Use these questions as reasoning drills. Choose an answer before reading the explanation.
Question 1: Durable object storage
A team needs highly durable storage for millions of images. Applications will retrieve each image through an API, and no mounted filesystem is required. Which service is the best fit?
A. Amazon EBS
B. Amazon S3
C. Amazon EFS
D. EC2 instance store
Answer: B. Amazon S3. The requirement is durable object storage accessed through an API. EBS is block storage, EFS is a shared filesystem, and instance store is ephemeral host storage.
Question 2: Audit an AWS change
A security team needs to identify which principal changed a security group yesterday. Which service should it examine first?
A. CloudWatch Metrics
B. AWS CloudTrail
C. Amazon Inspector
D. AWS Budgets
Answer: B. AWS CloudTrail. CloudTrail records AWS API activity and is the natural source for who performed a control-plane action.
Question 3: Estimate a planned workload
A team has not deployed its architecture yet and wants to estimate monthly service cost. Which tool fits?
A. AWS Pricing Calculator
B. Cost Explorer
C. AWS Budgets
D. CloudWatch
Answer: A. AWS Pricing Calculator. Cost Explorer analyzes existing spend and forecasts based on it. Budgets alert against thresholds.
Question 4: Shared responsibility
Who patches the guest operating system on an Amazon EC2 instance?
A. AWS only
B. The customer
C. The hardware manufacturer
D. The AWS Support team
Answer: B. The customer. AWS secures the underlying cloud infrastructure. The customer manages the EC2 guest operating system and application.
Question 5: Managed event-driven compute
An image upload should trigger a short processing function, and the team does not want to manage servers. Which service is the best fit?
A. AWS Lambda
B. Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts
C. AWS Direct Connect
D. Amazon Redshift
Answer: A. AWS Lambda. The workload is short, event-driven, and asks for minimal server operations. See the asynchronous file processing architecture.
Question 6: Multi-AZ traffic distribution
A web application runs on several EC2 instances across two Availability Zones. Which service distributes HTTP requests only to healthy targets?
A. Amazon Route 53 Resolver
B. Application Load Balancer
C. AWS KMS
D. Amazon SQS
Answer: B. Application Load Balancer. It provides Layer 7 routing and target health checks. Review the highly available web architecture.
Question 7: Private outbound internet access
Instances in a private subnet need to download updates from the internet without accepting inbound internet connections. What should the architecture use?
A. NAT gateway in a public subnet
B. Internet gateway attached directly to each instance
C. An S3 bucket policy
D. AWS WAF
Answer: A. NAT gateway in a public subnet. The private subnet routes outbound IPv4 traffic to the NAT gateway. The VPC subnet diagram shows the path.
Question 8: Detect a cost threshold
A finance team wants an alert when monthly forecast spend crosses a defined amount. Which service should it configure?
A. AWS Budgets
B. AWS Artifact
C. Amazon GuardDuty
D. AWS CloudFormation
Answer: A. AWS Budgets. The key word is alert. Pricing Calculator estimates and Cost Explorer analyzes.
How to use mistakes
Do not only record the correct letter. Write the requirement, the winning service capability, and why your choice did not fit. That is exactly how believable distractors become easy to eliminate.