AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional Practice Test
The SAP-C02 practice page addresses advanced AWS architecture decisions for distributed applications and systems. Its scenarios involve matching data access patterns to storage services, designing resilient traffic flows, controlling external access, and balancing retrieval needs against storage cost. The focus is on applying architectural judgment to workloads that span services and, where needed, multiple AWS Regions.
Exam overview
About the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional Exam
Solutions architects translate business and operational constraints into designs for secure, resilient, and cost-aware AWS workloads. This involves comparing service capabilities, identifying failure boundaries, and assessing how choices affect availability, performance, scaling, access control, and ongoing operations. Practical decisions can include selecting a database for consistency and key-based access, choosing S3 storage tiers for retrieval and retention needs, routing traffic to healthy regional endpoints, and granting time-limited access without persistent IAM users. Architecture work also includes designing data sharing across accounts and planning log delivery and retention. The practice bank’s examples use these kinds of scenarios to exercise trade-off analysis rather than service-name recall alone; they are practice material, not a statement of official exam domains.
Sample Practice Questions
Review a selection from this exam's published US Practice Tests practice bank.
An application writes transaction records that must be strongly consistent and support efficient key-based access at very high scale. Which database service is the best match?
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Correct answer: BAmazon DynamoDB is a managed NoSQL database optimized for high-scale key-value and document access patterns, with strong consistency options. Aurora is relational, ElastiCache is an in-memory cache, and Redshift is an analytics warehouse.
A company needs to reduce the cost of storing infrequently accessed backups in Amazon S3 while preserving immediate retrieval when needed. Which storage class is the best default fit?
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Correct answer: DS3 Intelligent-Tiering is a good general-purpose choice when access patterns are uncertain or change over time. It automatically moves objects between access tiers, helping reduce cost while keeping immediate access available.
A workload is currently served by an Application Load Balancer in front of EC2 Auto Scaling. The team wants a managed way to add event-driven, lightweight URL path rewrites and header manipulation before traffic reaches the service. Which service best fits this requirement?
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Correct answer: BCloudFront Functions are designed for very lightweight edge logic such as header inspection or modification and simple URL rewrites at the CDN edge. They are a better fit than Lambda, API Gateway, or WAF for this specific use case.
A team wants centralized logging for an application where log events are streamed continuously and then delivered to Amazon S3 with little operational overhead. Which service is the best match?
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Correct answer: AAmazon Kinesis Data Firehose is designed to ingest streaming data and deliver it to destinations like S3 with minimal management. Amazon MQ is a managed message broker, Step Functions orchestrates workflows, and EventBridge routes events but does not natively focus on managed streaming delivery to S3.
A company wants to share a large Amazon S3 dataset with a partner company. The partner should be able to read only that dataset, without creating IAM users in the producer account. What is the simplest standard approach?
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Correct answer: AAn S3 bucket policy can grant cross-account access directly to another AWS account, including read access to a specific bucket or prefix. This avoids creating IAM users in the producer account and is a common least-privilege sharing pattern.
A company needs to store archival data that will be accessed at most a few times per year, but when it is needed it should be retrievable within minutes. Which Amazon S3 storage class is the best fit?
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Correct answer: CS3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval is designed for archival data with infrequent access and retrieval times measured in minutes to hours, depending on the retrieval option. It is a better archival fit than standard or infrequent-access classes for rarely used data.
A company needs to give an external consultant temporary, limited console access to an AWS account for one week. The consultant should not have a long-term IAM user, and access should be easy to revoke afterward. What is the best approach?
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Correct answer: BFederation or AWS IAM Identity Center is the standard way to provide temporary human access without creating a long-term IAM user. It is easier to revoke and aligns with least privilege and short-lived credentials.
How to use this practice test
Access is free. A session presents up to 20 random questions from the 50 published practice questions, covering AWS architecture scenarios such as storage, data access, traffic routing, and account access. Results appear after the session, so use them to identify which service-selection decisions or trade-offs need another pass.
Preparation tips
- For each database scenario, write down the consistency model and access pattern first, then compare candidate services against both requirements.
- Map S3 retrieval urgency and access frequency to storage choices; distinguish immediate retrieval from archival retrieval within minutes and long-term retention.
- Sketch regional traffic flows and failure points, then assess how health-based routing can direct users to a healthy regional endpoint.
- Practice least-privilege designs for consultants and partner data access, including temporary credentials, revocation, and cross-account sharing.
- For log pipelines, trace event ingestion through delivery to S3 and compare operational burden, latency, and retention needs.