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🇺🇸 AWS Certified Solutions Architect · flashcards
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Application Integration and Modern Architectures Flashcards
52 question-and-answer cards covering Application Integration and Modern Architectures as it is examined in AWS Certified Solutions Architect. 24 of them are printed below, taken from across the deck — no signup, no paywall on the preview.
24 sample cards from the Application Integration and Modern Architectures deck
Sampled from the end of the deck, so these are different cards from the ones shown on the syllabus page.
What is the difference between API Gateway REST APIs and HTTP APIs?
REST APIs offer more features (API keys, request/response transformation, WAF, usage plans, caching). HTTP APIs are cheaper and lower latency with a leaner feature set, optimized for proxying to Lambda and HTTP backends.
What types of authorizers can API Gateway use to secure endpoints?
IAM (SigV4), Lambda (custom/token or request authorizers), and Amazon Cognito user pools. HTTP APIs also support JWT authorizers natively.
What is API Gateway throttling and how do usage plans relate to it?
Throttling limits request rate and burst to protect backends, returning 429 when exceeded. Usage plans associate API keys with throttling and quota limits per client, enabling tiered access and monetization.
What is API Gateway caching and what benefit does it provide?
Stage-level response caching stores endpoint responses for a configurable TTL (0–3600s), reducing calls to the backend, lowering latency, and improving scalability for repeated identical requests.
What is the difference between API Gateway edge-optimized and regional endpoints?
Edge-optimized routes requests through CloudFront edge locations for geographically distributed clients. Regional endpoints serve clients in the same region with lower latency and let you manage your own CloudFront distribution if desired.
What is AWS AppSync and which API style does it provide?
AppSync is a managed service for building GraphQL (and Pub/Sub) APIs. It connects to data sources like DynamoDB, Lambda, and RDS, supports real-time subscriptions, and handles offline data sync for mobile and web apps.
Compare Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS.
ECS is AWS's proprietary container orchestrator—simpler, deeply AWS-integrated. EKS is managed Kubernetes—portable, with the rich Kubernetes ecosystem but more operational complexity.
What are the two launch types / capacity options for Amazon ECS?
EC2 launch type (you manage the cluster of EC2 container instances) and AWS Fargate (serverless—AWS provisions compute per task, no instance management).
What is AWS Fargate and what is its main advantage?
Fargate is a serverless compute engine for ECS and EKS that runs containers without you provisioning or managing servers. You specify CPU/memory per task and pay only for those resources, eliminating cluster capacity management.
In ECS, what is the difference between a task definition, a task, and a service?
A task definition is the blueprint (container image, CPU/memory, ports, IAM role). A task is a running instance of that definition. A service maintains a desired number of running tasks and integrates with load balancers and scaling.
What is an ECS task role versus a task execution role?
The task role grants permissions to the application code running inside the container (e.g., to call S3/DynamoDB). The task execution role grants the ECS agent permissions to pull images from ECR and write logs to CloudWatch.
What is Amazon ECR?
Elastic Container Registry is a fully managed Docker/OCI container image registry that stores, encrypts, scans, and serves images with IAM-based access control, integrating natively with ECS, EKS, and Lambda.
What is the AWS Lambda execution model and what triggers invocations?
Lambda runs stateless functions in response to events, automatically provisioning and scaling compute. Triggers include API Gateway, S3, DynamoDB Streams, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Kinesis, and many other services.
What are the current AWS Lambda limits for timeout, memory, and deployment package size?
Maximum timeout is 15 minutes; memory ranges 128 MB–10,240 MB (CPU scales with memory); deployment package is 50 MB zipped/250 MB unzipped, or up to 10 GB via container image. The /tmp space is up to 10 GB.
What is a Lambda cold start and how can you mitigate it?
A cold start is the added latency when Lambda initializes a new execution environment (downloads code, starts runtime, runs init). Mitigate with Provisioned Concurrency (pre-warmed environments), smaller packages, and SnapStart for supported runtimes.
What is the difference between Lambda reserved concurrency and provisioned concurrency?
Reserved concurrency caps the maximum simultaneous executions for a function (guaranteeing/limiting capacity). Provisioned concurrency pre-initializes a set number of execution environments to eliminate cold starts for predictable low-latency response.
How do Lambda synchronous and asynchronous invocations differ in retry behavior?
Synchronous (e.g., API Gateway) returns the result immediately and the caller handles retries. Asynchronous (e.g., S3, SNS) queues the event and Lambda automatically retries twice on failure, optionally sending failures to a DLQ or on-failure destination.
Compare Amazon ElastiCache for Redis and for Memcached.
Redis supports persistence, replication, read replicas, multi-AZ failover, pub/sub, sorting, and complex data types. Memcached is simpler, multi-threaded, and good for a pure, scalable, non-persistent cache with multiple nodes/sharding but no replication or persistence.
Explain the cache-aside (lazy loading) strategy and one drawback.
The application reads from the cache first; on a miss it loads from the database, writes the value to cache, and returns it. Only requested data is cached. Drawback: the first request always misses (cold cache) and data can become stale unless a TTL or invalidation is used.
Explain the write-through caching strategy and one drawback.
Every write updates the cache and the database synchronously, so the cache is always current. Drawback: it adds write latency and the cache may hold rarely read data, increasing memory usage (cache churn).
What is DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) and when is it appropriate?
DAX is a fully managed, in-memory, write-through cache specifically for DynamoDB that delivers microsecond read latency. Use it for read-heavy, eventually-consistent workloads needing faster reads without changing application API calls (it's DynamoDB-API compatible).
What is Amazon CloudFront and what is an edge location's role?
CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) that caches content at edge locations near users to reduce latency. Edge locations serve cached content and forward cache misses to the origin, also providing TLS termination and DDoS protection.
What is an Origin Access Control (OAC) / Origin Access Identity in CloudFront?
It restricts an S3 bucket so content is only accessible through CloudFront, not via direct S3 URLs. OAC is the current recommended mechanism (replacing the legacy OAI), enforcing that users go through the CDN.
What is the difference between CloudFront and AWS Global Accelerator?
CloudFront caches HTTP/S content at edge locations and is ideal for cacheable web content. Global Accelerator does not cache; it uses the AWS global network and Anycast IPs to route any TCP/UDP traffic to the nearest healthy endpoint, improving performance and failover for non-cacheable, dynamic, or gaming/IoT workloads.
What this deck covers
The Application Integration and Modern Architectures deck follows the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Application Integration and Modern Architectures syllabus — 3 chapters and 9 topics — so questions land on material that is genuinely examinable rather than trivia around it. That works out to roughly 17.3 cards per chapter.
Answers are written to be recallable, not just readable — averaging about 226 characters, which is long enough to carry the reasoning and short enough to say out loud.
A deck like this earns its keep on the second and third pass. Read the syllabus first so you know the shape of the subject, then use the cards to find the specific facts that have not stuck.
Application Integration and Modern Architectures flashcards FAQ
How many Application Integration and Modern Architectures flashcards are in this AWS Certified Solutions Architect deck?
52 cards. This page previews 24 of them, sampled evenly across the deck so you can judge the difficulty before installing anything.
Are these AWS Certified Solutions Architect flashcards free?
Yes. The preview here is free to read with no signup, and the full 52-card deck is free inside the Examius app.
What do the Application Integration and Modern Architectures cards cover?
They follow the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Application Integration and Modern Architectures syllabus — 3 chapters and 9 topics — so the questions track what is actually examinable.
How should I use these flashcards?
Read the syllabus first so you know the shape of the subject, then drill the deck. Examius schedules each card with spaced repetition, so cards you keep missing come back sooner and ones you know drift further apart.