea about complexity of questions that you can expect in the real exam. AWS certification exams are relatively new and the kind of questions that are asked keeps on changing. So make sure you are well prepared before you appear for it.

7 Responses to “Sample Questions for AWS Professional Level Solutions Architect Certification Exam”

  1. Pavan

    Disable sticky sessions
    Reduce the frequency of the health checks
    Enable cross zone load balancer
    Amazon recommends to use two availability zone behind ELB

    I guess the answer is cross zone LB. Stick sessions comes in to picture when there is un-even load balancing between ec2 instances behind lb in single region. Since the Q explicity said two AZ it is cross zone LB.

    • Himanshu Sachdeva

      Cross zone load balancing enables machines to receive traffic equally regardless of the their AZ. This may not guarantee equal distribution at AZ level.

      Not enabling cross-zone distribution ensures all AZs receive equal traffic.

      • Avi

        What Pavan said is true. As per the Question “You observe that one availability zone is receiving more traffic as compared to other AZs”, to make sure that the traffic is evenly distributed across AZs, the user must enable “Cross-Zone Load Balancing” feature.
        Refer 1st Paragraph which also describes this with an Example –

        Sticky sessions feature on the ELB is to make sure that a user’s session is binded to an EC2 instance. Refer –

        Now let us assume, that you disable sticky sessions but do not enable “Cross-Zone LBing”, the requests received by one Node on the ELB will always pass the request to an EC2 instance in its AZ. While the EC2 instances in the other AZ will never receive the requests (should the load increase) because Cross-Zone LBing wasn’t enabled.

        So the correct answer is “c: Enable cross zone load balancer” which makes sure that load is evenly balanced across AZs.

        Now let us assume

  2. Ashish

    These ques are not anywhere near to what comes in actual exam.

    • Himanshu Sachdeva

      You might be right Ashish. Exam might have changed a lot since I wrote this blog. We’ll release the updated version of this blog soon.

  3. James

    Number 6, Hosting a website in an S3 bucket, the answer is D, not possible, S3 static website endpoint doesn’t support HTTPS 😀

    • Himanshu Sachdeva

      Thanks for pointing out the mistake James. I have corrected it from https to http in the question.


Leave a Reply