Unit 6: Serverless and Microservices Architectures - Practice Quiz

1 What does the term serverless computing primarily mean?

2 Which is a common benefit of a serverless architecture?

3 Why should serverless functions generally be designed as stateless?

4 Which architectural style is commonly associated with serverless applications?

5 What is AWS Lambda primarily used for?

6 What is the purpose of a Lambda function handler?

7 Which event can directly trigger an AWS Lambda function?

8 What allows an AWS Lambda function to access other AWS services securely?

9 What is the main purpose of Amazon API Gateway?

10 How can Amazon API Gateway work with AWS Lambda?

11 Which AWS service can help authenticate API Gateway users?

12 Which HTTP method is commonly used to retrieve a resource through an API?

13 Which AWS service is designed to orchestrate Docker-compatible containers?

14 Which AWS service provides managed Kubernetes clusters?

15 What does AWS Fargate allow developers to do?

16 What is a key characteristic of a microservice?

17 Which practice supports the Security pillar in a serverless architecture?

18 Which AWS service is commonly used to monitor Lambda metrics and logs?

19 Which serverless pricing characteristic supports the Cost Optimization pillar?

20 Which practice can improve the reliability of event-driven serverless processing?

21 An image-processing workload receives unpredictable traffic spikes and remains idle for several hours each day. Which architecture best minimizes operational effort and idle cost?

22 A serverless shopping-cart function must preserve cart data across multiple invocations. Where should the application store this state?

23 A synchronous serverless API has strict latency requirements, but users occasionally experience delays when new Lambda execution environments are created. Which change most directly reduces this issue?

24 An order API invokes a payment-processing component. Temporary payment-service failures must not cause orders to be lost, and the API should respond quickly. Which design is most appropriate?

25 A Lambda function must create thumbnails whenever users upload images to a specific Amazon S3 bucket. What is the most direct event configuration?

26 An SQS-triggered Lambda function may receive the same message more than once. The function writes payment records to a database. Which implementation prevents duplicate charges?

27 A Lambda function consumes records rapidly, but its relational database can handle only 50 simultaneous connections. Which configuration best protects the database?

28 A document workflow contains validation, approval, and notification Lambda functions. It needs branching, retries, and execution history. Which AWS service should coordinate the workflow?

29 A company wants to expose a Lambda function as a synchronous HTTPS endpoint that accepts POST requests. Which integration is most appropriate?

30 A mobile application receives JSON Web Tokens from an identity provider. The API must reject invalid tokens before invoking its Lambda backend. Which API Gateway feature should be used?

31 A public REST API is overwhelming its backend during sudden traffic bursts. Which API Gateway configuration most directly limits the request rate reaching the backend?

32 A legacy backend expects a field named customer_id, but API clients send customerId. The backend code cannot be changed. Which API Gateway feature can adapt the request?

33 A team wants to run containerized microservices using Amazon ECS without provisioning or managing EC2 worker instances. Which compute option should it select?

34 An organization has existing Kubernetes manifests and requires Kubernetes APIs for its containerized microservices. Which AWS service is the best fit?

35 Three ECS services must share one public endpoint. Requests to /orders, /users, and /catalog must be sent to different services. Which component should perform this routing?

36 An order microservice must notify an inventory microservice, but inventory updates can occur asynchronously. Which design best reduces tight coupling between the services?

37 Five Lambda functions currently share one IAM role with broad permissions. Which change best follows the security pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework?

38 An asynchronously invoked Lambda function occasionally fails after all configured retries. The application must retain failed events for later investigation and reprocessing. What should be configured?

39 A request passes through API Gateway and several Lambda functions. Operators need to identify where latency occurs across the complete request path. Which approach provides the most useful observability?

40 A Lambda function has been assigned 3,008 MB of memory, but monitoring shows low CPU use and short, simple executions. Which action best supports cost optimization without assuming that the smallest memory setting is ideal?

41 An order service writes an order to DynamoDB and then publishes an OrderCreated event to EventBridge. A process failure between these operations sometimes leaves orders without events. Which design most reliably eliminates this dual-write inconsistency?

42 A workload maintains thousands of long-lived bidirectional connections, performs steady CPU-intensive processing continuously, and has highly predictable 24-hour utilization. Which architecture is the strongest default choice?

43 A multi-tenant event processor has one high-volume tenant that can exhaust concurrency and delay events for premium tenants. Which redesign provides the strongest workload-level bulkhead isolation?

44 One domain event must be consumed independently by billing, analytics, and notification services. A failure or slowdown in analytics must not delay the other consumers. Which topology best satisfies this requirement?

45 A Lambda event source mapping reads SQS messages in batches of 10. If one message fails, nine successful messages are repeatedly processed with the retried batch. Which change minimizes redundant work without assuming exactly-once delivery?

46 A Lambda function consumes a Kinesis shard in order. One malformed record repeatedly fails its batch and prevents later records in the shard from being processed. Which configuration best limits the blockage while preserving recovery evidence?

47 An AWS account has a Lambda regional concurrency quota of 1,000. Function A is assigned reserved concurrency of 400 but currently uses only 100. Function B has no reserved concurrency. Ignoring burst-rate limits and other functions, what is Function B's maximum concurrency?

48 A team needs to shift 10% of production traffic to a new Lambda release and automatically return all traffic to the previous release when a CloudWatch alarm enters ALARM. Which deployment mechanism is most appropriate?

49 An API Gateway REST API caches GET /profile, whose response depends on the authenticated user. The method path and query string are identical for all users. Which configuration prevents one user's cached profile from being returned to another user while retaining caching?

50 An API operation starts a report that can require several minutes. Clients currently keep an API Gateway request open until a Lambda workflow finishes, causing integration timeouts and retries. Which API design is most resilient?

51 A Lambda proxy integration completes successfully but returns { "result": "ok" } directly. API Gateway responds to the client with 502 Bad Gateway. What is the most likely correction?

52 An HTTP API exposes routes to OAuth 2.0 clients. Only tokens with the orders.write scope may call POST /orders, and the Lambda function must not be directly invocable by unrelated AWS resources. Which design best meets both requirements?

53 ECS tasks on Fargate run in private subnets without public IP addresses. They must pull private ECR images and send logs to CloudWatch Logs without using a NAT gateway. Which endpoint set is required for this path?

54 An ECS Fargate task has an application container reserving 512 CPU units and 1,024 MiB, plus a sidecar reserving 256 CPU units and 512 MiB. What is the smallest listed valid task size that can satisfy the combined reservations?

55 An ECS worker service processes an SQS queue. Message arrival rates vary sharply, and processing time per message is approximately stable. CPU utilization remains low even when the queue is growing. Which scaling signal best reflects required capacity?

56 An ECS service uses Fargate and awsvpc networking with an Application Load Balancer. Tasks receive dynamically allocated private IP addresses. Which target group configuration is required?

57 Critical and best-effort Lambda workloads share an account. During traffic spikes, best-effort invocations consume all unreserved concurrency and throttle the critical function. Which Lambda control most directly creates a concurrency bulkhead?

58 A Lambda function uses 1 GiB and averages 900 ms per invocation. Testing shows that 2 GiB reduces average duration to 430 ms with the same request count and result. Ignoring free tier and architecture-specific price differences, which configuration has lower duration-based compute usage?

59 A Lambda function needs a rotating database password. The password is currently stored in an encrypted environment variable, but rotations still require function configuration updates. Which design best follows the security pillar?

60 A request travels through API Gateway, Lambda, SQS, another Lambda function, and an ECS service. Operators cannot connect failures in the final service to the initiating request. Which observability design best addresses this gap?