The blueprint
A mock exam here has 65 questions in 90 minutes, split across the domains in the same proportions as the official exam guide. The official pass mark is 700 of 1,000 (scaled). FixOps scores practice against a target of 72%.
-
01
Cloud Concepts
-
02
Security and Compliance
-
03
Cloud Technology and Services
-
04
Billing, Pricing, and Support
Sample questions
Three of the 10 questions in the free diagnostic. Open one to see the answer and why.
A retailer buys servers every three years, sized for its busiest week. Which benefit of the AWS Cloud removes the need for that purchase?
- Benefiting from massive economies of scale
- Going global in minutes
- Increasing speed and agility
- Trading fixed expense for variable expense
Answer: Trading fixed expense for variable expense. Paying only for the capacity actually consumed replaces a large upfront purchase with a variable cost. Economies of scale explain why AWS prices are low, global reach is about deploying in other Regions, and agility is about how quickly resources become available; none of those is the reason the upfront purchase goes away.
A team tests how its workload recovers when an instance is terminated on purpose. Which Well-Architected pillar does this practice belong to?
- Cost optimization
- Performance efficiency
- Reliability
- Sustainability
Answer: Reliability. Testing recovery procedures and recovering automatically from failure are design principles of the reliability pillar. Performance efficiency is about using resources efficiently to meet requirements, cost optimization about avoiding unneeded spend, and sustainability about environmental impact.
Under the AWS shared responsibility model, which task is AWS responsible for?
- Classifying and encrypting customer data
- Configuring security group rules for an application's instances
- Managing IAM users and their permissions
- Physical security of the data centers that run AWS services
Answer: Physical security of the data centers that run AWS services. AWS is responsible for security of the cloud: the facilities, hardware, network and virtualization layer. Security groups, data protection and identity management are security in the cloud, which the customer controls.
Revision notes: Cloud Concepts
The notes for one domain, free to read here and in the app. FixOps Pro has them for all 4 domains.
Why organisations move to AWS, how the Well-Architected Framework judges a design, how migrations are approached, and where the cost advantages of the cloud come from.
Benefits of the cloud
- Capital expense is traded for variable expense: you pay for what you use instead of buying hardware up front.
- Elasticity means capacity follows demand, up and down, so you stop guessing how much to buy.
- Agility: resources are available in minutes, which makes experiments cheap.
- Economies of scale: AWS buys at a volume that lowers the price for everyone.
- Going global in minutes: deploy in several Regions to be close to users.
- High availability comes from spreading a workload over several Availability Zones.
Well-Architected Framework
- Six pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimisation and sustainability.
- Operational excellence is about running and improving systems: automation, small reversible changes, learning from failure.
- Reliability is about recovering from failure and meeting demand: multiple zones, backups, automatic recovery.
- Performance efficiency is about using the right resource types and sizes as needs change.
- Cost optimisation is about paying only for what is needed: right sizing, turning things off, pricing models.
- Sustainability is about reducing the energy a workload uses.
- The AWS Well-Architected Tool reviews a workload against the pillars.
Migration
- The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework organises guidance in six perspectives: business, people, governance, platform, security and operations.
- Migration strategies include rehost (lift and shift), replatform (small optimisations), refactor (re-architect), repurchase (move to SaaS), retain and retire.
- The Snow Family moves large amounts of data physically when the network would take too long.
- AWS Application Migration Service rehosts servers; AWS Database Migration Service moves databases with little downtime.
Cloud economics
- Fixed costs on-premises (data centres, hardware, staff) become variable costs in the cloud.
- Right sizing means choosing the smallest resource that meets the need.
- Managed services reduce operational work, which is part of the total cost of ownership.
- Licensing can be included in the price or brought along (bring your own licence).
Easy to mix up
- Elasticity is scaling with demand automatically; scalability is the ability to grow at all.
- High availability keeps a system running through a failure; fault tolerance does it with no interruption.
- Rehost moves as is; replatform changes a little; refactor redesigns.
- The Well-Architected Framework judges a workload's design; the Cloud Adoption Framework guides the organisation's move.