A company has used infrastructure as code (IaC) to provision a set of two Amazon EC2 instances. The instances have remained the same for several years.
The company's business has grown rapidly in the past few months. In response the company's operations team has implemented an Auto Scaling group to manage the sudden increases in traffic. Company policy requires a monthly installation of security updates on all operating systems that are running.
The most recent security update required a reboot. As a result, the Auto Scaling group terminated the instances and replaced them with new, unpatched instances.
Which combination of steps should a solutions architect recommend to avoid a recurrence of this issue? (Choose two.)
A company uses a load balancer to distribute traffic to Amazon EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone. The company is concerned about security and wants a solutions architect to re-architect the solution to meet the following requirements:
*Inbound requests must be filtered for common vulnerability attacks.
*Rejected requests must be sent to a third-party auditing application.
*All resources should be highly available.
Which solution meets these requirements?
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/marketplace-managed-rule-groups.html
A company has Linux-based Amazon EC2 instances. Users must access the instances by using SSH with EC2 SSH Key pairs. Each machine requires a unique EC2 Key pair.
The company wants to implement a key rotation policy that will, upon request, automatically rotate all the EC2 key pairs and keep the key in a securely encrypted place. The company will accept less than 1 minute of downtime during key rotation.
Which solution will meet these requirement?
To meet the requirements for automatic key rotation of EC2 SSH key pairs with minimal downtime, storing the keys in AWS Secrets Manager and defining a rotation schedule is the most suitable solution. AWS Secrets Manager supports automatic rotation of secrets, including SSH keys, by invoking a Lambda function that can handle the creation of new key pairs and the replacement of public keys on EC2 instances. Updating the corresponding private keys in Secrets Manager ensures secure and centralized management of SSH keys, complying with the key rotation policy and minimizing operational overhead.
AWS Secrets Manager Documentation: Describes how to store and rotate secrets, including SSH keys, using Secrets Manager and Lambda functions.
AWS Lambda Documentation: Provides information on creating Lambda functions for custom secret rotation logic.
AWS Best Practices for Security: Highlights the importance of key rotation and how AWS services like Secrets Manager can facilitate secure and automated key management.
A solutions architect is reviewing an application's resilience before launch. The application runs on an Amazon EC2 instance that is deployed in a private subnet of a VPC.
The EC2 instance is provisioned by an Auto Scaling group that has a minimum capacity of I and a maximum capacity of I. The application stores data on an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. The VPC has subnets configured in three Availability Zones and is configured with a single NAT gateway.
The solutions architect needs to recommend a solution to ensure that the application will operate across multiple Availability Zones.
Which solution will meet this requirement?
The goal is to ensure the application operates across multiple Availability Zones. That means removing single points of failure in compute, database, and network egress for private subnets.
For compute, the Auto Scaling group currently has min=1 and max=1, which guarantees only one instance is running at a time. Even if the Auto Scaling group spans multiple subnets, a single-instance configuration cannot provide multi-AZ active capacity because a failure of the Availability Zone hosting the single instance would cause downtime until a new instance is launched in a different zone. To operate across multiple Availability Zones, the solution should run multiple instances across different AZs, which implies increasing the minimum capacity above 1 and allowing the group to launch across multiple subnets/AZs.
For the database, a single-AZ RDS for MySQL instance is a single point of failure. Converting to an RDS Multi-AZ configuration provides synchronous replication to a standby in a different Availability Zone and managed failover to maintain availability when the primary AZ or instance fails.
For NAT, a single NAT gateway is an AZ-scoped managed resource. If private subnets in other AZs route to a NAT gateway in one AZ, an AZ outage can break outbound connectivity for workloads that depend on NAT. The resilient pattern is to deploy a NAT gateway in each Availability Zone and configure each private subnet's route table to use the NAT gateway in the same AZ.
Option A addresses all three: it deploys additional NAT gateways per AZ and updates route tables accordingly, converts RDS to Multi-AZ, and adjusts Auto Scaling to launch across AZs with min and max set to 3 so there are instances running in multiple AZs simultaneously. This ensures the application remains available across AZ failures, meeting the requirement.
Option B replaces NAT with a virtual private gateway, which is used for VPN/Direct Connect connectivity, not for internet egress from private subnets. It does not satisfy the NAT functionality requirement. Although Aurora can provide high availability, the NAT replacement is not correct for the described architecture.
Option C increases operational overhead by replacing NAT gateway with NAT instances, which are self-managed and less resilient without additional design. It also changes the database engine to PostgreSQL unnecessarily and does not directly address the requirement with minimal change.
Option D improves NAT resiliency but only enables RDS automatic backups, which is a durability feature, not a high availability feature. Backups do not provide automatic failover and do not ensure the application will operate across multiple AZs. Also, keeping Auto Scaling min/max at 1 still leaves the application compute layer single-AZ at any given moment.
Therefore, option A is the correct solution.
A company has built a high performance computing (HPC) cluster in AWS tor a tightly coupled workload that generates a large number of shared files stored in Amazon EFS. The cluster was performing well when the number of Amazon EC2 instances in the cluster was 100. However, when the company increased the cluster size to 1,000 EC2 instances, overall performance was well below expectations.
Which collection of design choices should a solutions architect make to achieve the maximum performance from the HPC cluster? (Select THREE.)
A . High performance computing (HPC) workload cluster should be in a single AZ.
C . Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) is a network device that you can attach to your Amazon EC2 instances to accelerate High Performance Computing (HPC)
F . Amazon FSx for Lustre - Use it for workloads where speed matters, such as machine learning, high performance computing (HPC), video processing, and financial modeling.
Cluster -- packs instances close together inside an Availability Zone. This strategy enables workloads to achieve the low-latency network performance necessary for tightly-coupled node-to-node communication that is typical of HPC applications.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/placement-groups.html
Charles King
6 days ago