Free Practice Questions for the Alibaba Cloud Computing CAP-C01 Exam (2026 Updated)

Tair, Auto Scaling, and ALB directly address the three core runtime requirements: session performance, elastic capacity, and distributed traffic handling.

Tair provides an in-memory Redis-compatible data tier that is appropriate for high-frequency session information. Keeping session state outside individual ECS game servers allows requests to be handled by different backend instances without losing player session information and avoids disk/database latency on critical session lookups.

Auto Scaling directly satisfies the requirement to react automatically to sudden player surges. Alibaba Cloud Auto Scaling can monitor metrics such as CPU utilization and automatically add ECS instances when capacity thresholds are exceeded, then remove excess capacity as demand decreases.

ALB distributes client requests across the resulting game-server fleet, performs health checks, and avoids overloading individual ECS instances.

CDN is highly valuable for downloading static assets such as textures, patches, images, and game packages because those objects can be cached at edge POPs. However, standard CDN does not provide the core dynamic scaling mechanism for real-time game sessions. Given that exactly three selections are required, Auto Scaling is essential because the question explicitly requires automatic scaling during player surges.

Study Guide reference: Building Highly Available, Performant Cloud Architecture — Tair, ALB, Auto Scaling, low-latency session architecture, and elastic gaming workloads.

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The core problem is durability during transient processing or network failures. A topic provides publish/subscribe notification delivery, but placing an SMQ queue behind the topic creates a persistent buffer between the notification producer and the Function Compute consumer. Alibaba Cloud supports subscribing a queue to an SMQ topic so that every message published to the topic is copied into the queue and retained for consumption.

Function Compute should then process records from the queue. Queue semantics provide the required failure recovery: after a consumer receives a message, it becomes temporarily invisible. The consumer deletes the message only after successful processing. If processing fails—for example because of a temporary connectivity problem—the message is not deleted and becomes visible again after the visibility timeout, allowing another processing attempt.

Function Compute also supports SMQ queue triggers with configurable retries, fault-tolerance behavior, and dead-letter handling, which can further strengthen this architecture.

Increasing memory does not fix network reliability, and multi-region deployment alone does not guarantee message persistence. A durable queue therefore prevents transient failures from silently losing ingestion work.

Study Guide reference: Core Infrastructure Deep Dive — Simple Message Queue, Function Compute, durable asynchronous processing, retries, and decoupled event-driven architecture.

Alibaba Cloud CDN addresses the front-end performance problem by caching static resources at edge Points of Presence close to users. Instead of every image, JavaScript file, stylesheet, or other cacheable object being retrieved from the origin application, CDN returns cached copies from nearby edge nodes. This reduces network latency and decreases load on the original application servers. Alibaba Cloud specifically identifies reduced latency and lower origin workload as primary benefits of CDN.

Read/write splitting addresses database-side pressure. ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL can use database proxy functionality to direct write operations to the primary instance and distribute eligible read operations to read-only instances. This is especially effective for read-heavy web applications because it reduces CPU and I/O load on the primary database and increases aggregate read throughput.

A multi-zone database improves availability rather than directly solving page-load latency. AnalyticDB is an analytical database and should not replace RDS simply to handle transactional data. OSS is optimized for static objects; hosting dynamic application content there does not fit its object-storage model.

Study Guide reference: Building Highly Available, Performant Cloud Architecture — CDN acceleration, RDS read scaling, database proxies, and application performance optimization.

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Alibaba Cloud Cloud Firewall is the purpose-built managed network-security service for centralized traffic inspection, filtering, access control, and threat prevention. It protects multiple network boundaries, including traffic between cloud workloads and the Internet as well as east-west traffic involving VPC environments.

For Internet-facing assets, Cloud Firewall can inspect inbound and outbound traffic and apply access-control policies, DPI-based analysis, intrusion-prevention rules, and threat intelligence without requiring an organization to deploy and maintain a self-managed firewall appliance.

For private architectures, a VPC Firewall can inspect and control traffic traversing VPC boundaries through CEN or Express Connect. Access-control policies determine which traffic is permitted or blocked.

Simple Log Service can analyze network logs but does not itself enforce inline traffic filtering. Traffic Mirroring copies traffic to another inspection system and therefore requires additional tooling. Security Center focuses primarily on workload security posture, vulnerability management, malware protection, and host security rather than functioning as the VPC ' s inline network firewall.

Cloud Firewall therefore most closely reproduces the company ' s former inspection-and-filtering architecture as a fully managed cloud-native service.

Study Guide reference: Securing Workloads on Alibaba Cloud — Cloud Firewall, network inspection, access control, IPS, and VPC security.

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VPC peering provides direct private communication between two VPCs without exposing either application or database traffic to the public Internet. Alibaba Cloud VPCs are isolated by default. After creating a peering connection and configuring the required bidirectional routes, resources in VPC A and VPC B can communicate using private IP addresses. VPC peering supports same-account and cross-account connections as well as same-region and cross-region configurations.

This is materially more secure than exposing the database publicly. The application ' s existing EIP does not need to participate in database connectivity; the application can use its ECS private address when communicating across the peering link. Security-group and database whitelist rules should then restrict access to only the required source CIDRs and ports.

Option A intentionally routes database access through public addressing. Option B introduces an unnecessary proxy server, additional management overhead, and another failure point. Option D creates the largest attack surface by making the database Internet-accessible.

The design principle is straightforward: when workloads in two Alibaba Cloud VPCs require direct communication, establish private network connectivity and keep sensitive database traffic off the Internet.

Study Guide reference: Building Enterprise-grade Networks on Alibaba Cloud — VPC isolation, VPC peering, routing, and private database access.

Option C provides the lowest-change migration path for the application tier. Rehosting the existing Windows workload on Windows Server ECS instances preserves its operating-system environment while distributing instances across availability zones improves resilience against zone-level infrastructure failures.

For the database tier, Option A provides the stronger managed architecture. Alibaba Cloud explicitly supports using DTS to migrate self-managed Oracle databases to PolarDB for PostgreSQL (Compatible with Oracle), including schema, full-data, and incremental-data migration for minimal migration downtime.

PolarDB ' s Oracle-compatible edition is specifically engineered to run Oracle workloads with minimal application modification. It supports Oracle-compatible data types, SQL constructs, PL/SQL features, OCI connectivity, packages, sequences, synonyms, and related functionality.

It also provides built-in high availability: failures are detected automatically and workloads can fail over to healthy nodes. This provides a more complete managed availability architecture than simply deploying independent self-managed Oracle servers across zones, which would additionally require Oracle-level replication/failover configuration.

Options B and D require substantial application refactoring and therefore conflict with the explicit requirement to minimize development changes.

Study Guide reference: Building Highly Available, Performant Cloud Architecture — workload migration, ECS multi-zone design, DTS, and PolarDB Oracle compatibility.

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Tair (Redis OSS-Compatible) is the appropriate centralized session-state layer for an elastic, distributed application. When ECS instances frequently scale in and out, application sessions must not depend on the lifecycle of any individual compute node. By storing session tokens and session state in Tair, every ECS instance can retrieve the same session information, making the web/application tier effectively stateless and compatible with Auto Scaling.

Alibaba Cloud Tair is a fully managed Redis-compatible database designed for high throughput, low latency, elastic scalability, and high availability. Alibaba Cloud also documents session-oriented Tair use cases in which session tokens are stored as Redis/Tair data structures with TTL values, demonstrating precisely why the service fits distributed session management.

Session stickiness is weaker because it attempts to keep a user on a specific backend and therefore creates affinity to an instance that might be removed during scaling or failover. CloudMonitor is an observability service, not a session store. STS issues temporary Alibaba Cloud credentials and does not maintain application user sessions.

Consequently, separating session state from ECS compute by storing it in Tair gives the architecture the elasticity and fault tolerance required.

Study Guide reference: Distributed Architecture on Alibaba Cloud; Performant Architecture; Core Infrastructure Deep Dive.

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Simple Log Service (SLS) is the appropriate logging platform for an ACK Serverless environment. Serverless Kubernetes removes much of the node-management responsibility, so the logging architecture should follow the same managed-service model rather than introduce dedicated log-processing infrastructure.

Alibaba Cloud provides native SLS integration for ACK Serverless. SLS can collect container standard output and application log files and then provide centralized search, analysis, dashboards, alerting, and downstream shipping. Alibaba documentation specifically states that ACK Serverless provides managed SLS capabilities and supports collecting container logs directly into SLS.

ARMS is primarily an application performance monitoring and observability platform; it does not replace SLS as the core centralized log-ingestion service. Option C is incorrect because SLS supports near-real-time collection and analysis. Option D also misunderstands serverless logging: scaling events do not inherently require dedicated logging servers.

The architecture should therefore preserve the operational advantages of serverless compute by using SLS as a fully managed, elastic logging layer capable of handling workload fluctuations without requiring the organization to provision and administer separate logging infrastructure.

Study Guide reference: Core Infrastructure Deep Dive — ACK, serverless container architecture, observability, and Simple Log Service.

Time Series Database is specifically designed for timestamped telemetry generated by IoT devices, monitoring systems, and industrial equipment. Alibaba Cloud identifies IoT device monitoring as a core TSDB scenario, including continuously collecting, storing, analyzing, and querying device-status and business-event data in real time.

ApsaraMQ for Kafka provides the high-throughput ingestion and buffering layer. It is a managed distributed Kafka platform intended for real-time data pipelines, monitoring-data aggregation, log collection, streaming processing, and large-scale analytics. Its partitioned distributed architecture lets producers ingest very large event volumes while downstream consumers process the streams independently.

Function Compute supplies elastic event processing without persistent compute servers. Alibaba Cloud supports ApsaraMQ for Kafka triggers that invoke Function Compute automatically whenever new records arrive in Kafka topics. This enables functions to perform transformations, filtering, enrichment, alert generation, or routing in near real time.

EMR is valuable for Hadoop/Spark-style batch analytics, but the question specifically emphasizes low-latency real-time ingestion and analysis. It therefore does not replace the streaming components selected above.

Study Guide reference: Core Infrastructure Deep Dive — IoT telemetry, TSDB, ApsaraMQ for Kafka, Function Compute, and real-time streaming architectures.

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This is fundamentally a lift-and-shift filesystem workload. The applications already depend on standard operating-system file interfaces, and the requirement explicitly states that application code should not be changed. ECS therefore preserves the existing Linux and Windows execution environments, while File Storage NAS supplies managed shared filesystem semantics.

Alibaba Cloud NAS supports NFS and SMB protocols and is designed specifically for workloads migrating from traditional file servers. Alibaba documentation describes NAS as appropriate for lift-and-shift applications because existing applications can continue using standard filesystem calls, path structures, and file-locking behavior without rewriting file I/O logic.

For cross-operating-system sharing, Alibaba Cloud recommends SMB when Linux and Windows clients must access the same filesystem, and Linux ECS can mount SMB when cross-platform data sharing is required.

OSS would change the storage interface from filesystem semantics to object APIs, normally requiring application changes. Message Queue changes the application ' s data exchange architecture. ACK introduces unnecessary containerization complexity.

Therefore, Linux ECS + Windows ECS + managed NAS most closely preserves the existing application model while eliminating the operational problems associated with manually synchronized on-premises file systems.

Study Guide reference: Core Infrastructure Deep Dive — ECS migration, File Storage NAS, NFS/SMB, and lift-and-shift architecture.

Each selected option maps directly to one of the stated enterprise requirements.

A multi-zone PolarDB deployment protects the database against availability-zone-level infrastructure failure. Alibaba Cloud ' s multi-AZ PolarDB architecture keeps replicated data in separate zones and can use standby resources for failover when the primary zone becomes unavailable, resulting in a higher database SLA than a single-zone deployment.

Cloud Backup provides centralized policy-driven backup and recovery for Alibaba Cloud and on-premises resources, including ECS data, databases, NAS, OSS, and other supported workloads. This addresses the requirement for automated application and database protection without building custom backup infrastructure.

RAM roles and associated policies provide fine-grained authorization. RAM policies define allowed actions, affected resources, and optional access conditions, enabling least-privilege access to sensitive student data and administrative services.

Leaving OSS data unencrypted conflicts with the handling of sensitive enterprise information, while manual ACK scaling does not contribute to the stated requirement for high availability or automated operations.

The resulting architecture therefore combines multi-AZ database resilience, managed backup protection, and fine-grained identity authorization.

Study Guide reference: Securing Workloads on Alibaba Cloud — RAM; Building Highly Available, Performant Cloud Architecture — PolarDB HA and Cloud Backup.

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File Storage NAS is Alibaba Cloud ' s managed shared filesystem service and is the correct storage family for workloads that require standard filesystem semantics and mounting by many clients. NAS supports NFS and SMB-based access, and a mount target acts as the private VPC endpoint through which clients access a NAS filesystem. General-purpose NAS currently supports up to two mount targets, and a mount target can be concurrently accessed by large numbers of compute nodes.

Alibaba Cloud also explicitly supports accessing NAS from an on-premises data center through VPN Gateway. This means the same private network architecture can accommodate cloud-hosted ECS clients and systems connected through the enterprise VPN.

OSS provides object semantics rather than a native shared NFS/SMB filesystem. EBS is block storage attached to compute instances and would require Priya to build and maintain custom file-server proxies, reducing availability and increasing administration.

Among the offered answers, multiple NAS mount points best align with the requirement for scalable managed file storage and resilient access paths while preserving standard filesystem protocols.

Study Guide reference: Core Infrastructure Deep Dive — File Storage NAS, NFS/SMB, mount targets, and hybrid-cloud storage.