You were just hired as a DevOps Engineer for a startup. Your startup uses AWS for 100% of their infrastructure. They
currently have no automation at all for deployment, and they have had many failures while trying to deploy to production.
The company has told you deployment process risk mitigation is the most important thing now, and you have a lot of
budget for tools and AWS resources.
Their stack:
2-tier API
Data stored in DynamoDB or S3, depending on type
Compute layer is EC2 in Auto Scaling Groups
They use Route53 for DNS pointing to an ELB
An ELB balances load across the EC2 instances
The scaling group properly varies between 4 and 12 EC2 servers. Which of the following approaches, given this
company’s stack and their priorities, best meets the company’s needs?

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?

You have been asked to de-risk deployments at your company. Specifically, the CEO is concerned about outages that
occur because of accidental inconsistencies between Staging and Production, which sometimes cause unexpected
behaviors in Production even when Staging tests pass. You already use Docker to get high consistency between Staging
and Production for the application environment on your EC2 instances. How do you further de-risk the rest of the
execution environment, since in AWS, there are many service components you may use beyond EC2 virtual machines?

What is web identity federation?

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?

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.

You work for a company that automatically tags photographs using artificial neural networks (ANNs), which run on GPUs
using C++. You receive millions of images at a time, but only 3 times per day on average. These images are loaded into
an AWS S3 bucket you control for you in a batch, and then the customer publishes a JSON-formatted manifest into
another S3 bucket you control as well. Each image takes 10 milliseconds to process using a full GPU. Your neural network
software requires 5 minutes to bootstrap. Image tags are JSON objects, and you must publish them to an S3 bucket.
Which of these is the best system architectures for this system?

When thinking of AWS Elastic Beanstalk’s model, which is true?

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?

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?