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🇺🇸 AWS Certified Solutions Architect · flashcards
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Design High-Performing Architectures Flashcards
51 question-and-answer cards covering Design High-Performing 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 Design High-Performing Architectures deck
Sampled from the end of the deck, so these are different cards from the ones shown on the syllabus page.
What is Amazon EFS and when do you use it?
Elastic File System = fully managed, elastic NFS shared file storage accessible by many EC2 instances/Lambda concurrently across AZs; use for shared, scalable POSIX file workloads.
What is Amazon FSx for Lustre used for?
A high-performance parallel file system for HPC, machine learning, and media processing; delivers sub-millisecond latency and hundreds of GB/s throughput, integrable with S3.
How do S3 storage classes affect performance and cost (Standard vs Intelligent-Tiering vs Glacier)?
S3 Standard = high throughput, low latency for frequent access; Intelligent-Tiering auto-moves objects between tiers to save cost; Glacier classes = low-cost archival with retrieval latency from minutes to hours.
What is the current S3 request performance per prefix?
At least 3,500 PUT/COPY/POST/DELETE and 5,500 GET/HEAD requests per second per prefix, scaling horizontally by using more prefixes.
What is S3 Transfer Acceleration?
A feature that speeds long-distance uploads/downloads to S3 by routing data over the CloudFront edge network to the bucket's Region.
How do read replicas improve database performance in Amazon RDS?
They provide read scaling by offloading read-only queries to up to 15 asynchronous replicas, reducing load on the primary instance (replicas can also be cross-Region).
What is the difference between RDS Multi-AZ and read replicas?
Multi-AZ = synchronous standby for high availability/failover (not for reads, except newer Multi-AZ cluster); read replicas = asynchronous copies for read scaling/performance.
What is Amazon RDS Proxy and how does it boost performance?
A managed connection pooler that sits between apps and RDS/Aurora, pooling and reusing DB connections to reduce overhead, improve scalability, and handle failovers faster.
How does Amazon Aurora improve performance over standard RDS engines?
It uses a distributed, log-structured storage layer across 3 AZs (6 copies), auto-scaling up to 128 TiB, offers up to 15 low-latency read replicas, and delivers up to 5x MySQL / 3x PostgreSQL throughput.
What is Amazon ElastiCache and what two engines does it offer?
A managed in-memory caching service to offload databases and reduce latency; engines are Redis (and Valkey) and Memcached.
When choose ElastiCache for Redis vs Memcached?
Redis = persistence, replication, pub/sub, sorted sets, Multi-AZ failover, complex data types; Memcached = simple, multi-threaded, easy horizontal scaling for plain key-value caching.
What are the lazy loading and write-through caching strategies?
Lazy loading = load data into cache only on a cache miss (cache can be stale); write-through = update the cache whenever the database is written (always fresh but extra writes).
What purpose-built database is best for key-value workloads needing single-digit millisecond latency at any scale?
Amazon DynamoDB.
What is DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)?
A fully managed, in-memory write-through cache for DynamoDB that delivers microsecond read latency without application code changes.
Compare DynamoDB on-demand vs provisioned capacity modes.
On-demand = pay-per-request, auto-scales instantly for unpredictable traffic; provisioned = you set RCUs/WCUs (with optional auto scaling) for predictable, cost-efficient workloads.
Which AWS purpose-built database fits time-series data like IoT and operational metrics?
Amazon Timestream.
Which AWS database is purpose-built for highly connected graph data and relationship queries?
Amazon Neptune.
Which AWS database is a managed in-memory database delivering microsecond reads and single-digit-ms durable writes?
Amazon MemoryDB for Redis.
Which AWS service is the purpose-built petabyte-scale data warehouse for analytics (OLAP)?
Amazon Redshift — columnar, massively parallel processing (MPP); Redshift Spectrum queries data directly in S3.
What is Amazon CloudFront and how does it accelerate performance?
A global CDN that caches content at edge locations close to users, reducing latency and origin load; supports static and dynamic content, and runs Lambda@Edge/CloudFront Functions.
What is AWS Global Accelerator and how does it differ from CloudFront?
It uses 2 static anycast IPs and the AWS global network to route TCP/UDP traffic to the nearest healthy regional endpoint; unlike CloudFront it doesn't cache — it optimizes routing for non-HTTP and dynamic traffic.
What is the difference between AWS Direct Connect and a Site-to-Site VPN?
Direct Connect = dedicated private physical link with consistent low latency/high bandwidth; VPN = encrypted tunnel over the public internet, cheaper/faster to set up but with variable performance.
What is VPC Peering vs AWS Transit Gateway for connecting networks?
VPC Peering = one-to-one, non-transitive connection between two VPCs; Transit Gateway = hub-and-spoke that connects thousands of VPCs and on-prem networks at scale with transitive routing.
Which AWS services move large data sets at scale: Snowball, DataSync, and Kinesis Data Streams — what is each for?
Snow Family (Snowball/Snowcone) = physical offline transfer of TB–PB; DataSync = fast online transfer between on-prem and AWS storage; Kinesis Data Streams = real-time streaming ingestion of high-volume event data.
What this deck covers
The Design High-Performing Architectures deck follows the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Design High-Performing 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 17.0 cards per chapter.
Answers are written to be recallable, not just readable — averaging about 147 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.
Design High-Performing Architectures flashcards FAQ
How many Design High-Performing Architectures flashcards are in this AWS Certified Solutions Architect deck?
51 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 51-card deck is free inside the Examius app.
What do the Design High-Performing Architectures cards cover?
They follow the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Design High-Performing 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.