Phase 5 Exam: Architecting

A solutions architect is conducting a Well-Architected review of a production web application. The review identifies the following: the application runs on a single EC2 instance with no Auto Scaling, the RDS database is Single-AZ, there are no CloudWatch alarms configured, and IAM policies use `Action: "*"` on several roles. Which TWO pillars have the most critical gaps? (Select TWO.)Select multiple

A company is designing a global e-commerce platform that must serve users in North America, Europe, and Asia with sub-100ms latency for static content. Product images and JavaScript bundles are stored in an S3 bucket in us-east-1. Which service should the company add to reduce latency for global users?

A startup is building its first product with a team of 4 developers. The product is a task management application with simple CRUD operations and uncertain traffic patterns. The team is debating between a microservices architecture and a monolithic architecture. Which approach should the team choose, and which Well-Architected pillar most strongly supports this recommendation?

A solutions architect is designing a workflow for processing loan applications. The workflow involves: (1) validating the application data, (2) running a credit check (which takes 10 seconds), (3) if the credit score is above 700, auto-approving the loan; if below 700, routing to a human underwriter who may take hours to review, (4) sending a notification to the applicant with the decision. Which AWS service is best suited for orchestrating this workflow?

A company runs all workloads in a single AWS account. A developer accidentally deletes a production RDS database while testing in the development environment. The security team cannot attribute costs to specific projects because all resources share the same billing. Which multi-account change addresses both the isolation and cost attribution concerns?

A data engineering team stores 2 TB of application logs in S3 as CSV files. They run daily Athena queries that filter by date and aggregate error counts. Each query scans the entire 2 TB and costs approximately $10. The team wants to reduce query costs by at least 80%. Which TWO optimizations should the team implement? (Select TWO.)Select multiple

A solutions architect is evaluating trade-offs for a customer-facing API. The team must choose between two architectures: Option A: API Gateway + Lambda + DynamoDB. Estimated cost: $500/month. Latency: 50ms to 300ms (variable due to cold starts). Scales to zero during idle periods. Option B: ALB + ECS Fargate + RDS. Estimated cost: $1,800/month. Latency: 20ms to 50ms (consistent). Minimum 2 tasks running at all times. The API serves a financial trading platform where consistent sub-100ms latency is a hard requirement and the platform operates 24/7. Which option should the architect recommend?

A company wants to protect its S3 bucket so that content is accessible only through CloudFront, not by accessing the S3 URL directly. Which CloudFront feature should the company configure?

A solutions architect is designing an event-driven order processing system. When a customer places an order, the following must happen independently: the inventory service deducts stock, the payment service charges the customer, and the notification service sends a confirmation email. Each service processes at different speeds, and a failure in one must not block the others. Which architecture pattern should the architect use?

A team is migrating a monolithic Java application to microservices on AWS. The application has 6 major features. The team wants to minimize risk and maintain the application's availability throughout the migration. Which migration strategy should the team use?

A solutions architect is reviewing a Well-Architected self-assessment for a capstone project. The student claims the architecture is "fully Well-Architected" because it uses Multi-AZ deployment, encryption, and CloudWatch alarms. However, the architecture has no CI/CD pipeline (deployments are manual), no IaC templates (resources were created through the console), and no cost allocation tags. Which pillar has the most significant gap?

A company uses Amazon ElastiCache (Redis) to cache product catalog data for an e-commerce application. The catalog is updated once per day at 2:00 AM. During the day, the application reads the catalog 50,000 times per hour. The team wants to minimize DynamoDB read costs while ensuring users see the updated catalog within 1 hour of the daily update. Which caching strategy is most appropriate?

Place the following steps in the correct order for conducting a Well-Architected review using the AWS Well-Architected Tool. 1. Create an improvement plan that prioritizes high-risk issues by business impact and implementation effort. 2. Define the workload in the tool (name, description, environment, Regions). 3. Save a milestone to establish a baseline for tracking progress over time. 4. Answer the pillar questions, selecting which best practices are implemented.

A solutions architect is designing a static website with a dynamic API backend for a media company. The website serves 500,000 page views per day (mostly static articles and images) and has a comments API that handles 10,000 requests per day. Which architecture provides the best combination of performance, cost, and scalability?

A company currently uses AWS Control Tower to manage a multi-account environment. The security team wants to prevent any account in the "Workloads" OU from launching EC2 instances in Regions outside of us-east-1 and eu-west-1. Which mechanism should the security team use?

A solutions architect is choosing between AWS Step Functions Standard Workflows and Express Workflows for a data transformation pipeline. The pipeline processes 200,000 events per hour, each event requires a single Lambda invocation with no branching or parallel execution, and each event completes in under 30 seconds. Which workflow type is more appropriate, and why?

A solutions architect is presenting a capstone architecture to stakeholders. The architecture uses API Gateway + Lambda + DynamoDB for the backend, S3 + CloudFront for the frontend, and CodePipeline for CI/CD. A stakeholder asks: "What happens if the us-east-1 Region goes down?" The architect's current design has no multi-Region capability. How should the architect respond?

A team is designing a data processing pipeline. Raw JSON files (100 MB each, 500 files per day) are uploaded to S3. Each file must be validated, transformed, and stored in Parquet format for Athena queries. Which pipeline architecture is most appropriate for this scale?

A solutions architect is evaluating whether to apply the CQRS pattern to a new application. The application is a simple task management tool with basic CRUD operations. Read and write traffic are roughly equal, and all queries are simple key-value lookups by task ID. Should the architect apply CQRS?

A company runs a three-tier web application (ALB + EC2 Auto Scaling + RDS Multi-AZ). The Well-Architected review identifies that the application scores well on Reliability and Security but poorly on Cost Optimization. The EC2 instances are `m5.4xlarge` (16 vCPUs, 64 GB RAM) running at 12% average CPU utilization, all S3 data is in Standard storage class regardless of access frequency, and there are no commitment-based pricing plans. Which THREE changes would improve the Cost Optimization pillar? (Select THREE.)Select multiple

A solutions architect needs to choose between Amazon ElastiCache Redis and Memcached for caching session data in a web application. The application requires: session persistence (sessions must survive a cache node failure), pub/sub messaging for real-time notifications, and multi-AZ replication for high availability. Which option should the architect choose?

A solutions architect is designing an architecture for a SaaS application. The architect wants to evaluate the application against both the general Well-Architected Framework and SaaS-specific best practices (tenant isolation, metering, onboarding). How should the architect configure the Well-Architected review?

A company is designing a notification system for an e-commerce platform. When an order is placed, the system must: send a confirmation email to the customer, update the inventory database, and trigger a fraud detection workflow. The fraud detection workflow involves multiple steps with branching logic (flag for review if the order amount exceeds $1,000). Which combination of services should the architect use?

A solutions architect is writing an Architecture Decision Record (ADR) for choosing DynamoDB over RDS for a session storage use case. Which section of the ADR is most important for future team members who question the decision?

A solutions architect is designing the final architecture for a capstone project. The application is a URL shortener that must handle 1,000 redirects per second at peak, store URL mappings with automatic expiration, serve a web dashboard for analytics, and be deployed entirely through IaC with a CI/CD pipeline. The architect must justify every service choice. Which architecture best meets all requirements while following Well-Architected best practices?