AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional (SAP-C02) practice questions

A multinational runs around 200 VPCs spread across 40 AWS accounts under a single organisation, and the count grows monthly as new product teams onboard. Every VPC must reach a shared services VPC for DNS and patching, and many must also reach each other, with full transitive routing and central control of which routes propagate where. The networking team wants to avoid managing an ever-expanding mesh of point-to-point links. Which design MOST scalably meets these requirements?

• ADeploy an AWS Transit Gateway shared through AWS Resource Access Manager, attach every VPC to it, and use Transit Gateway route tables to control which attachments can route to the shared services VPC and to each other.check_circle Correct
• BCreate a full mesh of VPC peering connections between every pair of VPCs and add the shared services VPC as another peer, relying on the peering links for any VPC to reach any other VPC directly.
• CExpose the shared services through AWS PrivateLink endpoint services and create interface endpoints in every VPC, then add PrivateLink endpoints between product VPCs wherever two teams need to reach each other.
• DDesignate one central VPC as a transit hub, run software routers on EC2 instances inside it, and peer every other VPC to that hub so traffic is forwarded between VPCs through the EC2 routing layer.

Why A is correct: A Transit Gateway is a hub that provides transitive routing for all attached VPCs and accounts, scales to thousands of attachments, and its route tables centrally govern which VPCs reach the shared services VPC or each other.

Why B is wrong: A peering mesh seems to give any-to-any reachability, but peering is non-transitive and the number of links grows roughly with the square of the VPC count, which becomes unmanageable well before 200 VPCs.

Why C is wrong: PrivateLink cleanly publishes the shared services, but it exposes single services rather than whole VPCs, so building any-to-any product connectivity from endpoints does not provide the general transitive routing the estate needs.

Why D is wrong: EC2 software routers can forward traffic to work around non-transitive peering, but they add instances to patch, scale and make highly available, duplicating a managed capability Transit Gateway already provides.

A financial services company defines its production environment with a single large AWS CloudFormation stack that includes an Amazon RDS database, security groups, and an Auto Scaling group. A release engineer must apply a template change that updates the database instance class and an IAM role, but a previous release caused an unexpected replacement of the database and a long outage. Leadership now requires that before any production update is executed, the team must see exactly which resources will be modified, replaced, or deleted, and obtain a sign-off, without applying anything. Which approach BEST gives the team that pre-execution visibility?

• ACreate a CloudFormation change set from the revised template, review the action and replacement column for each resource to confirm whether the database is modified or replaced, gain sign-off, and only then execute the change set.check_circle Correct
• BRun the stack update directly with rollback triggers configured on CloudWatch alarms, so that if the database is replaced and the alarm fires the stack automatically rolls back to the prior state before users are affected.
• CEnable termination protection on the stack and turn on drift detection before the release, then run the update and rely on the drift report to highlight any resource that the change unexpectedly replaced or deleted during deployment.
• DValidate the template with the CloudFormation linter and the validate-template action in the pipeline, capture the output for the approvers, and proceed with the update once the template is confirmed to be syntactically valid.

Why A is correct: A change set computes the difference between the running stack and the proposed template and lists every resource with its action and whether a replacement is required, so the team can confirm the database will not be replaced and obtain sign-off before executing anything.

Why B is wrong: Rollback triggers act only after the update has already started executing and a resource may have been replaced, so the change is applied first rather than previewed, which fails the requirement to see the impact before anything runs.

Why C is wrong: Termination protection only blocks stack deletion and drift detection compares deployed resources to the template after the fact, so neither previews the pending update or shows planned replacements before execution.

Why D is wrong: Template validation checks only syntax and structure and never compares against the deployed stack, so it cannot reveal that the instance-class change would force a replacement of the live database.

A manufacturer running an AWS Migration Hub portfolio assessment must label two workloads with one of the seven common migration strategies before wave planning begins. The first is a self-managed Microsoft SQL Server estate the team is willing to retire in favour of a managed engine, accepting a database engine swap but no application rewrite, to cut patching and backup overhead. The second is a VMware-based line-of-business application the business will not let the team change at all and which must move within an eight-week lease deadline that rules out re-imaging each host. Which TWO strategy classifications correctly pair with these two workloads? Select TWO.

• AThe SQL Server estate is a refactor, because re-architecting it into a serverless event-driven design on AWS is the only way to remove the patching and backup burden that the team has identified as the problem.
• BThe SQL Server estate is a replatform, because moving it onto Amazon RDS for SQL Server keeps the application unchanged while offloading patching, backups and failover to the managed service through a targeted change.check_circle Correct
• CThe SQL Server estate is a rehost, because lifting the database servers to Amazon EC2 unchanged is the lowest-effort move and still lets the team stop managing on-premises hardware after the migration.
• DThe VMware application is a relocate, because moving the virtual machines to VMware Cloud on AWS lifts them as-is with no operating system or application change and the fastest path to meet the eight-week deadline.check_circle Correct
• EThe VMware application is a retire, because workloads bound by a hard lease deadline are decommissioned to avoid migration effort and the business case treats them as end-of-life candidates by default.

Why A is wrong: Refactor means re-architecting the application and is far heavier than needed, since a managed RDS engine already removes patching and backup overhead without rewriting the application.

Why B is correct: Replatform (the lift-and-tinker strategy) is exactly an engine move to a managed RDS service without rewriting the application, which matches the willingness to swap the database while reducing operational overhead.

Why C is wrong: Rehost lifts servers to EC2 with no engine change, so it leaves the team still patching and backing up SQL Server itself, which contradicts the stated goal of offloading that overhead to a managed engine.

Why D is correct: Relocate moves VMware workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS without changing the guest operating system or application, which fits the no-change mandate and the short deadline that rules out re-imaging hosts.

Why E is wrong: Retire applies only to applications no longer needed, but this line-of-business application is still required, so a deadline alone never justifies decommissioning a workload the business depends on.