The AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01) exam is designed for individuals who perform complex networking tasks and have at least five years of hands-on experience in network architecture, design, and implementation. This exam validates advanced technical skills and experience in designing and implementing AWS and hybrid IT network architectures at scale.
The ANS-C01 exam consists of 65 multiple-choice and multiple-answer questions and must be completed within 170 minutes. The exam is available in English, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese and can be taken at a testing center or via online proctoring. The cost of the exam is $300.
The exam covers a variety of topics, including designing and implementing hybrid IT network architectures, advanced networking concepts and technologies, automation, and security. It also covers AWS-specific topics, such as AWS networking services, AWS Direct Connect, and Amazon VPC.
To prepare for the exam, candidates should have a strong understanding of networking concepts and technologies, as well as experience working with AWS networking services. AWS recommends that candidates have achieved the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate or AWS Certified Developer – Associate certification before taking the ANS-C01 exam.
Candidates can also take advantage of AWS training courses, practice exams, and other resources to prepare for the exam. Upon passing the ANS-C01 exam, candidates will earn the AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty certification.
Introduction
The AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01) exam is intended for individuals who perform an AWS networking specialist’s role. The exam validates a candidate’s ability to design, implement, manage, and secure AWS and hybrid network architectures at scale.
The exam is for individuals who perform complex networking tasks, and validates an individual’s ability to perform the following tasks:
• Design and develop hybrid and cloud-based networking solutions by using AWS
• Implement core AWS networking services according to AWS best practices
• Operate and maintain hybrid and cloud-based network architecture for all AWS services
• Use tools to deploy and automate hybrid and cloud-based AWS networking tasks
• Implement secure AWS networks using AWS native networking constructs and services
Target candidate description
The target candidate possesses the knowledge, skills, experience, and competence to design, implement, and operate complex AWS and hybrid networking architectures. The target candidate is expected to have 5 or more years of networking experience with 2 or more years of cloud and hybrid networking experience.
Recommended AWS knowledge
The target candidate should have the following knowledge:
• AWS networking nuances and how they relate to the integration of AWS services
• AWS security best practices
• AWS compute and storage options and their underlying consistency models
To view a detailed list of specific tools and technologies that might be covered on the exam, as well as lists of in-scope and out-of-scope AWS services, refer to the Appendix.
Exam content
Response types
There are two types of questions on the exam:
• Multiple choice: Has one correct response and three incorrect responses (distractors)
• Multiple response: Has two or more correct responses out of five or more response options
Select one or more responses that best complete the statement or answer the question. Distractors, or incorrect answers, are response options that a candidate with incomplete knowledge or skill might choose. Distractors are generally plausible
responses that match the content area.
Unanswered questions are scored as incorrect; there is no penalty for guessing. The exam includes 50 questions that will affect your score.
Unscored content
The exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score. AWS collects information about candidate performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored questions. These unscored questions are not identified on the exam.
Exam results
The AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01) exam is a pass or fail exam. The exam is scored against a minimum standard established by AWS professionals who follow certification industry best practices and guidelines.
Your results for the exam are reported as a scaled score of 100–1,000. The minimum passing score is 750. Your score shows how you performed on the exam as a whole and whether or not you passed. Scaled scoring models help equate scores across multiple exam forms that might have slightly different difficulty levels.
Your score report may contain a table of classifications of your performance at each section level. This information is intended to provide general feedback about your exam performance. The exam uses a compensatory scoring model, which means that you do not need to achieve a passing score in each section. You need to pass only the overall exam.
Each section of the exam has a specific weighting, so some sections have more questions than other sections have. The table contains general information that highlights your strengths and weaknesses. Use caution when interpreting section-level feedback.
Content outline
This exam guide includes weightings, test domains, and task statements for the exam. It is not a comprehensive listing of the content on the exam. However, additional context for each of the task statements is available to help guide your preparation for the exam. The following table lists the main content domains and their weightings. The table precedes the complete exam content outline, which includes the additional context. The percentage in each domain represents only scored content. Domain % of Exam
Domain 1: Network Design 30%
Domain 2: Network Implementation 26%
Domain 3: Network Management and Operation 20%
Domain 4: Network Security, Compliance, and Governance 24%
TOTAL 100%
QUESTION 1
A company is planning to create a service that requires encryption in transit. The traffic must not be
decrypted between the client and the backend of the service. The company will implement the
service by using the gRPC protocol over TCP port 443. The service will scale up to thousands of
simultaneous connections. The backend of the service will be hosted on an Amazon Elastic
Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) duster with the Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler and the Horizontal
Pod Autoscaler configured. The company needs to use mutual TLS for two-way authentication
between the client and the backend.
Which solution will meet these requirements?
A. Install the AWS Load Balancer Controller for Kubernetes. Using that controller, configure a
Network Load Balancer with a TCP listener on port 443 to forward traffic to the IP addresses of the
backend service Pods.
B. Install the AWS Load Balancer Controller for Kubernetes. Using that controller, configure an
Application Load Balancer with an HTTPS listener on port 443 to forward traffic to the IP addresses of
the backend service Pods.
C. Create a target group. Add the EKS managed node group’s Auto Scaling group as a target Create an
Application Load Balancer with an HTTPS listener on port 443 to forward traffic to the target group.
D. Create a target group. Add the EKS managed node group’s Auto Scaling group as a target. Create a
Network Load Balancer with a TLS listener on port 443 to forward traffic to the target group.
Answer: B
QUESTION 2
A company is deploying a new application in the AWS Cloud. The company wants a highly available
web server that will sit behind an Elastic Load Balancer. The load balancer will route requests to
multiple target groups based on the URL in the request. All traffic must use HTTPS. TLS processing
must be offloaded to the load balancer. The web server must know the user’s IP address so that the
company can keep accurate logs for security purposes.
Which solution will meet these requirements?
A. Deploy an Application Load Balancer with an HTTPS listener. Use path-based routing rules to
forward the traffic to the correct target group. Include the X-Forwarded-For request header with
traffic to the targets.
B. Deploy an Application Load Balancer with an HTTPS listener for each domain. Use host-based
routing rules to forward the traffic to the correct target group for each domain. Include the XForwarded-
For request header with traffic to the targets.
C. Deploy a Network Load Balancer with a TLS listener. Use path-based routing rules to forward the
traffic to the correct target group. Configure client IP address preservation for traffic to the targets.
D. Deploy a Network Load Balancer with a TLS listener for each domain. Use host-based routing rules
to forward the traffic to the correct target group for each domain. Configure client IP address
preservation for traffic to the targets.
Answer: A
Explanation:
An Application Load Balancer (ALB) can be used to route traffic to multiple target groups based on
the URL in the request. The ALB can be configured with an HTTPS listener to ensure all traffic uses
HTTPS. TLS processing can be offloaded to the ALB, which reduces the load on the web server. Pathbased
routing rules can be used to route traffic to the correct target group based on the URL in the
request. The X-Forwarded-For request header can be included with traffic to the targets, which will
allow the web server to know the user’s IP address and keep accurate logs for security purposes.
QUESTION 3
A company has developed an application on AWS that will track inventory levels of vending machines
and initiate the restocking process automatically. The company plans to integrate this application
with vending machines and deploy the vending machines in several markets around the world. The
application resides in a VPC in the us-east-1 Region. The application consists of an Amazon Elastic
Container Service (Amazon ECS) cluster behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The
communication from the vending machines to the application happens over HTTPS.
The company is planning to use an AWS Global Accelerator accelerator and configure static IP
addresses of the accelerator in the vending machines for application endpoint access. The
application must be accessible only through the accelerator and not through a direct connection over
the internet to the ALB endpoint.
Which solution will meet these requirements?
A. Configure the ALB in a private subnet of the VPC. Attach an internet gateway without adding
routes in the subnet route tables to point to the internet gateway. Configure the accelerator with
endpoint groups that include the ALB endpoint. Configure the ALB’s security group to only allow
inbound traffic from the internet on the ALB listener port.
B. Configure the ALB in a private subnet of the VPC. Configure the accelerator with endpoint groups
that include the ALB endpoint. Configure the ALB’s security group to only allow inbound traffic from
the internet on the ALB listener port.
C. Configure the ALB in a public subnet of the VPAttach an internet gateway. Add routes in the subnet
route tables to point to the internet gateway. Configure the accelerator with endpoint groups that
include the ALB endpoint. Configure the ALB’s security group to only allow inbound traffic from the
accelerator’s IP addresses on the ALB listener port.
D. Configure the ALB in a private subnet of the VPC. Attach an internet gateway. Add routes in the
subnet route tables to point to the internet gateway. Configure the accelerator with endpoint groups
that include the ALB endpoint. Configure the ALB’s security group to only allow inbound traffic from
the accelerator’s IP addresses on the ALB listener port.
Answer: A
QUESTION 4
A global delivery company is modernizing its fleet management system. The company has several
business units. Each business unit designs and maintains applications that are hosted in its own AWS
account in separate application VPCs in the same AWS Region. Each business unit’s applications are
designed to get data from a central shared services VPC.
The company wants the network connectivity architecture to provide granular security controls. The
architecture also must be able to scale as more business units consume data from the central shared
services VPC in the future.
Which solution will meet these requirements in the MOST secure manner?
A. Create a central transit gateway. Create a VPC attachment to each application VPC. Provide full
mesh connectivity between all the VPCs by using the transit gateway.
B. Create VPC peering connections between the central shared services VPC and each application
VPC in each business unit’s AWS account.
C. Create VPC endpoint services powered by AWS PrivateLink in the central shared services VPCreate
VPC endpoints in each application VPC.
D. Create a central transit VPC with a VPN appliance from AWS Marketplace. Create a VPN
attachment from each VPC to the transit VPC. Provide full mesh connectivity among all the VPCs.
Answer: C
QUESTION 5
A company uses a 4 Gbps AWS Direct Connect dedicated connection with a link aggregation group
(LAG) bundle to connect to five VPCs that are deployed in the us-east-1 Region. Each VPC serves a
different business unit and uses its own private VIF for connectivity to the on-premises environment.
Users are reporting slowness when they access resources that are hosted on AWS.
A network engineer finds that there are sudden increases in throughput and that the Direct Connect
connection becomes saturated at the same time for about an hour each business day. The company
wants to know which business unit is causing the sudden increase in throughput. The network
engineer must find out this information and implement a solution to resolve the problem.
Which solution will meet these requirements?
