aws solutions architect associate practice exam Intermediate Practice Exam: Medium Difficulty 2025

A financial services company is deploying a web application on AWS that processes sensitive customer data. The application runs on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The security team requires that all data be encrypted in transit and at rest, and that the private keys used for SSL/TLS termination never be exposed in unencrypted form. Which solution meets these requirements?

An e-commerce application experiences predictable traffic patterns with significant increases during lunch hours (12-2 PM) and evenings (6-9 PM). The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. The company wants to optimize costs while ensuring performance during peak times. Which scaling strategy should a solutions architect recommend?

A media company stores user-uploaded videos in Amazon S3. Videos are transcoded using AWS Lambda functions triggered by S3 events. Recently, some large video files (over 500 MB) have been failing to process, and the Lambda functions are timing out. The company needs a solution that can handle files of any size reliably. What should a solutions architect recommend?

A company runs a three-tier web application with a web tier, application tier, and database tier. The application tier consists of EC2 instances that need to access AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store for configuration data and AWS Secrets Manager for database credentials. The security team wants to ensure that the EC2 instances can access these services without using long-term access keys. What is the MOST secure solution?

An analytics company processes data using Amazon EMR clusters that run for 2-3 hours multiple times per day. The workload is not time-critical and can tolerate interruptions. The company wants to minimize costs while maintaining reasonable performance. Which EC2 instance purchasing option should be used for the EMR core nodes?

A healthcare application stores patient records in Amazon RDS PostgreSQL. The company needs to create a disaster recovery solution in a different AWS region with an RPO (Recovery Point Objective) of 5 minutes and an RTO (Recovery Time Objective) of 30 minutes. The solution should minimize operational overhead. Which approach meets these requirements?

A company is migrating a legacy application to AWS. The application serves static content and dynamic API requests. Static content is accessed frequently and rarely changes, while API requests have variable access patterns. The company wants to minimize latency for global users and reduce load on the origin servers. Which architecture should a solutions architect recommend?

A SaaS company hosts a multi-tenant application where each customer's data must be isolated in separate databases for compliance reasons. The application currently uses 50 Amazon RDS MySQL instances, one per customer, but this number is growing rapidly. Most databases are small (under 10 GB) with low utilization. The company wants to reduce costs and operational complexity. What solution should a solutions architect recommend?

A financial application processes transactions stored in an Amazon SQS queue using EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. During a recent incident, some transactions were processed multiple times, causing duplicate charges to customers. The application must ensure that each transaction is processed exactly once. What solution should a solutions architect implement?

A company runs a web application on EC2 instances that queries an Amazon RDS MySQL database. The application experiences slow performance during morning hours when reports are generated. Analysis shows that report queries cause high CPU utilization on the database and impact the performance of regular transactional queries. The company wants to improve performance for both workloads without changing the application code significantly. What should a solutions architect recommend?