EMT Practice Test

1. Question Content...

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Question1: What is the scope of an EBS snapshot?

Question2: You need your API backed by DynamoDB to stay online during a total regional AWS failure. You can
tolerate a couple minutes of lag or slowness during a large failure event, but the system should recover
with normal operation after those few minutes. What is a good approach?

Question3: You need to create a simple, holistic check for your system's general availablity and uptime. Your system
presents itself as an HTTP-speaking API. What is the most simple tool on AWS to achieve this with?

Question4: You need to migrate 10 million records in one hour into DynamoDB. All records are 1.5KB in size. The
data is evenly distributed across the partition key. How many write capacity units should you provision
during this batch load?

Question5: You need to process long-running jobs once and only once. How might you do this?

Question6: What is the scope of AWS IAM?

Question7: What is the scope of an EC2 security group?

Question8: What is server immutability?

Question9: You have an asynchronous processing application using an Auto Scaling Group and an SQS Queue. The
Auto Scaling Group scales according to the depth of the job queue. The completion velocity of the jobs
has gone down, the Auto Scaling Group size has maxed out, but the inbound job velocity did not increase.
What is a possible issue?

Question10: You are getting a lot of empty receive requests when using Amazon SQS. This is making a lot of
unnecessary network load on your instances. What can you do to reduce this load?

Question11: You need to deploy an AWS stack in a repeatable manner across multiple environments. You have
selected CloudFormation as the right tool to accomplish this, but have found that there is a resource type
you need to create and model, but is unsupported by CloudFormation. How should you overcome this
challenge?

Question12: Which of these is not an intrinsic function in AWS CloudFormation?

Question13: Which of the following are not valid sources for OpsWorks custom cookbook repositories?

Question14: You are building out a layer in a software stack on AWS that needs to be able to scale out to react to
increased demand as fast as possible. You are running the code on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling
Group behind an ELB. Which application code deployment method should you use?

Question15: What is the scope of an EC2 EIP?

Question16: You want to pass queue messages that are 1GB each. How should you achieve this?

Question17: When thinking of AWS OpsWorks, which of the following is true?

Question18: When thinking of AWS Elastic Beanstalk, the 'Swap Environment URLs' feature most directly aids in
what?

Question19: You are designing an enterprise data storage system. Your data management software system requires
mountable disks and a real filesystem, so you cannot use S3 for storage. You need persistence, so you
will be using AWS EBS Volumes for your system. The system needs as low-cost storage as possible, and
access is not frequent or high throughput, and is mostly sequential reads. Which is the most appropriate
EBS Volume Type for this scenario?

Question20: What is the order of most-to-least rapidly-scaling (fastest to scale first)?
A: EC2 + ELB + Auto Scaling
B: Lambda
C: RDS

Question21: You run accounting software in the AWS cloud. This software needs to be online continuously during the
day every day of the week, and has a very static requirement for compute resources. You also have other,
unrelated batch jobs that need to run once per day at any time of your choosing. How should you
minimize cost?

Question22: You are hired as the new head of operations for a SaaS company. Your CTO has asked you to make
debugging any part of your entire operation simpler and as fast as possible. She complains that she has
no idea what is going on in the complex, service-oriented architecture, because the developers just log to
disk, and it's very hard to find errors in logs on so many services. How can you best meet this requirement
and satisfy your CTO?

Question23: Your company wants to understand where cost is coming from in the company's production AWS account.
There are a number of applications and services running at any given time. Without expending too much
initial development time, how best can you give the business a good understanding of which applications
cost the most per month to operate?

Question24: What method should I use to author automation if I want to wait for a CloudFormation stack to finish
completing in a script?

Question25: Which status represents a failure state in AWS CloudFormation?

Question26: For AWS CloudFormation, which is true?

Question27: You have a high security requirement for your AWS accounts. What is the most rapid and sophisticated
setup you can use to react to AWS API calls to your account?

Question28: Why are more frequent snapshots or EBS Volumes faster?

Question29: You need your CI to build AMIs with code pre-installed on the images on every new code push. You need
to do this as cheaply as possible. How do you do this?

Question30: You are building a Ruby on Rails application for internal, non-production use which uses MySQL as a
database. You want developers without very much AWS experience to be able to deploy new code with a
single command line push. You also want to set this up as simply as possible. Which tool is ideal for this
setup?

Question31: You run a 2000-engineer organization. You are about to begin using AWS at a large scale for the first time.
You want to integrate with your existing identity management system running on Microsoft Active
Directory, because your organization is a power-user of Active Directory. How should you manage your
AWS identities in the most simple manner?

Question32: If I want CloudFormation stack status updates to show up in a continuous delivery system in as close to
real time as possible, how should I achieve this?

Question33: You are building a mobile app for consumers to post cat pictures online. You will be storing the images in
AWS S3. You want to run the system very cheaply and simply. Which one of these options allows you to
build a photo sharing application without needing to worry about scaling expensive uploads processes,
authentication/authorization and so forth?

Question34: There is a very serious outage at AWS. EC2 is not affected, but your EC2 instance deployment scripts
stopped working in the region with the outage. What might be the issue?

Question35: For AWS CloudFormation, which stack state refuses UpdateStack calls?

Question36: For AWS Auto Scaling, what is the first transition state an existing instance enters after leaving steady
state in Standby mode?

Question37: Fill the blanks: __________ helps us track AWS API calls and transitions, _________ helps to understand
what resources we have now, and ________ allows auditing credentials and logins.

Question38: Your company needs to automate 3 layers of a large cloud deployment. You want to be able to track this
deployment's evolution as it changes over time, and carefully control any alterations. What is a good way
to automate a stack to meet these requirements?

Question39: Which of these configuration or deployment practices is a security risk for RDS?

Question40: You run operations for a company that processes digital wallet payments at a very high volume. One
second of downtime, during which you drop payments or are otherwise unavailable, loses you on average
USD 100. You balance the financials of the transaction system once per day. Which database setup is
best suited to address this business risk?

Question41: You are designing a system which needs, at minumum, 8 m4.large instances operating to service traffic.
When designing a system for high availability in the us-east-1 region, which has 6 Availability Zones, you
company needs to be able to handle death of a full availability zone. How should you distribute the
servers, to save as much cost as possible, assuming all of the EC2 nodes are properly linked to an ELB?
Your VPC account can utilize us-east-1's AZ's a through f, inclusive.

Question42: When thinking of AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which statement is true?

Question43: You are creating a new API for video game scores. Reads are 100 times more common than writes, and
the top 1% of scores are read 100 times more frequently than the rest of the scores. What's the best
design for this system, using DynamoDB?

Question44: What does it mean if you have zero IOPS and a non-empty I/O queue for all EBS volumes attached to a
running EC2 instance?

Question45: Your CTO thinks your AWS account was hacked. What is the only way to know for certain if there was
unauthorized access and what they did, assuming your hackers are very sophisticated AWS engineers
and doing everything they can to cover their tracks?

Question46: If you're trying to configure an AWS Elastic Beanstalk worker tier for easy debugging if there are problems
finishing queue jobs, what should you configure?

Question47: Your serverless architecture using AWS API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and AWS DynamoDB experienced
a large increase in traffic to a sustained 400 requests per second, and dramatically increased in failure
rates. Your requests, during normal operation, last 500 milliseconds on average. Your DynamoDB table
did not exceed 50% of provisioned throughput, and Table primary keys are designed correctly. What is
the most likely issue?

Question48: Which of these is not a Pseudo Parameter in AWS CloudFormation?

Question49: Which EBS volume type is best for high performance NoSQL cluster deployments?

Question50: You need to perform ad-hoc business analytics queries on well-structured data. Data comes in constantly
at a high velocity. Your business intelligence team can understand SQL. What AWS service(s) should you
look to first?

Question51: For AWS Auto Scaling, what is the first transition state an instance enters after leaving steady state when
scaling in due to health check failure or decreased load?

Question52: You are creating an application which stores extremely sensitive financial information. All information in
the system must be encrypted at rest and in transit. Which of these is a violation of this policy?

Question53: You need to replicate API calls across two systems in real time. What tool should you use as a buffer and
transport mechanism for API call events?

Question54: Which deployment method, when using AWS Auto Scaling Groups and Auto Scaling Launch
Configurations, enables the shortest time to live for individual servers?

Question55: Which is not a restriction on AWS EBS Snapshots?

Question56: Which of these is not an instrinsic function in AWS CloudFormation?

Question57: You need to know when you spend $1000 or more on AWS. What's the easy way for you to see that
notification?

Question58: Your application's Auto Scaling Group scales up too quickly, too much, and stays scaled when traffic
decreases. What should you do to fix this?

Question59: You need to create a Route53 record automatically in CloudFormation when not running in production
during all launches of a Template. How should you implement this?

Question60: What is a circular dependency in AWS CloudFormation?