3 AWS certification questions and answers

Answers to real-world scenarios for AWS Solutions Architect, covering RDS disk scaling, mobile app performance, and EIP costs.

In my role as the DevOps Practice Lead at my workplace in the UK, I’ve been trying to think of challenges for the Cloud engineering team that are a little different from those we see in our normal day-to-day work situation. An aim to keep sharp with our skills and technical thinking, and keeping abreast of the ever changing Cloud services platforms.

The team already did a great job at pulling together a bank of Google Cloud Platform questions to help them with the GCP Associate Cloud Engineer exam. And that got me thinking about the same for Amazon Web Services.

Couple that with being on lock-down — and so we have this article; I’m going to find sample questions and attempt to answer them.

Every week, I’ll post an article with another set of questions. And I’ll use these back at work to discuss with the team.

I’ve chosen a sample of 3 x recent real-world requests for help and sample questions posted on the Facebook groups “AWS Cloud” and “Amazon Web Services (AWS)”.

Disclaimer; I am not advocating that my answers are the correct ones — indeed, I’ve chosen two examples where the online responses were mixed.

I will explain my thinking and how I came to the answer I did. I welcome all feedback in the comments.

Scenario 1. An application uses an Amazon RDS MySQL cluster for the database layer. Database growth requires periodic resizing of the instance. Currently, administrators check the available disk space manually once a week.

How can this process be improved?

A. Use the largest instance type for the database.

B. Use AWS CloudTrail to monitor storage capacity.

C. Use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor storage capacity.

D. Use Auto Scaling to increase storage size.