Five Star AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Study Guide - ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Aurora Metrics, a retail analytics startup operating in 8 AWS accounts, completes a 45-day cost review and suspects they are paying for idle block storage. They want an AWS service that scans their environment and identifies orphaned or barely used Amazon EBS volumes across Regions. Which service should they use?

• ❏ A. AWS Config

• ❏ B. AWS Trusted Advisor

• ❏ C. AWS Compute Optimizer

• ❏ D. Amazon CloudWatch

Which console sign-in methods follow AWS security best practices? (Choose 2)

• ❏ A. AWS IAM Identity Center (AWS SSO) without MFA

• ❏ B. IAM user with console password

• ❏ C. X.509 certificate from AWS Certificate Manager

• ❏ D. Use MFA for console sign-in

• ❏ E. Access key ID only

Northwind Textiles plans to leave its colocated facility and move workloads to AWS within the next 9 months. As the cloud practitioner advising this effort, which choices will help the company determine the appropriate AWS services to use when designing its solutions? (Choose 2)

• ❏ A. AWS Organizations

• ❏ B. AWS Service Catalog

• ❏ C. AWS CloudTrail

• ❏ D. AWS Partner Network (APN)

• ❏ E. Amazon CloudWatch

In Amazon Route 53, which routing policy sends all traffic to a single endpoint without weighting or failover?

• ❏ A. Weighted routing

• ❏ B. Route 53 simple routing

• ❏ C. Geolocation routing

• ❏ D. Failover routing

A pan-European travel booking company, AlpineTrails, needs to block website access from about twelve countries to satisfy regional compliance requirements. Which AWS service should the team use to set country-based rules that allow or deny web requests?

• ❏ A. AWS Shield

• ❏ B. Amazon WAF

• ❏ C. Amazon Pinpoint

• ❏ D. Amazon Fraud Detector

How can you rapidly and consistently deploy the same AWS infrastructure across multiple Regions?

• ❏ A. AWS Service Catalog

• ❏ B. Use AWS CloudFormation templates for repeatable deployment

• ❏ C. AWS Systems Manager Automation

• ❏ D. AWS Elastic Beanstalk

LumaBridge Analytics wants to lower unpredictable compute charges by committing to a consistent hourly spend that applies across Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda. Which Savings Plans offerings from AWS should they evaluate to achieve this?

• ❏ A. Instance Savings Plans, Storage Savings Plans

• ❏ B. Reserved Instances Savings Plans, EC2 Instance Savings Plans

• ❏ C. Compute Savings Plans, EC2 Instance Savings Plans

• ❏ D. Compute Savings Plans, Storage Savings Plans

Which AWS service automatically scans EC2 instances for vulnerabilities using a host-level agent?

• ❏ A. AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager

• ❏ B. Amazon Inspector service

• ❏ C. AWS Trusted Advisor

• ❏ D. Amazon GuardDuty

A geospatial analytics startup runs Amazon EC2 instances in three Availability Zones and needs a central, shared file store so the instances can read, update, and collaborate on the same files at the same time. Which AWS service should they choose to provide a managed, elastic network file system that supports concurrent access across AZs?

• ❏ A. Amazon S3

• ❏ B. Amazon EBS

• ❏ C. Amazon EFS

• ❏ D. EC2 Instance Store

Compared to on-premises data centers, which advantages are typical when building and operating applications on AWS? (Choose 2)

• ❏ A. AWS Outposts

• ❏ B. Elastic scaling for variable demand

• ❏ C. Automatic data replication to all Regions

• ❏ D. Simpler high availability across multiple AZs

• ❏ E. Guaranteed lower costs without tuning

All AWS exam questions come from the AWS Practitioner Udemy course and certificationexams.pro

A compliance analyst at Horizon Outfitters needs to review who made API changes across their AWS environment and view a 90-day history of account activity for audits. Which AWS service should they use to capture and review user actions?

• ❏ A. Amazon Inspector

• ❏ B. AWS CloudTrail

• ❏ C. AWS Config

• ❏ D. Amazon CloudWatch

Under AWS’s shared responsibility model, which tasks are customers responsible for? (Choose 2)

• ❏ A. Patching the database engine for Amazon RDS

• ❏ B. Enabling server-side encryption for S3 data

• ❏ C. Ensuring global compute capacity availability

• ❏ D. Configuring security groups, network ACLs, and host firewalls

• ❏ E. Patching the underlying hypervisor

A fintech startup in Dublin runs its application on an Amazon EC2 instance in eu-west-1. The team wants to launch the same server image in us-west-2 to expand to North America. What should they use to duplicate the instance configuration in the new Region?

• ❏ A. AWS CloudFormation

• ❏ B. AWS Lambda

• ❏ C. Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

• ❏ D. Amazon EBS snapshots

Which AWS Support plan offers 24×7 access to Cloud Support Engineers for production workloads at the lowest cost?

• ❏ A. AWS Enterprise On-Ramp

• ❏ B. AWS Developer Support

• ❏ C. AWS Business Support plan

• ❏ D. AWS Enterprise Support

A digital media startup stores high-bitrate video files in Amazon S3, and an application running on Amazon EC2 serves them to viewers. The team needs to convert a few thousand 1080p sources into formats that play smoothly on smartphones and tablets. Which AWS service should they use to perform this transcoding?

• ❏ A. AWS Glue

• ❏ B. Amazon Elastic Transcoder

• ❏ C. Amazon Comprehend

• ❏ D. Amazon Transcribe

What best describes an Availability Zone within an AWS Region?

• ❏ A. A group of data centers distributed across multiple cities

• ❏ B. One or more isolated data centers in one location

• ❏ C. A VPC subnet

• ❏ D. A network of edge sites used for global content delivery

ScholarBeam, an edtech startup, is reviewing cloud pricing models and wants to know which cloud benefit explains how AWS can cut per-unit pay-as-you-go rates when demand from millions of customers is pooled across its platform?

• ❏ A. Expand globally within minutes

• ❏ B. Greater speed and agility

• ❏ C. Significant economies of scale

• ❏ D. Shift capital expenses to variable costs

Which AWS service is used to build conversational chatbots for voice and text with intent and slot handling?

• ❏ A. AWS Chatbot

• ❏ B. Amazon Lex service

• ❏ C. Amazon Bedrock

• ❏ D. Amazon Comprehend

A digital art marketplace is preparing to store product images in Amazon S3. What is the term for the primary container that holds these objects at the top level?

• ❏ A. S3 Access Point

• ❏ B. Bucket

• ❏ C. Folder

• ❏ D. Instance Store

Under the AWS shared responsibility model, which task is the customer responsible for?

• ❏ A. Securing the underlying hypervisor

• ❏ B. Managing data center cabling and switches

• ❏ C. Enabling and managing encryption for data at rest

• ❏ D. Controlling physical access to server racks

All AWS exam questions come from the AWS Practitioner Udemy course and certificationexams.pro

A cost analyst at BlueRiver Labs enables Amazon CloudWatch to publish estimated charges for a company-wide cost dashboard. Regardless of where workloads run, in which AWS Region does AWS store the CloudWatch billing metric data?

• ❏ A. US West (N. California) – us-west-1

• ❏ B. The Region hosting the provisioned resources

• ❏ C. US East (N. Virginia) – us-east-1

• ❏ D. The Region where the AWS account was initially set up

Which AWS service is used to build natural-language conversational interfaces for voice and chat?

• ❏ A. Amazon Transcribe

• ❏ B. Amazon Lex

• ❏ C. Amazon Connect

• ❏ D. Amazon Comprehend

BrightWave Media runs its customer portal in one AWS Region and spreads the web tier across three Availability Zones to improve resilience. What characteristic best describes this architecture?

• ❏ A. Elasticity

• ❏ B. Global footprint

• ❏ C. High availability

• ❏ D. Security posture

At what scope are Service Control Policies attached in AWS?

• ❏ A. AWS Regions

• ❏ B. AWS Organizations hierarchy

• ❏ C. AWS IAM

• ❏ D. Availability Zones

A fintech startup is adopting AWS Lambda to run event-driven workloads. Under AWS’s shared responsibility model, which task remains the customer’s obligation when operating Lambda?

• ❏ A. Build and manage all runtime environments for Lambda

• ❏ B. Provision and operate the underlying network infrastructure for Lambda

• ❏ C. Create and manage Lambda function versions

• ❏ D. Apply operating system patches to the Lambda service infrastructure

For an On-Demand Amazon EC2 instance running Amazon Linux 2, in what time increment is compute billed?

• ❏ A. Per hour

• ❏ B. Per second, 60-second minimum

• ❏ C. Per vCPU-hour

• ❏ D. Per CPU core

A regional healthcare nonprofit is preparing a three year Total Cost of Ownership comparison before migrating workloads to AWS. Which on premises expenses should be counted as costs that will be eliminated after the move to the AWS Cloud? (Choose 2)

• ❏ A. Operating system administration labor

• ❏ B. Physical servers and storage hardware

• ❏ C. AWS Direct Connect

• ❏ D. Data center network equipment such as routers and switches

• ❏ E. Database schema and data model design work

Which AWS service runs code in response to events without managing servers?

• ❏ A. Amazon EventBridge

• ❏ B. AWS Fargate

• ❏ C. AWS Lambda functions

• ❏ D. Amazon ECS

A retail analytics company runs an application on a single Amazon EC2 instance and plans to improve performance by moving to a larger instance class with more vCPUs and memory. What kind of scaling does this represent?

• ❏ A. Horizontal scaling

• ❏ B. Vertical scale-up

• ❏ C. AWS Auto Scaling

• ❏ D. Loose coupling

Which IAM construct provides long-term programmatic credentials (access key ID and secret access key)?

• ❏ A. AWS STS

• ❏ B. IAM Policy

• ❏ C. IAM user identity

• ❏ D. IAM Role

At Quicksilver Labs, developers want to orchestrate several microservices across AWS using a visual, step-by-step workflow that includes state tracking and automatic retries with little custom code. Which AWS service should they use?

• ❏ A. Amazon SNS

• ❏ B. Amazon SWF

• ❏ C. AWS Step Functions

• ❏ D. Amazon EventBridge

Which AWS service enables push-based pub/sub fanout to send urgent messages concurrently to about 30,000 subscribers across email and mobile app endpoints?

• ❏ A. Amazon EventBridge

• ❏ B. Amazon Pinpoint

• ❏ C. Amazon SNS

• ❏ D. Amazon SQS

Engineers at Solstice Robotics need credentials for scripts and CI jobs to interact with AWS services without using a web browser. What are IAM access keys primarily intended for?

• ❏ A. AWS Certificate Manager

• ❏ B. Signing in to the AWS Management Console

• ❏ C. Validating the integrity of AWS CloudTrail log files

• ❏ D. Programmatically calling AWS using the CLI, SDKs, or direct API requests

Which AWS Support plan offers the lowest-cost 24×7 phone access to technical support?

• ❏ A. AWS Developer Support

• ❏ B. AWS Business Support plan

• ❏ C. AWS Enterprise On-Ramp

• ❏ D. AWS Enterprise Support

An online gaming studio is rehosting its data center matchmaker onto AWS. The service keeps large session state and real-time rankings entirely in memory to maintain sub-millisecond responses. Which Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance family is the most appropriate for this requirement?

• ❏ A. Compute Optimized instances

• ❏ B. Accelerated Computing instances

• ❏ C. Memory Optimized instances

• ❏ D. Storage Optimized instances

The correct choice is AWS Trusted Advisor. It provides cost optimization checks that surface unattached EBS volumes and volumes with consistently low activity across Regions so you can remove or resize them to reduce spend.

AWS Trusted Advisor runs best practice checks and returns actionable findings that point to orphaned or underutilized block storage. Those cost optimization checks are designed to highlight unattached volumes and persistently idle volumes so you can address them quickly across your accounts.

AWS Config records configuration history and inventory and helps with compliance and change tracking, but it does not natively perform utilization analysis or automatically list idle or unattached EBS volumes for cost optimization.

Amazon CloudWatch collects metrics logs and alarms and can show EBS performance and activity, however it does not perform an account wide assessment that automatically flags orphaned or barely used volumes.

AWS Compute Optimizer provides rightsizing recommendations for instances and volume performance tuning for attached storage, but it focuses on sizing attached resources and does not identify unattached volumes the way Trusted Advisor does.

When a question mentions idle or unattached EBS volumes and asks about cost checks think about the service that gives quick account level findings across Regions.

IAM user with console password and Use MFA for console sign-in are correct because they represent the supported and recommended approaches for secure interactive AWS Management Console access.

IAM user with console password is the standard method for an individual to sign in when federation is not used and it allows administrators to apply password policies and IAM permissions to that identity, and it becomes secure when combined with MFA.

Use MFA for console sign-in provides a required second authentication factor and it greatly reduces the risk of account compromise even if a password is exposed.

AWS IAM Identity Center (AWS SSO) without MFA is not a best practice when MFA is omitted because Identity Center is recommended for centralized access but it should still be configured with multi factor authentication to meet security best practices.

X.509 certificate from AWS Certificate Manager is incorrect because ACM certificates protect network connections and are not used to authenticate human users to the Management Console.

Access key ID only is for programmatic API or CLI access and it cannot be used by itself to sign in to the AWS Management Console.

Focus on whether the method is for interactive console sign in or for programmatic access and favor MFA plus managed user identities when answering.

The correct choices are AWS Service Catalog and AWS Partner Network (APN).

AWS Service Catalog presents curated, organization approved portfolios and templates so teams can consistently choose the right building blocks for workloads and it directly supports deciding which AWS services to use when designing solutions.

AWS Partner Network (APN) connects you with experienced consulting and technology partners who can recommend appropriate AWS services and reference architectures and that guidance is especially valuable during migrations away from a colocated facility.

AWS Organizations focuses on centralized account management, consolidated billing, and policy controls and it does not help evaluate or select specific services for solution design.

Amazon CloudWatch provides monitoring, metrics, and logs for operational visibility and it is not a tool for determining which services to adopt.

AWS CloudTrail records API calls and account activity for auditing and compliance and it does not aid in choosing which AWS services to use.

When evaluating service choices focus on centralized enablement and external expertise. Use AWS Service Catalog to enforce approved patterns and consult AWS Partner Network (APN) for migration and architecture guidance.

Route 53 simple routing is correct because it returns a single record for a hostname and sends all traffic to a single endpoint with no traffic splitting and no health based failover.

The simple routing policy is the default when there is exactly one resource to route traffic to and you do not need advanced routing features. It does not perform weight based distribution and it does not use health checks to switch endpoints so every request resolves to the single configured target.

Weighted routing is incorrect because it distributes traffic across multiple endpoints based on assigned weights, which contradicts the requirement to always use a single endpoint.

Geolocation routing is incorrect because it routes users based on their geographic location and it typically assumes multiple regional or country endpoints rather than a single destination for all users.

Failover routing is incorrect because it configures primary and secondary records with health checks to provide active passive behavior, and it is used to switch traffic on health failures rather than to keep all traffic pointed to one endpoint without failover.

When the question states a single endpoint with no splitting or health based switching choose simple routing. If the exam mentions weights think of weighted routing and if it mentions standby or health checks think of failover.

The correct choice is Amazon WAF because it supports geo match statements to allow or deny web requests from specific countries and you can attach a web ACL to CloudFront, an Application Load Balancer, or API Gateway for enforcement at scale.

With WAF you add a geo match rule to a web ACL and set the action to allow or block traffic from the listed countries. Attaching the web ACL to CloudFront provides global coverage and attaching to an ALB or API Gateway protects regional endpoints and lets you enforce the same country based policy across your application.

AWS Shield is focused on DDoS protection and does not provide country based request filtering or custom web ACL rules.

Amazon Pinpoint is a customer engagement service for messaging and analytics and it cannot block HTTP requests at the edge or at your application endpoints.

Amazon Fraud Detector evaluates events for potential fraud and is not intended to control access by geographic origin.

When you need country level allow or block think Amazon WAF geo match and attach the web ACL to CloudFront or your load balancer for scalable enforcement.

The correct answer is Use AWS CloudFormation templates for repeatable deployment. This choice enables you to define infrastructure as code and reuse the same template artifacts across Regions for consistent and automated provisioning.

With CloudFormation you declare resources in templates and deploy them as stacks. You can use StackSets to distribute and manage those stacks across multiple accounts and Regions at scale and that is what makes CloudFormation well suited for repeatable multi Region infrastructure rollout.

AWS Service Catalog helps curate and govern approved products that are often built on CloudFormation and it is useful for governance and self service. It is not the primary mechanism for defining and directly deploying the underlying infrastructure across Regions and accounts.

AWS Systems Manager Automation focuses on operational runbooks and tasks such as creating AMIs and applying patches and it is not intended for end to end declarative infrastructure deployment across multiple Regions.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk simplifies application deployment and manages environment resources for you and it is not designed to provide broad, reusable multi Region infrastructure templates in the way CloudFormation with StackSets is.

When a question mentions consistency, repeatability, or multi Region and multi account rollout look for IaC keywords like template stack and StackSets as strong clues that CloudFormation is the correct choice.

The correct choice is Compute Savings Plans, EC2 Instance Savings Plans. These two Savings Plans let LumaBridge Analytics commit to a predictable hourly spend that applies across Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda and they differ in flexibility and discount depth.

The Compute Savings Plans provide the broadest flexibility and automatically apply to usage across EC2, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda regardless of instance family, instance size, Region, operating system, or tenancy. This makes the compute plan the best fit when the goal is a consistent hourly commitment that covers multiple compute services. The EC2 Instance Savings Plans deliver larger discounts but require a commitment to a specific EC2 instance family within a Region so they are less flexible than the compute plan.

Instance Savings Plans, Storage Savings Plans is incorrect because there is no Storage Savings Plan and the term Instance Savings Plans is not the correct product name since Savings Plans are focused on compute usage only.

Reserved Instances Savings Plans, EC2 Instance Savings Plans is incorrect because Reserved Instances are a separate purchase model and the phrase Reserved Instances Savings Plans does not describe an AWS Savings Plans type.

Compute Savings Plans, Storage Savings Plans is incorrect because no Storage Savings Plan exists and storage services such as Amazon S3 and EBS are not covered by Savings Plans.

Remember that Compute Savings Plans cover EC2, Fargate and Lambda and that EC2 Instance Savings Plans trade flexibility for deeper discounts. If an answer mentions storage it is almost certainly a distractor.

Amazon Inspector service is the correct option because it is designed to automatically scan EC2 instances for vulnerabilities using a host-level agent.

Amazon Inspector service automatically discovers EC2 instances and uses the AWS Systems Manager agent on hosts to collect software inventory and evaluate installed packages against known CVEs. The service generates findings that include severity and suggested remediation and it can integrate with other AWS security services for centralized reporting.

AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager is not correct because it focuses on automating operating system and application patching and reporting patch compliance rather than performing continuous vulnerability discovery and CVE scanning.

AWS Trusted Advisor is not correct because it provides high level account and configuration best practice checks and it does not run a host agent or analyze instance level software vulnerabilities.

Amazon GuardDuty is not correct because it is a threat detection service that analyzes logs and network activity for malicious or anomalous behavior and it does not perform host based vulnerability scanning.

When the question mentions vulnerability scanning, CVE, or a host agent prioritize Inspector in your answer and reserve Patch Manager for patching and compliance scenarios.

The correct choice is Amazon EFS. Amazon EFS provides a fully managed elastic Network File System that multiple EC2 instances can mount concurrently across multiple Availability Zones in the same Region so instances can read update and collaborate on the same files.

Amazon EFS is POSIX compliant and supports concurrent access from many EC2 instances while it automatically scales storage and throughput as needed. This makes it well suited for shared file based workloads that require low administrative overhead and multi AZ availability.

Amazon S3 is object storage and not a POSIX compliant file system so it cannot be mounted like NFS for simultaneous file sharing across instances. Amazon S3 is ideal for object storage and data lakes but not for POSIX file sharing.

Amazon EBS provides block storage that is normally attached to a single instance and while some volume types offer Multi Attach it is limited to the same Availability Zone. Amazon EBS does not provide a managed multi AZ shared file system.

EC2 Instance Store is ephemeral storage that is physically attached to the host and it cannot be shared between instances. EC2 Instance Store also loses data when the instance stops or terminates so it is unsuitable for centralized shared file storage.

When you need POSIX compliant file sharing across Availability Zones choose Amazon EFS. Remember that Amazon EBS is for single instance block storage and Amazon S3 is object storage.

The correct options are Simpler high availability across multiple AZs and Elastic scaling for variable demand.

AWS Regions include multiple isolated Availability Zones and AWS provides managed services and networking that help distribute workloads and enable failover across AZs, which makes it easier to design resilient architectures compared to a single on premises site. That is why Simpler high availability across multiple AZs is a typical cloud advantage.

Elasticity is a fundamental cloud advantage because services such as auto scaling and serverless compute let resources scale up and down quickly to match changing demand, which helps maintain performance and can improve cost efficiency when managed properly. That is why Elastic scaling for variable demand is also correct.

AWS Outposts is incorrect because it is a specific hybrid offering that brings AWS infrastructure into a customer location and it is not an inherent advantage of using the AWS public cloud over on premises.

Automatic data replication to all Regions is incorrect because cross Region replication is not performed automatically by most services and must be explicitly configured per service and per dataset.

Guaranteed lower costs without tuning is incorrect because achieving cost savings requires right sizing purchasing choices and ongoing optimization and there is no blanket guarantee of lower costs without effort.

Focus on core cloud principles such as elasticity and multi AZ fault tolerance and be wary of choices that claim automatic or guaranteed outcomes.

All AWS exam questions come from the AWS Practitioner Udemy course and certificationexams.pro

The correct choice is AWS CloudTrail because it captures management and data events for AWS services and provides a time stamped audit trail of API calls that shows who made changes where and when and the console offers a built in 90 day event history while logs can be delivered to Amazon S3 for longer retention.

AWS CloudTrail records management events and data events across services and includes attributes such as the caller identity the source IP and the event time which makes it suitable for compliance audits and forensic review.

Amazon Inspector is a vulnerability assessment and runtime security evaluation service and it does not provide a consolidated record of user API calls across the account.

AWS Config records resource configuration states and relationships and it helps with compliance and drift detection but it does not show the full API caller history in the same way CloudTrail does.

Amazon CloudWatch focuses on metrics logs and alarms and it can ingest logs for applications and services but it is not the primary source for a time stamped audit trail of API activity.

Enable AWS CloudTrail organization trails to collect events across all accounts and configure delivery to Amazon S3 for long term retention and to Amazon CloudWatch Logs for alerting.

The correct responsibilities are Enabling server-side encryption for S3 data and Configuring security groups, network ACLs, and host firewalls under AWS’s shared responsibility model where customers manage security in the cloud and AWS manages security of the cloud.

Customers must handle Enabling server-side encryption for S3 data because configuring how your data is encrypted at rest and managing the keys or encryption settings is part of protecting customer data. Customers must also handle Configuring security groups, network ACLs, and host firewalls because network access controls and host-level firewall rules are configuration tasks that determine who and what can reach your resources.

Patching the database engine for Amazon RDS is incorrect because managed services like Amazon RDS include engine patching and maintenance as part of AWS managed service responsibilities.

Ensuring global compute capacity availability is incorrect because AWS is responsible for the resilience and capacity of its global infrastructure and for maintaining availability across regions and availability zones.

Patching the underlying hypervisor is incorrect because AWS operates and patches the host hardware and hypervisor layers as part of the cloud infrastructure services they provide.

Security in the cloud maps to customer tasks like data encryption and network controls and security of the cloud maps to AWS tasks like hypervisors and global infrastructure. Look for keywords about data, IAM, encryption, or network configuration when choosing customer responsibilities.

The correct choice is Amazon Machine Image (AMI). You create an AMI from the existing EC2 instance and copy that AMI to the target Region so you can launch identical instances there.

Amazon Machine Image (AMI) packages the instance root volume and launch metadata into a bootable image that can be copied between Regions. After you copy the AMI to us-west-2 you can use it to start EC2 instances with the same configuration as the original.

AWS CloudFormation can deploy infrastructure from templates but it does not replicate AMIs across Regions. You still need an AMI that exists in the destination Region for a CloudFormation template to reference.

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service and it is not used to create or duplicate EC2 machine images.

Amazon EBS snapshots capture the state of volumes and you can copy snapshots across Regions but a snapshot by itself is not a registered bootable image. You would still create or register an AMI to launch the same instance from snapshot data.

When moving an EC2 server to another Region remember to create an AMI and copy that AMI to the target Region before launching instances.

AWS Business Support plan is correct because it is the lowest cost AWS Support tier that provides 24×7 access to Cloud Support Engineers via phone, chat, and email for production workloads.

The AWS Business Support plan covers production systems and includes access to technical support around the clock and support for third party software and guidance for operational issues. This plan is the typical choice when the question asks for both continuous coverage and the lowest cost for production environments.

AWS Enterprise On-Ramp is incorrect because although it can offer accelerated engagement and guidance it is aimed at customers who need additional onboarding and advisory services and it is not the lowest cost option for production support.

AWS Developer Support is incorrect because it is designed for development and test environments and it does not provide full 24×7 access to Cloud Support Engineers across phone, chat, and email for production workloads.

AWS Enterprise Support is incorrect because it is the highest tier that adds a designated technical account manager and concierge services and therefore it is not the lowest cost solution for basic 24×7 production support.

24×7 access plus the phrase lowest cost for production in a question usually indicates the Business Support plan.

The correct choice is Amazon Elastic Transcoder. It is a managed service for converting media files stored in Amazon S3 into device friendly formats and bitrates so video plays smoothly on smartphones and tablets.

Amazon Elastic Transcoder handles batch jobs and uses presets and pipelines to produce common output codecs and adaptive bitrates that mobile devices expect. It integrates with S3 which makes it a straightforward choice when your sources already live in S3 and an EC2 application serves the output.

A newer alternative is AWS Elemental MediaConvert which offers more advanced features and broader codec support. MediaConvert is often recommended for complex or large scale production workflows and it is commonly emphasized on newer exams.

AWS Glue is focused on extract transform and load tasks for analytics and data lakes and it does not perform audio or video encoding.

Amazon Comprehend provides natural language processing for text and it does not convert or reencode media files.

Amazon Transcribe converts speech in audio into text and it is not used to transcode media into playback formats for devices.

When a question asks about converting media for playback think transcoding and choose services like Elastic Transcoder or AWS Elemental MediaConvert for device friendly output.

One or more isolated data centers in one location is correct because an Availability Zone is one or more discrete data centers inside a single AWS Region that are physically separate and that have independent power and networking and connectivity.

One or more isolated data centers in one location are designed to be fault isolated from other Availability Zones while still offering low latency network connections within the Region so you can place resources in multiple AZs to improve availability and resilience.

A group of data centers distributed across multiple cities is incorrect because that scope describes an AWS Region rather than a single Availability Zone.

A VPC subnet is incorrect because a subnet is a logical network segment inside a VPC and is not a physical, fault isolated site.

A network of edge sites used for global content delivery is incorrect because those are CloudFront edge locations and they serve content delivery use cases rather than acting as Availability Zones.

Remember to map terms to their physical scope and purpose. Think AZ equals discrete data center location inside one Region and not a subnet or global edge site.

The correct choice is Significant economies of scale. AWS can reduce per-unit pay-as-you-go rates because it aggregates demand across millions of customers which enables bulk purchasing and more efficient use of infrastructure.

By pooling demand AWS can negotiate lower hardware and network prices and run data centers at higher utilization which spreads fixed costs over a much larger customer base. These effects let AWS lower unit costs and pass savings to customers which is the essence of Significant economies of scale.

Expand globally within minutes describes the ability to deploy resources across regions quickly and to reach customers worldwide, but it does not explain how pooled customer demand lowers per-unit pricing.

Greater speed and agility refers to faster provisioning and quicker experimentation, and it improves time to market, but it is not the mechanism for bulk price reductions that come from aggregated demand.

Shift capital expenses to variable costs highlights moving from upfront investments to pay-as-you-go billing which is a key cloud benefit, but it explains cost model flexibility rather than the price decreases driven by economies of scale.

When a question mentions pooled demand or bulk purchasing think economies of scale. When it mentions avoiding upfront spend think capex to opex.

Amazon Lex service is correct because it is the managed AWS service for building conversational chatbots that handle both voice and text with built in intent recognition and slot filling.

The Amazon Lex service provides automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding so you can define intents and slots and implement fulfillment with AWS Lambda or other services. The service supports both text and voice channels and includes dialog management features such as slot elicitation and intent confirmation which makes it suitable for customer facing conversational experiences.

AWS Chatbot is incorrect because it integrates AWS notifications with Slack and Amazon Chime and it is not designed to build customer facing chatbots with intent and slot handling.

Amazon Bedrock is incorrect because it offers access to foundation models and generative AI orchestration and it does not provide the native intent and slot dialogue management that a managed chatbot service supplies.

Amazon Comprehend is incorrect because it focuses on NLP tasks like sentiment analysis and entity recognition and it does not provide dialog flow control or slot filling for interactive chatbots.

When a question mentions conversational interfaces with intents and slots think Lex. Also remember that Comprehend handles NLP analysis and that Polly and Transcribe handle speech synthesis and recognition respectively.

Bucket is the correct choice for the top level container that holds objects in Amazon S3.

Amazon S3 stores data as objects and each object resides inside a uniquely named Bucket that provides the namespace and the place to apply lifecycle rules and access controls within a region.

S3 Access Point is incorrect because access points create dedicated endpoints and policies to access an existing bucket and they do not act as separate storage containers.

Folder is incorrect because the S3 namespace is flat and folders are a console convenience implemented as key prefixes rather than independent root containers.

Instance Store is incorrect because instance store refers to ephemeral block storage attached to an EC2 host and it is unrelated to S3 object storage.

When a question asks about the S3 top level container think Bucket and remember that folders are just prefixes shown in the console.

The correct choice is Enabling and managing encryption for data at rest. Under the shared responsibility model the customer is responsible for security in the cloud and must configure encryption settings and manage keys and access to protect their data.

That responsibility means customers decide when to enable encryption and which key management approach to use when storing data. Even when AWS offers managed encryption or default options the customer must grant or restrict access to keys configure encryption options where applicable and manage policies that govern data protection.

The option Securing the underlying hypervisor is incorrect because AWS is responsible for securing and operating the virtualization layer and the hypervisor as part of security of the cloud.

The option Managing data center cabling and switches is incorrect because AWS operates the physical network infrastructure inside its data centers and customers do not manage cabling or internal switching.

The option Controlling physical access to server racks is incorrect because AWS controls physical security for its facilities and manages access to racks and hardware.

Remember that AWS secures the cloud while customers secure resources in the cloud. On exam questions pick answers that mention data encryption key management IAM or configuration when the responsibility is customer side.

The correct choice is US East (N. Virginia) – us-east-1. CloudWatch billing metrics are global and are stored and retrieved from US East (N. Virginia) – us-east-1 for the account regardless of where workloads run.

Billing and the EstimatedCharges metric are published to the CloudWatch endpoint in us-east-1 and you must query that Region to view company wide estimated charges. Centralizing the data in one Region allows a single dashboard to represent costs from all Regions for the account.

US West (N. California) – us-west-1 is incorrect because AWS does not store billing metrics there and you will not find the EstimatedCharges metric in that Region.

The Region hosting the provisioned resources is incorrect because billing metrics are not tied to where workloads run and CloudWatch publishes billing data centrally instead.

The Region where the AWS account was initially set up is incorrect because the account creation Region does not determine where billing metrics reside and AWS uses the global endpoint in us-east-1.

When you monitor cost metrics remember that EstimatedCharges are published centrally so target queries and dashboards to us-east-1 to see account wide estimates.

The correct choice is Amazon Lex. It is the AWS service for creating conversational interfaces for both voice and chat and it is specifically designed to build virtual assistants and chatbots.

Amazon Lex provides automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding and it lets you define intents and slots and manage multi turn dialogs which are required to recognize user intent and maintain conversation state.

Amazon Transcribe is incorrect because it only converts speech to text and it does not provide intent recognition or dialog management needed for conversational bots.

Amazon Connect is incorrect because it is a contact center service that can integrate with Amazon Lex to host bots but it does not itself provide bot building and dialog management.

Amazon Comprehend is incorrect because it performs NLP analytics such as entity recognition and sentiment detection and it is not a service for building conversational agents.

When a question asks about building chat or voice bots choose Amazon Lex and remember to match other services to their core functions such as speech to text or text analytics.

The architecture is best described as High availability because running the web tier across three Availability Zones within a single AWS Region improves resilience and reduces single points of failure.

Placing instances in multiple Availability Zones allows traffic and workloads to fail over when one zone has problems and lets load be balanced across zones to maintain uptime, which is the core goal of High availability.

Elasticity refers to automatically scaling capacity up or down in response to demand and does not by itself describe distributing instances across Availability Zones for redundancy.

Global footprint implies deployment across multiple Regions or the use of global edge locations and is not achieved by using multiple AZs within one Region.

Security posture relates to protective controls and compliance and does not describe the redundancy or uptime benefits provided by a multi-AZ design.

Associate multi-AZ with high availability and reserve multi-Region for global reach, while remembering that elasticity is about automatic scaling.

AWS Organizations hierarchy is correct because Service Control Policies are attached at the organization root, to organizational units, or directly to member accounts so administrators can establish permission guardrails that define the maximum allowed permissions across accounts.

AWS Organizations hierarchy policies act as boundaries and do not grant permissions by themselves and they apply across multiple accounts in an organization which makes them the proper mechanism for account‑wide or organization‑wide restrictions.

AWS Regions is incorrect because regions are geographic constructs and they are not an attachment point for organization policies.

AWS IAM is incorrect because IAM policies are attached to users, roles, and groups inside a single account and they are used to grant or deny permissions at the account level while SCPs are managed at the organization level.

Availability Zones is incorrect because availability zones are isolated locations within a region and they are not a scope for organization level policy attachment.

When you see guardrails or maximum permissions across multiple accounts think organization level controls and not AWS IAM or AWS Regions or Availability Zones.

The correct choice is Create and manage Lambda function versions. Customers retain responsibility for their code, configuration, access control, and deployment artifacts and they control when to publish, keep, or roll back function versions.

Under the AWS shared responsibility model AWS manages the service infrastructure, the hosts, the operating systems, and the managed runtimes and customers are responsible for what they deploy into the service. That means customers must handle application lifecycle tasks such as Create and manage Lambda function versions and related configuration and IAM settings.

Build and manage all runtime environments for Lambda is incorrect because AWS provides and maintains the managed runtimes and the platform that executes Lambda functions so customers do not build the underlying runtimes.

Provision and operate the underlying network infrastructure for Lambda is incorrect because AWS operates the service networking and data center infrastructure and customers only configure VPC access for functions when that is needed.

Apply operating system patches to the Lambda service infrastructure is incorrect because AWS is responsible for patching and maintaining the hosts and operating systems that run the Lambda service.

Remember that for serverless services AWS handles the underlying infrastructure and runtimes while you handle your code and deployment artifacts like function versions.

Per second, 60-second minimum is correct for On-Demand Amazon EC2 instances running Amazon Linux 2 because Linux based On-Demand instances are billed in one second increments after a 60 second minimum.

AWS uses a per second billing model for most Linux EC2 compute and attached EBS storage so the cost basis for Linux On-Demand instances is per second with a 60 second minimum. This means you pay for the instance runtime measured in seconds after the first minute rather than being rounded up to full hours.

Per hour is incorrect because Linux EC2 billing is no longer rounded to hourly blocks for On-Demand instances and the hourly unit does not apply in this case.

Per vCPU-hour is incorrect because EC2 pricing is tied to the instance type and its runtime and not billed by separate vCPU hour units.

Per CPU core is incorrect because the number of cores affects instance selection and performance and not the fundamental billing unit which is the instance runtime.

When the question includes On-Demand and Linux think per second billing with a 60 second minimum and rule out hourly or per core units.

Physical servers and storage hardware and Data center network equipment such as routers and switches are correct because they represent on premises capital and facility items that will be removed when workloads run on AWS.

Physical servers and storage hardware are replaced by provider managed compute and storage so you no longer buy or refresh racks of gear or pay for the associated facility footprint.

Data center network equipment such as routers and switches is removed because AWS supplies the networking fabric and you will not need to purchase maintain or support those physical network devices in your data center anymore.

Operating system administration labor is not an avoided cost because many systems still need OS level operations patching and configuration in the cloud and that labor commonly continues or shifts to cloud operations roles.

AWS Direct Connect is not an on premises expense to eliminate because it is an AWS connectivity service and may become a new recurring cost rather than a removed data center cost.

Database schema and data model design work is not eliminated because application and data design effort continues during and after migration and may increase for modernization activities.

For TCO count capital and facility expenses that go away such as servers storage network devices power and cooling and exclude labor and design tasks that will likely continue.

AWS Lambda functions is the correct choice because it runs code in response to events without requiring you to provision or manage servers.

AWS Lambda functions is a fully managed compute service that invokes code on triggers such as S3 uploads, API Gateway requests, or EventBridge events. You pay per invocation and for compute time and the platform abstracts the underlying servers so it aligns with event driven and no servers to provision requirements.

Amazon EventBridge is incorrect because it provides an event bus and routing rules and it does not execute user code by itself.

AWS Fargate is incorrect because it runs containers in a serverless way but it requires you to define and run container tasks and it is not the lightweight function invocation model that Lambda provides.

Amazon ECS is incorrect because it is a container orchestration service that manages tasks and services and it requires more operational setup than a function runtime.

Event-driven and no servers to manage are strong clues to pick serverless functions rather than container services.

Vertical scale-up is correct because the scenario describes upgrading a single Amazon EC2 instance to a larger instance class with more vCPUs and memory rather than adding more instances.

The team is increasing the compute and memory capacity of one server so they are performing a vertical scale up. Vertical scale-up raises the resource limits of a single node and it is commonly used when an application cannot be easily distributed or when a larger instance delivers the needed performance improvements.

Horizontal scaling is incorrect because that approach adds more instances to share load rather than making one instance bigger.

AWS Auto Scaling is incorrect because it is a service that automates scaling actions and it usually implements scaling policies across multiple instances rather than being the directional strategy described.

Loose coupling is incorrect because it is an architectural principle that improves resilience and flexibility and it does not refer to increasing compute resources on a single server.

On exams remember that scale up means increasing the size of a single instance and scale out means adding more instances to handle load.

IAM user identity is correct because long term access key pairs consisting of an access key ID and a secret access key are created and managed for IAM users to enable persistent programmatic access to AWS APIs.

IAM users own and manage access keys and those keys persist until rotated or deleted. This makes them suitable for long lived programmatic credentials that are tied to a person or an application. For short lived credentials and temporary access prefer IAM Role or AWS STS instead and remove or rotate long term keys when they are not needed.

The option AWS STS is incorrect because STS issues temporary credentials that expire and are obtained through operations like AssumeRole rather than providing long term key pairs.

The option IAM Policy is incorrect because policies only define permissions and do not create or store credentials for programmatic access.

The option IAM Role is incorrect because roles are assumed to grant temporary credentials and they do not have long lived access key ID and secret access key pairs themselves.

Remember that users provide long term keys while roles and STS provide temporary credentials. Prefer roles for AWS services and rotate or remove long term keys when possible.

AWS Step Functions is the correct choice because it provides a visual, step-by-step workflow with state tracking and automatic retries which match the developers’ needs.

Step Functions builds visual state machines that coordinate multiple AWS services and microservices with defined steps, branching logic, built-in retry and error handling, and persisted state so teams can orchestrate complex workflows with minimal custom code.

Amazon SWF can coordinate tasks and workers for background jobs but it is not a visual state machine service and it is an older orchestration option that is less commonly chosen for new visual workflows.

Amazon SNS provides publish and subscribe messaging and fan-out delivery but it does not offer ordered steps, state tracking, or the built-in retry and error handling needed for step-by-step orchestration.

Amazon EventBridge acts as an event bus for routing events to targets and it supports scheduling and filtering but it does not natively provide a visual, step-based state machine for orchestrating sequential workflows.

When a question asks for a visual, stateful workflow with retries choose AWS Step Functions and rule out services that only provide messaging or event routing.

Amazon SNS is correct because it provides push based pub/sub fanout that can deliver urgent messages concurrently to tens of thousands of subscribers across email and mobile app endpoints.

Amazon SNS is a managed pub/sub service that pushes messages to multiple protocols at once and it supports both mobile push and email endpoints. It is designed for high throughput broadcast notifications and can fan out a single message to very large audiences quickly.

Amazon SQS is incorrect because it uses a pull model where consumers poll the queue and it does not push messages to subscribers for immediate broadcast.

Amazon EventBridge is incorrect because it routes events between services and SaaS partners and it does not directly deliver notifications to end user email or mobile app endpoints.

Amazon Pinpoint is incorrect because it focuses on targeted campaigns, segmentation, and user journeys and it is not intended as a generic pub/sub fanout service for urgent broadcast alerts.

Match the delivery model to the use case and remember that SNS is for immediate push fanout while SQS is pull based. Use EventBridge for service level event routing and use Pinpoint for campaign style engagement.

Programmatically calling AWS using the CLI, SDKs, or direct API requests is correct because IAM access keys are meant to authenticate nonconsole requests so scripts, applications, and continuous integration jobs can sign API calls without a web browser.

IAM access keys consist of an access key ID and a secret access key and they are used by the AWS CLI, SDKs, and custom code to cryptographically sign requests. These keys are intended for programmatic use and they should be stored securely rotated regularly and replaced by temporary credentials such as IAM roles or STS when possible.

Signing in to the AWS Management Console is incorrect because interactive console sign in uses a username and password or federation through single sign on and it does not use access keys for web based authentication.

Validating the integrity of AWS CloudTrail log files is incorrect because CloudTrail integrity validation uses digest files and cryptographic verification methods and that process does not rely on IAM access keys.

AWS Certificate Manager is incorrect because ACM issues and manages TLS certificates for securing network traffic and it is unrelated to IAM access keys which are used to authenticate API requests.

Remember that IAM access keys are for programmatic access with the CLI SDKs and APIs and that interactive console sign in uses a password or federation while TLS relies on certificates.

The correct option is AWS Business Support plan. The AWS Business Support plan is the lowest cost AWS Support tier that includes 24×7 access to technical support engineers by phone, chat, and email.

AWS Business Support plan is built for production workloads and provides round the clock phone access to Cloud Support Engineers along with guidance and best practices. This combination of continuous phone access and lower price makes it the correct choice when the question asks for the lowest cost plan that offers 24×7 phone support.

AWS Developer Support is incorrect because it does not provide 24×7 phone support. It is aimed at early development and is primarily limited to email and business hours guidance.

AWS Enterprise On-Ramp is incorrect because although it includes 24×7 phone support it is positioned at a higher cost than the Business tier and therefore does not meet the requirement for the lowest cost option.

AWS Enterprise Support is incorrect because it also offers 24×7 phone access but it is the most comprehensive and expensive tier and not the lowest cost choice.

When the exam asks for the lowest cost plan that provides 24×7 phone support remember to choose Business because Developer lacks phone coverage around the clock and Enterprise tiers cost more.

The correct choice is Memory Optimized instances because they provide the large RAM capacity and high memory bandwidth needed when session state and real time rankings must reside in memory to meet sub millisecond response requirements.

Memory Optimized instances are built for in memory caches and databases and they deliver the high memory footprint and bandwidth required to keep the working set in RAM for ultra low latency access. Select an instance size in the family that balances vCPU and network performance for your concurrency and consider instances with enhanced networking for consistent latency.

Compute Optimized instances focus on vCPU performance for compute bound workloads and they do not prioritize large memory capacity so they are not ideal for an in memory session store.

Accelerated Computing instances provide GPUs or FPGAs for specialized acceleration such as machine learning or graphics tasks and they are not intended for general purpose in memory caching needs.

Storage Optimized instances are tuned for high throughput and low latency access to local storage and they optimize disk I O rather than offering the large RAM footprint required to keep session state fully in memory.

Map the primary resource bottleneck to the instance family and choose memory optimized when the dataset must stay in RAM for the lowest latency.