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Cluster Configuration

5 minutes 5 Questions

Amazon ElastiCache allows configuration of groups of cache nodes called clusters. Each cluster can have one or multiple shard(s) with replication depending on the selected engine (either Redis or Memcached) for safe and efficient scaling. Clusters use one or more cache node types to determine the a…

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AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Cluster Configuration Example Questions

Test your knowledge of Cluster Configuration

Question 1

You run a multimedia data processing cluster on AWS that uses EC2 Spot Instances to lower costs. Management wants to reduce the risk and impact of Spot interruptions while continuing to rely primarily on Spot capacity. Which approach is the best AWS-recommended way to achieve this?

Correct Answer: Use Spot Fleet with different instance types and diversify across multiple availability zones.

Diversifying Spot capacity across multiple instance types and Availability Zones using Spot Fleet (or EC2 Auto Scaling with a mixed instances policy) reduces the chance that any single capacity pool interruption will impact the entire cluster. This is an AWS best practice for minimizing Spot interruptions; when combined with a capacity-optimized allocation strategy and Capacity Rebalancing, it substantially lowers interruption frequency and impact while preserving Spot cost savings. Termination protection is not supported for Spot Instances, replacing terminated instances with On-Demand or migrating entirely to On-Demand both move off Spot and do not meet the requirement to continue using Spot for cost savings.

Question 2

A company runs PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS. The database must provide automatic high availability and failover across Availability Zones (Multi-AZ), and the application needs to offload some read queries to a replica. Which configuration meets these requirements at the lowest cost?

Correct Answer: Multi-AZ with one read replica

RDS Multi-AZ provides automatic high availability using a synchronous standby in a different Availability Zone with automatic failover, which is required to meet the HA requirement. Read replicas are asynchronous and are used to offload read traffic; they do not provide automatic HA by themselves. Among the options, the lowest-cost configuration that satisfies both HA (Multi-AZ) and read offloading (at least one replica) is Multi-AZ with one read replica. Adding three read replicas increases cost without additional HA benefits, and Single-AZ options do not meet the automatic HA requirement.

Question 3

You are designing a cluster configuration for a photo processing application. The application requires low latency access to Amazon S3 for reading/writing objects. Which configuration ensures the lowest latency?

Correct Answer: Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration

Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration uses Amazon CloudFront's globally distributed edge locations to accelerate S3 transfers over the public internet. It automatically routes traffic to the best performing AWS edge location, minimizing latency.

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