ACE-Professional case studies
ACE-Professional · Put your knowledge to work in context.
ACE Professional is a professional-level certification for people who design, build, and operate workloads on a cloud platform. It is aimed at engineers and architects with hands-on experience who want independent validation of their judgment across the full lifecycle: choosing an architecture, deploying compute and application services, managing data, wiring up connectivity, enforcing identity and compliance, and running the estate economically. The exam is multiple choice and is organized into six weighted domains: Cloud Concepts and Architecture, Compute and Application Services, Storage and Data Management, Networking and Connectivity, Security, Identity and Compliance, and Operations, Monitoring, and Cost Management. Questions tend to test trade-offs rather than recall, so expect scenarios where two answers are technically workable and one is clearly better under stated constraints. The ACE-Professional case studies are 5 cases and about 2,409 words.
1The Noisy Neighbor on a Single Instance
A small SaaS team runs a customer-facing API on one large virtual machine in a single cloud region. During a marketing push, one enterprise customer begins sending batched requests that saturate the VM's CPU for minutes at a time.
460 words, about 2 min2The Backup That Was Never Restored
An engineering team stores a production database's nightly snapshots in object storage in the same region and account as the live database. Snapshots have run successfully for 14 months.
494 words, about 2 min3Autoscaling That Scales the Wrong Thing
A web application runs behind a load balancer with an autoscaling group of application servers. Scaling policy is based on average CPU across the group, targeting 60%.
528 words, about 3 min4Least Privilege Meets a Deadline
A team is migrating an application to the cloud under a two-week deadline. To unblock progress, an engineer attaches an administrator-level policy to the application's service identity and says it will be tightened later.
481 words, about 2 min5Multi-Region Ambition on a Single-Region Budget
A company's leadership wants "multi-region active-active" after a regional outage took their product down for six hours. The product is a read-heavy catalog with a smaller transactional component.
446 words, about 2 min