SAA-C03 Design Resilient Architectures Practice Test 2 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A financial services company is hosting a critical web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application must remain available even if an entire AWS Region experiences a major outage. The database tier uses Amazon Aurora Global Databases. Which solution provides the most resilient multi-Region architecture with automated failover?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Deploy the application stack across two AWS Regions, use Amazon Route 53 with active-passive failover and automated health checks, and configure Amazon Aurora Global Databases with cross-region replication.. Deploying Route 53 with active-passive failover and automated health checks combined with a secondary Region ensures automatic traffic rerouting during a regional disaster. Aurora Global Databases minimize replication lag and permit fast promotion of the secondary region database, maintaining data consistency and business continuity for critical financial applications requiring minimal recovery time objectives.

Answer

Configure an Application Load Balancer in a single Region with EC2 instances distributed across multiple Availability Zones, and back the application with a standard Aurora MySQL database instance.

Answer

Use Amazon Route 53 with weighted routing policies to distribute traffic between two AWS Regions, and configure standard cross-region database replication using Amazon RDS snapshots taken every hour.

Answer

Set up an AWS Global Accelerator standard accelerator with endpoint groups in two AWS Regions, and use Amazon DynamoDB global tables with local secondary indexes for data storage.

Question 2

A media streaming company stores high-value video assets in an Amazon S3 bucket. The company requires a resilient storage architecture that protects against accidental deletion, malicious overwrites, and zonal or regional outages. Which combinations of features should a Solutions Architect implement to achieve these requirements? (Choose TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Enable S3 Versioning on the bucket and configure MFA Delete to prevent accidental or malicious deletion of object versions.. Enabling S3 Versioning ensures that previous versions are retained when objects are deleted or overwritten, protecting against accidental data loss. Furthermore, replicating objects to another AWS Region using S3 Cross-Region Replication guarantees durability and availability against catastrophic regional disruptions, satisfying robust disaster recovery best practices for critical media assets.

Answer

Configure Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering to automatically move infrequently accessed video assets to lower-cost storage tiers.

Answer

Attach a resource-based bucket policy that explicitly denies all delete object requests from any IAM user except the root account.

Answer

Enable S3 Object Lock in governance mode with a fixed retention period of 30 days for all uploaded video files.

Question 3

A company hosts a web application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application stores session state in local memory, causing users to be logged out whenever the load balancer routes requests to different instances. Which solution provides the most resilient, scalable architecture to resolve this?

Accepted Answer

Store session state in Amazon ElastiCache for Redis.. Storing session state in Amazon ElastiCache for Redis externalizes session data so any EC2 instance behind the ALB can serve any request, eliminating the logout problem while providing high availability and scalability. Redis is purpose-built for low-latency session stores and supports replication and failover. This is the AWS-recommended pattern for stateless web tiers.

Answer

Configure the Application Load Balancer to use source IP stickiness.

Answer

Use Amazon EBS multi-attach to share session files across instances.

Answer

Replicate session files using a cron job across all web instances.

Question 4

A company's web application requires a highly available database layer to survive an Availability Zone failure without manual intervention. The database must remain accessible during maintenance windows and ensure zero data loss. Which solution meets these requirements with the least operational overhead?

Accepted Answer

Implement an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployment.. Amazon RDS Multi-AZ maintains a synchronous standby replica in a different Availability Zone and automatically fails over during an AZ failure or maintenance event, with zero data loss (RPO=0) and no manual intervention. It meets high availability, maintenance resilience, and zero data loss with minimal operational overhead.

Answer

Configure RDS Read Replicas and manually promote them during an outage.

Answer

Deploy a Single-AZ RDS instance and use AWS Backup for hourly snapshots.

Answer

Host a MySQL database on an Amazon EC2 instance with an EBS volume.

Question 5

An application is deployed across two AWS Regions to ensure resilience. The architect needs to direct users to the healthy region with the lowest latency. If the primary region fails, traffic should fail over automatically. Which Route 53 routing policy should be implemented?

Accepted Answer

Latency routing policy with health checks.. Latency-based routing with health checks directs each user to the AWS Region that provides the lowest latency while the health check removes an unhealthy region's records from DNS responses, achieving automatic failover. This satisfies both requirements: lowest-latency selection under normal conditions and automatic redirection when the primary region fails.

Answer

Simple routing policy.

Answer

Failover routing policy.

Answer

Weighted routing policy.

Question 6

A high-traffic application uses an Application Load Balancer (ALB) and an Auto Scaling group (ASG). During peak hours, some EC2 instances fail, but the ASG does not replace them immediately because the instances are still in a 'running' state despite the application being unresponsive. How should the architect fix this?

Accepted Answer

Change the ASG health check type from EC2 to ELB.. By default, an Auto Scaling group uses EC2 health checks, which only detect instance-level failures (e.g., stopped or terminated instances) and not application-level unresponsiveness. Changing the health check type to ELB makes the ASG rely on the load balancer's health checks, which actively probe the application on each instance; if an instance fails the ELB health check, the ASG marks it unhealthy and replaces it. This directly resolves the issue of running-but-unresponsive instances.

Answer

Increase the ASG health check grace period to 600 seconds.

Answer

Create a CloudWatch alarm for high CPU usage to trigger replacement.

Answer

Configure a Lambda function to manually terminate unresponsive instances.

Question 7

A global gaming company wants to reduce latency for its players who are distributed worldwide. The application uses UDP-based traffic and requires a static entry point to simplify firewall management. Which service should the architect recommend to optimize the network path?

Accepted Answer

AWS Global Accelerator.. AWS Global Accelerator uses the AWS global network to route traffic to the optimal regional endpoint based on health and proximity. Unlike CloudFront, which is primarily for HTTP/S content, Global Accelerator supports non-HTTP protocols like UDP. It provides static IP addresses that act as a fixed entry point, improving performance by keeping traffic on the AWS backbone.

Answer

Amazon CloudFront.

Answer

Amazon Route 53 with Geolocation routing.

Answer

AWS Direct Connect.

Question 8

A company needs a Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy with an RTO of 30 minutes and an RPO of 15 minutes. They want to minimize costs while having a scaled-down version of their core environment always running in a second region. Which DR strategy should they use?

Accepted Answer

Warm Standby.. A Warm Standby DR strategy involves running a functional but scaled-down version of the application in a separate region. This allows for a very low Recovery Time Objective (RTO) because the core infrastructure is already live. Data is replicated frequently to meet the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes, providing a balance between cost and speed.

Answer

Backup and Restore.

Answer

Pilot Light.

Answer

Multi-site Active-Active.

Question 9

A database administrator needs to ensure that an Amazon RDS for MySQL instance can withstand an Availability Zone failure and provide low-latency reads for a reporting application. Which TWO steps should be taken?

Accepted Answer

Enable Multi-AZ deployment for the RDS instance.. Enabling Multi-AZ provides the high availability needed to survive an AZ failure by maintaining a synchronous standby. Creating a Read Replica in a different AZ offloads read traffic from the primary instance, improving performance for the reporting application while also providing an additional layer of data redundancy across the region.

Answer

Use EBS Snapshots to back up the database every 5 minutes.

Answer

Enable Enhanced Monitoring with a 1-second granularity.

Answer

Implement a Network Load Balancer in front of the RDS instance.

Question 10

A security team is concerned about accidental or malicious deletion of critical objects in an Amazon S3 bucket. Which TWO features should be enabled to prevent permanent data loss and require additional authentication for deletions?

Accepted Answer

S3 Versioning.. S3 Versioning (A) is correct because it keeps multiple variants of an object in the same bucket, so when an object is overwritten or deleted, a delete marker is placed and the prior version remains recoverable, preventing permanent data loss from accidental or malicious deletion. MFA Delete (B) is correct because it adds an additional authentication factor requirement for permanently deleting object versions or changing the versioning state of the bucket, directly satisfying the requirement for extra authentication on deletions. Together, versioning preserves the data and MFA Delete protects the destructive operations. S3 Object Lock in compliance mode (C) is not among the marked answers and, while it prevents deletion for a retention period, it does not itself require additional authentication for deletions. S3 Inventory (D) only provides scheduled reports of objects and metadata, and S3 Transfer Acceleration (E) only speeds up uploads/downloads via edge locations; neither prevents permanent deletion or adds authentication.

Answer

S3 Object Lock in compliance mode.

Answer

S3 Inventory.

Answer

S3 Transfer Acceleration.

Question 11

A company hosts a web application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application requires high availability across two Availability Zones (AZs). Which architectural design ensures the most resilient traffic distribution?

Accepted Answer

Place EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group distributed across two AZs behind the ALB.. High availability across two AZs requires resources to be distributed across both AZs so that the failure of one AZ does not take down the application. An Auto Scaling group spanning two AZs behind an ALB ensures that healthy targets exist in both AZs, and the ALB automatically routes traffic only to healthy targets in each enabled AZ.

Answer

Deploy all instances in one AZ and use a Route 53 failover policy to a secondary region.

Answer

Use an Auto Scaling group with a single AZ and enable Cross-Zone Load Balancing on the ALB.

Answer

Use a Network Load Balancer (NLB) with static IP addresses for each instance in one AZ.

Question 12

A financial application stores data in Amazon Aurora. The architecture must survive a regional outage. Which TWO steps should the architect take to meet this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Create an Aurora Global Database with a secondary region.. Option B is correct because an Aurora Global Database replicates data to a secondary region with typical cross-region replication latency under one second, which is the AWS-recommended design for surviving a full regional outage. Option D is correct because, during a regional failure, the secondary region's Aurora cluster must be promoted (via the managed planned or unplanned failover) to become a standalone read/write primary, restoring write capability in the surviving region. Option A is not sufficient because Aurora Multi-AZ (Aurora Replicas across AZs) only protects against an Availability Zone failure within a single region, not a regional outage. Option C is wrong because RDS snapshots copied to an S3 bucket in the same region are also lost if that region fails, and daily snapshots give a poor RPO. Option E is irrelevant because Performance Insights is a monitoring/performance-tuning feature and provides no disaster-recovery capability.

Answer

Enable Aurora Multi-AZ deployment in the primary region.

Answer

Schedule daily Amazon RDS snapshots and copy them to an S3 bucket in the same region.

Answer

Enable Performance Insights on all Aurora instances.

Question 13

Refer to the exhibit. An application needs to store highly durable data in S3. The architect wants to ensure data is protected against accidental deletion while maintaining cost-effective storage. What should be done?

Accepted Answer

Enable S3 Versioning on the bucket and use Lifecycle policies to manage older versions.. S3 Versioning preserves every prior version of an object, so an accidental overwrite or delete does not destroy the underlying data — the previous version remains retrievable. Pairing Versioning with Lifecycle policies lets you transition or expire noncurrent versions after a set number of days, which controls the cost of retaining all those versions. Together they deliver durability against accidental deletion while keeping storage spend predictable.

Answer

Enable S3 Cross-Region Replication for all objects.

Answer

Modify the IAM policy to include s3:DeleteObject in the Deny statement.

Answer

Use S3 Intelligent-Tiering for all objects to reduce storage costs.

Question 14

A company has a legacy application that requires a persistent file system shared across multiple EC2 instances. The file system must be highly available and support standard file system protocols. Which solution is most appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon EFS with mount targets in multiple Availability Zones.. Amazon EFS provides a fully managed, scalable, and highly available NFS file system that can be mounted simultaneously by multiple EC2 instances across multiple AZs. It is designed to be resilient, automatically replicating data across AZs within a region. This makes it the ideal choice for legacy applications that require shared storage without the management overhead of self-managed storage servers or distributed file systems.

Answer

Mount an Amazon EBS volume to multiple EC2 instances simultaneously.

Answer

Create an S3 bucket and use it as a mounted file system via S3FS.

Answer

Set up a self-managed NFS server on an EC2 instance.

Question 15

A company runs a mission-critical web application on EC2. The database is on RDS. How should the architect ensure the fastest possible recovery time objective (RTO) if the primary database instance fails?

Accepted Answer

Enable RDS Multi-AZ deployment.. RDS Multi-AZ deployment provides synchronous replication to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone (AZ) within the same region. If the primary instance fails, RDS automatically performs a failover to the standby, updating the DNS record to point to the new primary. This process typically happens in under 60 seconds, which is the most effective native way to achieve a low RTO for RDS.

Answer

Configure an RDS Read Replica in a different region and promote it if the primary fails.

Answer

Take hourly automated snapshots and restore from the latest snapshot upon failure.

Answer

Back up the database to S3 and use a standby EC2 instance to run a database engine.