SAA-C03 Design High-Performing Architectures — Timed 25 Questions

Question 1

A developer team uses Amazon EFS for a content management system across multiple EC2 instances. They notice performance degradation during heavy file operations. Which TWO configurations would improve performance for this shared file system? (Select TWO.)

25 minute time limit — choose an answer to begin.

Accepted Answer

Switch the throughput mode to Provisioned Throughput.. Option A is correct because switching to Provisioned Throughput mode lets you specify a fixed throughput (MiB/s) independent of the file system's size, which directly addresses performance degradation during heavy file operations by guaranteeing higher aggregate throughput than Bursting mode may provide. Option B is correct because Max I/O performance mode is designed for highly parallel workloads with many EC2 instances and high aggregate throughput, scaling to thousands of concurrent file operations, which suits a multi-instance CMS under heavy load. Option C is incorrect because General Purpose is the default mode optimized for latency-sensitive workloads with limited concurrency, not for the heavy parallel operations described. Option D is incorrect because the Infrequent Access storage class is a cost-optimization tier for rarely accessed files and does not improve throughput or performance. Option E is incorrect because EBS Multi-Attach supports only io1/io2 volumes attached to instances in a single AZ and is not a shared, scalable file system replacement for EFS.

Answer

Set the performance mode to General Purpose.

Answer

Move files to the Infrequent Access (IA) storage class.

Answer

Transition the workload to EBS Multi-Attach volumes.

Question 2

A developer needs to accelerate the delivery of dynamic content to global users. Which service should be used to provide the best performance?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudFront.. Amazon CloudFront is a valid and commonly used solution for accelerating dynamic content via its dynamic site acceleration features (using persistent connections and optimized routing). While Global Accelerator is excellent for non-HTTP/TCP/UDP traffic, CloudFront is specifically designed to accelerate dynamic HTTP/HTTPS content. The question is ambiguous, but CloudFront is frequently the intended answer for 'dynamic content' in AWS SAA exams.

Answer

AWS Global Accelerator.

Answer

Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing.

Answer

AWS Direct Connect.

Question 3

A large-scale application uses a monolithic SQL database that is reaching its throughput limit. The workload is a mix of complex analytical queries and simple transactions. What is the most performant way to scale?

Accepted Answer

Offload analytical queries to a separate database or data warehouse.. Separating transactional (OLTP) and analytical (OLAP) workloads is a critical performance pattern. Offloading analytical queries to a dedicated data warehouse (such as Amazon Redshift) or a separate database ensures that heavy analytical queries do not consume the resources of the primary transactional database or block critical business transactions. Simply adding read replicas (Option A) can still impact replication lag and transactional performance if the analytical queries are complex and resource-intensive, making a dedicated data warehouse the most performant solution for mixed heavy workloads.

Answer

Add more read replicas to the primary database.

Answer

Migrate both workloads to a larger single instance.

Answer

Implement database sharding on the primary instance.

Question 4

A company is experiencing performance latency in their application because of frequent DNS lookups. What is the best way to reduce the impact of these lookups?

Accepted Answer

Implement DNS caching in the application environment.. DNS lookup latency is typically caused by the application performing a DNS query for every request. Implementing DNS caching (at the application or OS level) ensures that the IP address is resolved once and reused, eliminating the round-trip time to the DNS resolver for subsequent requests. Route 53 Resolver Endpoints are for hybrid cloud connectivity and do not address application-level DNS lookup latency.

Answer

Change the DNS provider to a faster third-party service.

Answer

Use Route 53 health checks on all endpoints.

Answer

Migrate to a different VPC configuration.

Question 5

A global application uses an ALB. Users report that the application is slow in some regions. Which configuration change will improve performance for global users?

Accepted Answer

Deploy the application to more regions with Global Accelerator.. AWS Global Accelerator uses the AWS global network to route user traffic to the optimal endpoint, improving performance for global users by reducing latency and jitter. Deploying the application to more regions and using Global Accelerator ensures that users are directed to the nearest healthy endpoint, thus improving performance.

Answer

Increase the number of instances behind the ALB.

Answer

Enable ALB cross-zone load balancing.

Answer

Enable HTTP/2 on the Application Load Balancer.

Question 6

A financial services company is migrating a high-frequency trading application to AWS. The application requires a block storage solution that provides consistent sub-millisecond latency and supports up to 256,000 IOPS per instance. Which Amazon EBS volume type should the solutions architect recommend to meet these performance requirements?

Accepted Answer

Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2 Block Express). io2 Block Express is the only EBS volume type that delivers sub-millisecond latency and scales to 256,000 IOPS per volume (and per instance) with 99.999% durability. It is designed for the most demanding, latency-sensitive workloads like high-frequency trading. io1 and gp3 cap far below that IOPS ceiling, and st1 is a throughput HDD unsuitable for sub-millisecond transactional latency.

Answer

Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1)

Answer

General Purpose SSD (gp3)

Answer

Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)

Question 7

Refer to the exhibit. A solutions architect has configured this Auto Scaling policy for a web application fleet. The application currently experiences latency spikes when traffic increases suddenly. Why might this specific configuration be contributing to the performance issues?

Accepted Answer

The target value of 70% is too high for a high-performance application.. A target tracking policy with a target value of 70% CPU means the Auto Scaling group only scales out when average CPU exceeds 70%. For a latency-sensitive application experiencing sudden traffic spikes, 70% is too high — by the time CPU reaches that threshold, latency has already degraded. A lower target value (e.g., 40-50%) triggers scaling earlier, maintaining headroom and preventing latency spikes.

Answer

Target tracking policies do not support CPU-based metrics.

Answer

The policy lacks a cooldown period to prevent rapid scaling.

Answer

The policy should use 'ASGAverageNetworkIn' instead of CPU.

Question 8

An engineering firm uses Amazon EFS to store large datasets for parallel processing across hundreds of EC2 instances. The firm reports that the file system is hitting throughput limits, causing delays in job completion. Which EFS configuration should be changed to maximize performance for this high-throughput workload?

Answer

Change the performance mode from General Purpose to Max I/O.

Answer

Switch the throughput mode from Elastic to Bursting.

Answer

Move the data to an EFS One Zone storage class.

Answer

Increase the size of the EFS file system by adding dummy data.

Question 9

A real-time data ingestion service using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is struggling to keep up with incoming records. The 'ProvisionedThroughputExceededException' is frequently observed. The stream currently has 10 shards. What is the most effective way to increase the performance and throughput of the stream?

Accepted Answer

Switch the Kinesis Data Stream to On-Demand mode.. While resharding (Option C) increases throughput, it is a manual, operational task. Switching to On-Demand mode (Option D) is the most effective and recommended approach for handling unpredictable or fluctuating workloads as it automatically scales capacity.

Answer

Enable Enhanced Fan-out for the consumers.

Answer

Increase the retention period of the stream.

Answer

Perform a resharding operation to increase the number of shards.

Question 10

An application processes large volumes of telemetry data that arrive in unpredictable spikes. The data is written to an Amazon EBS volume, but during spikes, the application experiences I/O wait times. What is the most cost-effective way to handle this?

Accepted Answer

Migrate the volumes to General Purpose SSD (gp3).. gp3 volumes decouple IOPS and throughput from volume size, allowing the application to be provisioned with up to 16,000 IOPS and 1,000 MiB/s independently of capacity. This handles unpredictable I/O spikes at a lower cost than io2 because you only pay for the IOPS/throughput you provision rather than the full io2 premium, and gp3 is cheaper per GB than gp2.

Answer

Convert the EBS volumes to Provisioned IOPS io2.

Answer

Increase the size of the existing gp2 volumes.

Answer

Use Amazon EFS with Provisioned Throughput mode.

Question 11

Refer to the exhibit. An Amazon RDS MySQL instance is experiencing high latency. The metrics show high CPU and low memory. What is the immediate, non-disruptive recommendation to address this performance issue?

Accepted Answer

Switch to a larger RDS instance class.. Adding a Read Replica (or scaling up the instance class if downtime is acceptable) is used to address high CPU. However, scaling up the RDS instance class vertically is the most direct way to handle high CPU and low memory on the primary database, and many AWS questions consider modern vertical scaling to be minimally disruptive or the standard answer for resource exhaustion. Let's correct this to scaling the instance class, or alternatively, if the question meant adding a read replica, Option D states 'Decrease'. Let's fix the correct option to B (Switch to a larger RDS instance class) or correct D to 'Add Read Replicas'. Since scaling vertically is the standard direct remediation for CPU/Memory constraints on a standalone database, Option B is the intended correct answer for resource constraints.

Answer

Enable Performance Insights.

Answer

Add a Multi-AZ standby instance.

Answer

Decrease the number of Read Replicas.

Question 12

A company is migrating a monolithic application to microservices. The services are experiencing performance issues due to excessive inter-service communication overhead. Which architecture pattern should they adopt to improve performance?

Answer

Use an Amazon API Gateway.

Answer

Increase the number of instances for every service.

Answer

Switch to a synchronous REST API structure.

Answer

Move all services back to a single instance.

Question 13

A company is deploying a global gaming application that uses a custom UDP-based protocol. The application requires low latency and high availability for players worldwide. Which TWO AWS services or features should be used to optimize the network performance and global reach for this application?

Accepted Answer

AWS Global Accelerator. AWS Global Accelerator (A) is correct because it provides static anycast IP addresses that route player traffic over the AWS global backbone to the nearest healthy endpoint, reducing latency and jitter for UDP-based traffic while improving availability through health checks and automatic failover. Amazon Route 53 with latency-based routing (D) is correct because it directs each player to the AWS Region with the lowest latency, supporting global reach and high availability for the custom UDP protocol. Amazon CloudFront (B) is not appropriate here because it is a CDN optimized for HTTP/HTTPS caching, not custom UDP protocols. AWS Transit Gateway (C) is a regional VPC-to-VPC and on-premises routing hub, not a global latency optimization service. Application Load Balancer (E) operates at Layer 7 for HTTP/HTTPS and does not support custom UDP protocols, so it cannot meet the requirement.

Answer

Amazon CloudFront

Answer

AWS Transit Gateway

Answer

Application Load Balancer (ALB) with cross-zone load balancing

Question 14

A research firm is running a tightly coupled High Performance Computing (HPC) workload on AWS using EC2 instances. The firm needs to minimize network latency and maximize inter-node communication speed. Which network enhancement should the architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Deploy the instances using an Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA).. Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) is a network interface for Amazon EC2 instances that enables customers to run applications requiring high levels of inter-node communications at scale. It uses a custom protocol to provide lower and more consistent latency than traditional TCP/IP stacks used in standard networking.

Answer

Enable Enhanced Networking with the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA).

Answer

Use a Spread Placement Group for the EC2 instances.

Answer

Implement AWS Global Accelerator for the cluster.

Question 15

A media company experiences unpredictable traffic spikes on its web application. The architect needs to ensure the application remains responsive while optimizing for performance. Which TWO strategies should be implemented? (Select TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Configure a Target Tracking Scaling Policy for the Auto Scaling group.. Option A is correct because a Target Tracking Scaling Policy for the Auto Scaling group automatically adjusts capacity to maintain a specified metric (such as average CPU utilization or ALB request count per target) at a target value, which directly handles unpredictable traffic spikes while keeping the application responsive. Option C is correct because deploying Amazon CloudFront in front of the Application Load Balancer caches static and cacheable content at edge locations, reduces latency for global users, and offloads traffic from the origin, improving performance during spikes. Option B is not appropriate because a Simple Scaling Policy with a large cooldown period reacts slowly and can leave the application under-provisioned during sudden spikes. Option D is irrelevant because provisioning io2 IOPS on EC2 root volumes addresses storage throughput, not web traffic responsiveness. Option E is not suitable because manual vertical scaling is slow, requires downtime or restarts, and cannot respond to unpredictable spikes in real time.

Answer

Use a Simple Scaling Policy with a large cooldown period.

Answer

Provision IOPS (io2) for all EC2 root volumes.

Answer

Implement vertical scaling by increasing instance sizes manually.

Question 16

A global e-commerce site uses an Amazon RDS for MySQL database. Users in different regions are complaining about slow page load times when browsing product catalogs. How can the architect improve read performance for global users with minimal changes to the application?

Accepted Answer

Create Read Replicas in different AWS Regions.. Cross-region read replicas allow you to serve read traffic from a location physically closer to your users, reducing latency. This architectural pattern is essential for high-performing global applications where the primary database is located in a single region but the user base is distributed worldwide.

Answer

Enable Multi-AZ deployment for the RDS instance.

Answer

Upgrade the RDS instance to a larger instance class.

Answer

Enable Enhanced Monitoring with a 1-second granularity.

Question 17

Refer to the exhibit. An architect is reviewing a CloudFront Cache Policy for a dynamic site. The application is experiencing a low cache hit ratio, leading to high load on the origin servers. Based on the configuration, which change would most likely improve the cache hit ratio?

Accepted Answer

Change QueryStringBehavior to 'whitelist' or 'none'.. In a CloudFront cache policy, QueryStringBehavior set to 'all' (or forwarding all query strings) causes CloudFront to treat every unique query string combination as a separate cache object, drastically reducing the cache hit ratio. Changing it to 'whitelist' (forwarding only the query strings the origin actually needs) or 'none' (ignoring query strings entirely) collapses many variants into a single cached object, which increases the cache hit ratio and reduces origin load. This is the most direct fix for the described symptom.

Answer

Increase the DefaultTTL and MinTTL values.

Answer

Set CookieBehavior to 'all' to include session data.

Answer

Enable HeaderBehavior for the 'Host' header.

Question 18

A company has a high-performance database running on Amazon RDS for MySQL. The workload is read-heavy and experiences latency during peak hours. Which solution will improve read performance with minimal architectural changes?

Accepted Answer

Create one or more RDS Read Replicas and update the application connection string.. Creating an RDS Read Replica allows the application to offload read-only traffic from the primary database instance. By routing read queries to the replica, the primary instance can focus solely on write operations. This architecture is a standard practice for scaling read-heavy workloads in relational databases, ensuring lower latency and better resource utilization without requiring significant code modifications or complex database sharding.

Answer

Enable Multi-AZ deployment for the existing RDS instance.

Answer

Increase the instance size to a larger DB instance class.

Answer

Migrate the database to Amazon DynamoDB.

Question 19

Refer to the exhibit. An application running on EC2 instances needs to pull large binary files from an S3 bucket with maximum throughput. Which configuration should the architect implement to ensure the highest network performance?

Accepted Answer

Configure an S3 Gateway VPC Endpoint in the VPC.. To achieve maximum throughput, the application should use an S3 VPC Endpoint. This ensures that traffic between the EC2 instance and S3 stays within the AWS network, bypassing the public internet and avoiding potential bandwidth bottlenecks. Using VPC Endpoints also provides secure connectivity, which is critical for high-performance data transfers, as it prevents the exposure of traffic to external network risks while maintaining consistent latency and high speed.

Answer

Attach an Internet Gateway to the VPC.

Answer

Use a NAT Gateway for all outbound traffic.

Answer

Install an AWS Direct Connect connection.

Question 20

A legacy application uses a monolithic architecture with a high-performance compute requirement. The application is CPU-bound and requires consistent sub-millisecond latency between compute nodes. Which EC2 feature should the architect use?

Accepted Answer

Cluster Placement Groups.. Cluster Placement Groups provide high-density, low-latency, and high-throughput networking for compute-intensive applications. By placing instances in a single Availability Zone and a low-latency network cluster, the architect ensures that inter-node communication is as fast as possible. This is essential for HPC (High-Performance Computing) workloads where network jitter and latency can significantly degrade application performance. It allows the instances to participate in a low-latency, high-bandwidth network fabric within the AWS data center.

Answer

Spread Placement Groups.

Answer

Auto Scaling groups across multiple Availability Zones.

Answer

Dedicated Hosts with physical CPU pinning.