AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional exam questions

1. What is a circular dependency in AWS CloudFormation?

2. You need to run a very large batch data processing job one time per day. The source data exists entirely in S3, and the output of the processing job should also be written to S3 when finished.

If you need to version control this processing job and all setup and teardown logic for the system, what approach should you use?

3. What is true of the way that encryption works with EBS?

4. When thinking of AWS OpsWorks, which of the following is true?

5. 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?

6. 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.

7. 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?

8. What is web identity federation?

9. 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?

10. 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?

11. 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?

12. What is the scope of an EBS snapshot?

13. Your system uses a multi-master, multi-region DynamoDB configuration spanning two regions to achieve high availablity. For the first time since launching your system, one of the AWS Regions in which you operate over went down for 3 hours, and the failover worked correctly. However, after recovery, your users are experiencing strange bugs, in which users on different sides of the globe see different data.

What is a likely design issue that was not accounted for when launching?

14. When thinking of AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which statement is true?

15. Your company needs to automate 3 layers of a large cloud deployment. You want to be able to track this deployment's evolution as it changes over time, and carefully control any alterations.

What is a good way to automate a stack to meet these requirements?

16. Your application's Auto Scaling Group scales up too quickly, too much, and stays scaled when traffic decreases.

What should you do to fix this?

17. You need the absolute highest possible network performance for a cluster computing application. You already selected homogeneous instance types supporting 10 gigabit enhanced networking, made sure that your workload was network bound, and put the instances in a placement group.

What is the last optimization you can make?

18. Your CTO is very worried about the security of your AWS account.

How best can you prevent hackers from completely hijacking your account?

19. If you're trying to configure an AWS Elastic Beanstalk worker tier for easy debugging if there are problems finishing queue jobs, what should you configure?

20. You have a high security requirement for your AWS accounts.

What is the most rapid and sophisticated setup you can use to react to AWS API calls to your account?