Solutions Architect Professional · 25% of the exam

Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions: free practice questions

5 sample questions from our 14-question bank for this domain — answers and explanations included. These are the same scenario-based style as the real AWS exam.

1. An existing single-Region workload must improve availability to survive a full Regional outage for a critical, revenue-generating service. Which improvement is appropriate?

  • A. Introduce a multi-Region strategy (e.g., active-passive with Route 53 failover or active-active) for the critical service✓ Correct
  • B. Add a second instance in the same Region
  • C. Increase the instance size
  • D. Take more frequent EBS snapshots in the same Region
Explanation

Surviving a Regional outage requires a multi-Region strategy (active-passive with Route 53 health-check failover, or active-active). Same-Region measures (B, C, D) don't protect against the loss of the whole Region.

2. A steady, predictable production workload has run on On-Demand EC2 for two years. Finance wants to reduce compute cost without changing the architecture. What should the architect recommend?

  • A. Purchase Compute Savings Plans or Reserved Instances for the steady baseline✓ Correct
  • B. Switch everything to Spot Instances
  • C. Delete the workload at night
  • D. Move to Dedicated Hosts
Explanation

Savings Plans or Reserved Instances give significant discounts for steady, predictable usage in exchange for a 1- or 3-year commitment — the right lever for a stable baseline. Spot (B) risks interruption for a production baseline, deleting nightly (C) isn't viable for always-on, and Dedicated Hosts (D) usually cost more.

3. An existing global website serves the same images from an origin in one Region, causing slow load times for distant users and high origin load. What is the BEST improvement?

  • A. Put Amazon CloudFront in front of the origin to cache content at edge locations✓ Correct
  • B. Move the origin to a larger instance
  • C. Ask users to be patient
  • D. Disable images to speed up the site
Explanation

CloudFront caches content at global edge locations, reducing latency for distant users and offloading the origin. A bigger origin (B) doesn't fix geographic latency, and options C and D don't address the problem.

4. An existing application experiences repeated identical database reads for reference data that changes rarely. Which improvement reduces database load and latency?

  • A. Add Amazon ElastiCache (Redis/Memcached) as a caching layer✓ Correct
  • B. Add more read replicas for the reference data only
  • C. Increase the instance's disk size
  • D. Disable the database's query cache
Explanation

ElastiCache caches frequently read, slowly changing data in memory, cutting database load and latency. Read replicas (B) help but are heavier for simple reference caching, disk size (C) doesn't address read latency, and disabling caching (D) is counterproductive.

5. An existing application stores large volumes of logs in S3 Standard, but most logs are never read after 30 days yet must be retained for a year. How should the architect optimize cost?

  • A. Apply an S3 Lifecycle policy transitioning objects to S3 Standard-IA/Glacier tiers over time✓ Correct
  • B. Leave everything in S3 Standard
  • C. Delete all logs after 30 days despite the retention requirement
  • D. Copy logs to EBS volumes
Explanation

An S3 Lifecycle policy automatically transitions aging objects to cheaper tiers (Standard-IA, then Glacier) and can expire them after retention — optimizing cost while meeting the one-year requirement. Leaving all in Standard (B) overpays, deleting early (C) violates retention, and EBS (D) is more expensive block storage.

9 more questions in this domain

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Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions — Free Solutions Architect Professional Practice Questions | DataCertPrep — Certification Prep