AWS Exam Questions & Answers 2026 (11–20)

✓ Correct answer: C. AWS CloudHSM

The AWS CloudHSM service helps you meet corporate, contractual, and regulatory compliance requirements for data security by using dedicated Hardware Security Module (HSM) instances within the AWS cloud. AWS CloudHSM enables you to easily generate and use your own encryption keys on the AWS Cloud.<br/><br/><strong>CORRECT: </strong>"AWS CloudHSM" is the correct answer.<br/><br/><strong>INCORRECT:</strong> "AWS Secrets Manager" is incorrect. AWS Secrets Manager enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle.<br/><br/><strong>INCORRECT:</strong> "AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)" is incorrect. This service is also involved with creating and managing encryption keys but does not use dedicated hardware.<br/><br/><strong>INCORRECT:</strong> "AWS Directory Service" is incorrect. AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, enables your directory-aware workloads and AWS resources to use managed Active Directory in the AWS Cloud.

✓ Correct answer: D. A user is a permanent identity that can access AWS services, while a role is a temporary identity that can be assumed by a user or AWS service.

An AWS IAM user is an identity that represents a person or application to interacts with AWS services. Users have their own set of security credentials (access keys and secret access keys) and can be assigned permissions directly to access AWS resources.<br/><br/>On the other hand, An IAM role is an identity within your AWS account that has specific permissions. It is similar to an IAM user but is not associated with a specific person. Roles can be temporary and have a set of policies that determine what actions are allowed or denied. IAM role should be used when a service makes a request to AWS service.<br/><br/>Incorrect Options:<br/><br/><strong>A user is a person or application that uses AWS services, while a role is a set of permissions that determines what an AWS service can do.</strong><br/><br/><strong>A user is a set of permissions that determines what an AWS service can do, while a role is a person or application that uses AWS services.</strong><br/><br/><strong>A user is a group of permissions that determines what an AWS service can do, while a role is a set of users that can access AWS services.</strong><br/><br/>All of the above options are incorrect.<br/><br/>References:<br/><br/><a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id.html">https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id.html</a>

✓ Correct answer: C. By minimizing large capital expenditures

AWS reduces Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by removing the need for large capital expenditures and allowing you to invest in the capacity you need (pay-as-you-go model) and use it only when the business requires it.

✓ Correct answer: D. Developer

Developer provides email support by the Cloud Support Associates team whereas Business and Enterprise provide email, 24×7 phone and chat access to Cloud Support Engineers. Basic does not provide email support at all.<br/><br/><img src="asset:assets/questions/e44b7e4f227a4ae1.jpg"><br/><br/><strong>CORRECT: </strong>"Developer" is the correct answer.<br/><br/><strong>INCORRECT:</strong> "Basic" is incorrect as explained above.<br/><br/><strong>INCORRECT:</strong> "Business" is incorrect as explained above.<br/><br/><strong>INCORRECT:</strong> "Enterprise" is incorrect as explained above.

✓ Correct answer: C. AWS Pricing Calculator.

AWS Pricing Calculator is a web-based planning tool that you can use to create estimates for your AWS use cases. You can use it to model your solutions before building them, explore the AWS service price points, and review the calculations behind your estimates. You can use it to help you plan how you spend, find cost saving opportunities, and make informed decisions when using Amazon Web Services.<br/><br/><strong>CORRECT: </strong>"AWS Pricing Calculator" is the correct answer (as explained above.)<br/><br/><strong>INCORRECT:</strong> "Cost Explorer" is incorrect. AWS Cost Explorer is a way to visualize your current spend across your accounts, and to forecast future spend. It does not help create estimates of how much money you would spend through building on the AWS platform.<br/><br/><strong>INCORRECT:</strong> "AWS Billing and Cost Management dashboard" is incorrect, as you cannot calculate estimates for Cloud based workloads within the console.<br/><br/><strong>INCORRECT:</strong> "AWS Cost and Usage Report" is incorrect. The AWS Cost and Usage Reports (AWS CUR) contains the most comprehensive set of cost and usage data available. You can use Cost and Usage Reports to publish your AWS billing reports to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket that you own and doesn’t show costs for new workloads.

✓ Correct answer: D. The company can leverage a pricing model based on usage, which reduces costs during periods of decreased demand for data processing.

The correct answer reflects the pay-as-you-go pricing model of AWS, which aligns with variable workloads by providing a method to match cost with actual consumption. Unlike the fixed costs associated with on-premises infrastructure, where resources may be underutilized during periods of low demand, AWS allows the financial institution to scale their resources down and reduce costs. Traditional licensing often involves up-front costs and lacks the flexibility provided by AWS's consumption-based pricing. Meanwhile, reusable templates primarily aid in standardizing and automating deployment, but do not directly affect cost variability and management the way on-demand pricing does.

✓ Correct answer: C. Cost Explorer

Budgeting and planning for your AWS expenses can be made easier with Cost Explorer.

✓ Correct answer: B. Replace an EC2 compute instance with AWS Lambda

Where possible, you should replace EC2 workloads with AWS managed services that don’t require you to take any capacity decisions. AWS Lambda is a serverless services and you only pay for actual processing time. Other examples of services that you don’t need to make capacity decisions with include: ELB, CloudFront, SQS, Kinesis Firehose, SES, and CloudSearch.<br/><br/><strong>CORRECT: </strong>"Replace an EC2 compute instance with AWS Lambda" is the correct answer.<br/><br/><strong>INCORRECT:</strong> "Choosing the fastest EC2 instance to ensure performance" is incorrect. You should not choose the fastest EC2 instance if you’re trying to optimize for cost as this will be expensive, you should right-size your EC2 instances, so you use the cheapest EC2 instance to suit your workload’s requirements.<br/><br/><strong>INCORRECT:</strong> "Provision extra capacity to allow for growth" is incorrect. Provisioning extra capacity for growth is not an example of cost optimization. With cloud computing you no longer need to do this as you can configure applications, databases and storage systems to grow on demand.<br/><br/><strong>INCORRECT:</strong> "Deploy resources with AWS CloudFormation" is incorrect. Deploying resources with CloudFormation is great for consistently deploying application configurations from a template. However, this is not an example of cost optimization, it is more an example of operational optimization.

✓ Correct answer: C. Reserved instances

EC2 Reserved Instances offer significant discounts for a contracted term-of-service, of up to 75% off. On-Demand instances are charged equally per-hour, regardless of how long they’re run for. Spot instances are cheaper than On-Demand instances, but aren’t intended for long term use.

✓ Correct answer: D. No servers to manage

With AWS Lambda you don’t have any servers to manage (serverless). Lambda functions scale out rather than up running multiple invocations of the function in parallel.<br/><br/><strong>CORRECT: </strong>"No servers to manage" is a correct answer.<br/><br/><strong>CORRECT: </strong>"Continuous scaling (scale out)" is also a correct answer.<br/><br/><strong>INCORRECT:</strong> "Integrated snapshots" is incorrect. You do not have integrated snapshots (or any persistent storage) with Lambda.<br/><br/><strong>INCORRECT:</strong> "Flexible operating system choices" is incorrect. You do not manage the operating system on which the functions run so have no choice of software.<br/><br/><strong>INCORRECT:</strong> "Open source software" is incorrect. Lambda is AWS proprietary not open source.