AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional Intermediate Practice Exam: Medium Difficulty 2025

A large enterprise has multiple AWS accounts organized using AWS Organizations with Service Control Policies (SCPs) enabled. The security team needs to prevent all member accounts from launching EC2 instances in regions outside of us-east-1 and eu-west-1, while still allowing the central security account to operate globally for compliance auditing. What is the MOST effective approach to implement this requirement?

A financial services company is designing a new microservices application on AWS. The application must maintain separate databases for each microservice to follow best practices, ensure data isolation, and support independent scaling. However, some business transactions require atomicity across multiple microservices. How should the solutions architect design the system to handle distributed transactions while maintaining microservice independence?

A media company runs a video processing application on Amazon EC2 instances that processes uploaded videos from an S3 bucket. Processing times vary from 5 minutes to 3 hours depending on video length. The current architecture uses On-Demand instances that run 24/7, resulting in high costs. The company wants to reduce costs while ensuring all videos are processed within 6 hours of upload. Which solution provides the MOST cost-effective architecture?

A company has a three-tier web application running on AWS with an Application Load Balancer, EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group, and an Amazon RDS MySQL database. Performance monitoring shows that database read queries are causing bottlenecks during peak hours. The application makes frequent reads of relatively static reference data and user session data. The solutions architect needs to improve read performance while minimizing application code changes. What combination of actions should be taken? (Choose TWO)

A global company is migrating a legacy on-premises application to AWS. The application uses a shared file system that multiple application servers access simultaneously for read and write operations. The file system contains 50 TB of data and must support NFS protocol. The company requires high availability across multiple Availability Zones and the ability to access files with consistent low latency. Which solution meets these requirements?

A healthcare organization manages multiple AWS accounts for different departments using AWS Organizations. They need to implement a centralized logging solution that collects CloudTrail logs, VPC Flow Logs, and application logs from all accounts. The logs must be stored securely for 7 years to meet compliance requirements, with frequent access needed only for the first 90 days. The solution must prevent any account, including the root account, from deleting or modifying logs. What is the MOST cost-effective and secure solution?

A company runs a data analytics platform on AWS that processes customer data from multiple regions. Due to new data residency regulations, customer data from EU customers must remain within EU regions and cannot be transferred to other regions. The application uses Amazon S3 for storage, Amazon Athena for queries, and AWS Glue for ETL jobs. What solution ensures compliance with data residency requirements while maintaining operational efficiency?

A company is migrating a stateful application from on-premises to AWS. The application currently runs on physical servers with local storage and requires specific IP addresses that are hardcoded in multiple configuration files across the enterprise. The application must maintain session state and cannot tolerate more than 30 seconds of downtime. Which migration strategy minimizes application changes while meeting availability requirements?

A SaaS company provides a multi-tenant application where each tenant's data must be logically isolated. The application currently uses a single Amazon RDS PostgreSQL database with tenant_id columns to separate data. As the customer base grows, some large tenants are experiencing performance issues due to noisy neighbor problems. The company wants to implement a more scalable solution while maintaining cost efficiency for smaller tenants. What architecture should the solutions architect recommend?

A company is designing a disaster recovery solution for a critical application that runs in us-east-1. The application uses EC2 instances, RDS MySQL, and S3 for storage. The business requires an RPO of 1 hour and RTO of 4 hours. Database transactions must not be lost, and the DR solution should minimize costs while meeting the requirements. What DR strategy should be implemented?