SAA-C03 Practice Exam 4 — 20 Questions

Question 1

A company runs a customer portal on an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL cluster. The application currently connects directly to the writer instance endpoint and keeps long-lived connections open. During a maintenance failover, writes fail until clients are restarted. The team wants the application to reconnect to the correct Aurora endpoint automatically and reduce user-visible write interruptions.

Which change is most likely to achieve this?

Accepted Answer

Use the Aurora cluster endpoint for write traffic, use the reader endpoint for read-only traffic, and implement connection retry or reconnect logic on failover.. The Aurora cluster endpoint automatically points to the current writer instance, so using it for write traffic ensures that after a failover, new writes are directed to the new writer without needing to change the connection string. Implementing connection retry or reconnect logic in the application is essential because the existing long-lived connections will be broken during failover; the application must detect the failure and re-establish connections to the cluster endpoint to resume writes seamlessly.

Answer

Keep using the original writer instance endpoint so the database host name never changes during failover.

Answer

Convert the Aurora cluster to Single-AZ so there is only one database node to connect to.

Answer

Place Route 53 in front of the database and manually update DNS records whenever failover occurs.

Question 2

A company runs a stateless application tier behind an Application Load Balancer. Match each observed scaling pattern on the left to the best Auto Scaling strategy or metric on the right.

Accepted Answer

Steady increase: Step scaling. Steady increase is best handled by step scaling for gradual adjustments; sudden spikes use simple scaling for immediate action; cyclical patterns benefit from scheduled scaling; consistent low traffic may not need scaling; unpredictable bursts are managed by target tracking to maintain a metric; gradual decrease uses simple scaling to reduce capacity.

Answer

Steady increase: Simple scaling

Answer

Unpredictable bursts: Scheduled scaling

Question 3

A solutions architect is designing a cost-optimized data storage solution for a large dataset that is accessed infrequently but must be retained for compliance for 7 years. Which three actions should the architect take to minimize costs? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Enable S3 Intelligent-Tiering to automatically move data between access tiers based on usage patterns.. Amazon S3 lifecycle policies allow you to define rules that automatically transition objects to colder storage tiers like S3 Glacier Deep Archive after a specified period. This approach minimizes costs by keeping data in S3 Standard only for the initial 30 days when it might be accessed, then moving it to the lowest-cost storage class for the remaining compliance period. S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically optimizes costs by monitoring access patterns and moving data between frequent, infrequent, and archive access tiers without manual intervention. S3 Object Lock in compliance mode prevents any user, including the root user, from deleting or overwriting objects during the retention period, ensuring regulatory compliance.

Answer

Store all data in Amazon EBS gp2 volumes attached to an EC2 instance for low-latency access.

Answer

Replicate all data to a second AWS Region using S3 Cross-Region Replication to ensure durability.

Answer

Store the data in Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive immediately after creation.

Question 4

A company is designing a high-performance database architecture for an e-commerce platform that experiences rapid spikes in read traffic during flash sales. The database must handle millions of reads per second with sub-millisecond latency. The data is key-value in nature, with a small number of attributes per item. Which three options should be included in the architecture? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) as an in-memory cache.. Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL key-value database that delivers single-digit millisecond latency at any scale, making it ideal for high-traffic e-commerce platforms with key-value data. DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is an in-memory cache that sits in front of DynamoDB, reducing read latency to microseconds for millions of reads per second. Amazon ElastiCache for Redis with cluster mode enabled provides a distributed in-memory cache that can offload read traffic from the primary database, further reducing latency and handling spikes during flash sales.

Answer

Amazon Redshift with auto-scaling for real-time reads.

Answer

Amazon S3 as a primary data store accessed via Select and Range queries.

Answer

Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ and Read Replicas.

Question 5

A company is designing a high-performance web application that serves static and dynamic content to a global user base. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The static assets are stored in an S3 bucket. Which three architecture decisions will improve performance and reduce latency for users? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Integrate the ALB with AWS Global Accelerator to route traffic over the AWS global network.. Amazon CloudFront caches both static and dynamic content at edge locations, reducing latency by serving content from locations closer to users. AWS Global Accelerator improves performance by routing traffic over the AWS global network instead of the public internet, reducing jitter and latency. Larger EC2 instance types like c5n or m5n provide higher network bandwidth, which reduces network bottlenecks for high-traffic applications.

Answer

Use an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ database for read replicas to offload read traffic.

Answer

Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on the bucket for faster downloads.

Answer

Place the EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone to reduce network latency.

Question 6

A company is deploying a stateless web application on Amazon ECS with Fargate. The application must be resilient to individual task failures and Availability Zone failures. Which three steps should the company take to achieve this resilience? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Set a minimum healthy percent of 50 and a maximum percent of 200 in the ECS service deployment configuration.. Configuring the ECS service with a spread placement strategy across Availability Zones ensures tasks are distributed across multiple AZs, providing resilience against AZ failures. Setting a minimum healthy percent of 50 and a maximum percent of 200 allows the service to maintain at least half of the desired tasks during deployments or failures while scaling up to replace failed tasks without downtime. Using an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in front of the ECS service distributes incoming traffic across healthy tasks in different AZs, automatically rerouting traffic if a task or AZ fails.

Answer

Store application session data in an attached EFS file system shared across all tasks.

Answer

Disable automatic task replacement to avoid unnecessary task churn during failures.

Answer

Place all ECS tasks in a single subnet to minimize network latency.

Question 7

A solutions architect is designing a highly available and resilient architecture for a critical internal application that processes financial transactions. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances inside an Auto Scaling group. The database layer uses an Amazon Aurora MySQL cluster. The company requires that if an entire AWS Availability Zone (AZ) fails, the application must remain operational with minimal impact and automatically recover without manual intervention. Which combination of architectural decisions will meet these requirements? (Choose four.)

Accepted Answer

Configure the Auto Scaling group to span at least three Availability Zones in the same AWS Region.. Configuring the Auto Scaling group to span at least three Availability Zones ensures that if one AZ fails, the remaining AZs have sufficient capacity to handle the load, and the Auto Scaling group can automatically launch new instances in the healthy AZs. Deploying the Aurora cluster with at least one Aurora Replica in a different AZ than the primary instance provides automatic failover to a replica in under 30 seconds, ensuring database resilience without manual intervention. Using an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to distribute traffic across EC2 instances in multiple AZs allows the ALB to automatically route traffic away from failed AZs and only to healthy targets, maintaining application availability. Setting up an Amazon RDS Proxy manages database connections by pooling and reusing them, which reduces the load on the database during failover and improves resilience by providing seamless connection handling across AZ failures.

Answer

Deploy the Aurora cluster with a single DB instance to reduce complexity and cost.

Answer

Place the EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone to ensure data locality with the primary database.

Question 8

A company is migrating its on-premises workloads to AWS and wants to optimize costs. Which three strategies should the company implement to achieve a cost-optimized architecture? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Use Spot Instances for fault-tolerant, flexible workloads to achieve significant cost savings.. Reserved Instances or Savings Plans provide significant discounts (up to 72%) over On-Demand pricing for predictable workloads by committing to a specific usage term (1 or 3 years). This directly reduces compute costs for steady-state applications, making it a core cost-optimization strategy.

Answer

Provision additional EC2 instances to handle peak load at all times, ensuring maximum performance.

Answer

Deploy all resources in a single Availability Zone to minimize data transfer costs.

Answer

Store all data in Amazon S3 Standard storage class to avoid any data retrieval costs.

Question 9

A distributed system needs extremely low network latency between a set of EC2 instances running the same workload. The team wants the instances to be placed as close together as AWS allows to reduce round-trip time. Which placement strategy should the architect use?

Accepted Answer

Use a Cluster placement group for the instances that must communicate frequently over low latency.. A Cluster placement group is the correct choice because it places instances in a single Availability Zone within the same rack or logical cluster, providing the lowest possible network latency and maximum throughput (up to 10 Gbps for single-flow traffic) between instances. This is ideal for tightly coupled, latency-sensitive workloads like HPC or real-time distributed systems.

Answer

Use a Spread placement group across multiple Availability Zones to maximize fault tolerance.

Answer

Use the default placement strategy without specifying a placement group.

Answer

Use a placement group of type Partition to ensure independent failure of each instance.

Question 10

A internal reporting portal has old unattached EBS volumes and many stale snapshots. Which two actions reduce storage cost without affecting running instances? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

Accepted Answer

Delete unattached EBS volumes after verifying they are no longer needed. Deleting unattached EBS volumes directly reduces storage costs without impacting running instances, as these volumes are not in use. Option D is correct because snapshot lifecycle policies automate the deletion of obsolete snapshots, eliminating manual cleanup and reducing storage costs without custom scripts.

Answer

Disable CloudTrail logging

Answer

Stop all EC2 instances in the account

Question 11

Order the steps to create a static website using Amazon S3 and CloudFront.

Accepted Answer

Create S3 bucket and enable static website hosting, then upload website files, then create CloudFront distribution, then configure CloudFront distribution (e.g., custom domain, SSL), then update DNS to point to CloudFront.. S3 bucket with hosting, upload files, CloudFront distribution, configure CloudFront, then DNS.

Answer

Upload website files to S3, then create S3 bucket and enable static website hosting, then create CloudFront distribution, then configure CloudFront, then update DNS.

Answer

Create S3 bucket and enable static website hosting, then create CloudFront distribution, then upload website files, then configure CloudFront, then update DNS.

Answer

Create S3 bucket and enable static website hosting, then upload website files, then create CloudFront distribution, then update DNS, then configure CloudFront.

Question 12

A backup process restores a 2 TB production database from an EBS snapshot onto a new volume. During the first hours after restore, the application sees slow reads whenever previously unused blocks are accessed. What is the best way to avoid this performance issue in future restores?

Accepted Answer

Enable Fast Snapshot Restore on the snapshots used for recovery.. When an EBS volume is restored from a snapshot, it is lazily loaded from Amazon S3 in the background. Accessing data blocks that have not yet been loaded triggers a read penalty because the volume must fetch them from S3 before serving the I/O. Enabling Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) pre-warms the snapshot data so that restored volumes have full performance immediately, eliminating the slow reads on first access.

Answer

Increase the volume size to give the database more free space.

Answer

Move the database files to Amazon EFS after the restore completes.

Answer

Use magnetic standard volumes because they avoid snapshot hydration delays.

Question 13

A trading dashboard uses Aurora MySQL. The company wants fast cross-Region disaster recovery with low RPO. Which architecture should be considered?

Accepted Answer

Aurora Global Database. Aurora Global Database is designed for cross-Region disaster recovery with a typical RPO of 1 second and RTO of less than 1 minute, using storage-based replication that does not impact database performance. This meets the low RPO requirement for a trading dashboard, where data loss must be minimized.

Answer

A single-AZ Aurora cluster

Answer

Manual snapshots copied monthly

Answer

An ElastiCache Redis replica

Question 14

A payments API requires point-in-time recovery and accidental-delete protection for a DynamoDB table. Which two settings should the architect enable? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

Accepted Answer

Deletion protection or tightly controlled delete permissions. Point-in-time recovery (PITR) enables continuous backups of the DynamoDB table, allowing restoration to any point within the last 35 days, which satisfies the requirement for point-in-time recovery. Deletion protection prevents accidental deletion of the table by blocking drop-table operations, meeting the accidental-delete protection requirement. Both are managed AWS-native controls that require no custom scripting or external tooling.

Answer

Global secondary indexes

Answer

DAX

Question 15

A stateless web API runs on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The Auto Scaling group (ASG) currently uses subnets from only one Availability Zone, even though the ALB spans two Availability Zones. During maintenance of that single AZ, the ALB remains up but clients see timeouts because there are no healthy targets. Which change most directly improves resilience against an AZ failure?

Accepted Answer

Update the ASG to launch instances across subnets in at least two Availability Zones and ensure ALB health checks target an application-ready path.. The most direct fix for AZ failure resilience is to distribute the ASG across multiple Availability Zones. With the ALB already spanning two AZs, if the ASG only launches instances in one AZ, a failure of that AZ leaves the ALB with zero healthy targets, causing timeouts. By configuring the ASG to launch instances in at least two AZs and setting ALB health checks to an application-ready path, the ALB can route traffic to healthy instances in the surviving AZ, maintaining availability.

Answer

Keep the ASG in one subnet/AZ, but enable ALB stickiness to reduce session interruption.

Answer

Add a NAT gateway in the public subnets so instances can reach the internet during maintenance events.

Answer

Create a second ALB in the same Availability Zone and route traffic using DNS failover.

Question 16

An internal team runs a report-generation job once per day. It typically finishes in a few minutes, and even on its slowest days it still completes in under 15 minutes. The team wants to reduce operational overhead and pay primarily for actual runtime instead of keeping servers running 24/7. Which AWS approach best matches these goals?

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Lambda triggered by a schedule (for example, EventBridge) to run the report at the required time.. AWS Lambda is the ideal choice because it is a serverless compute service that runs code only when triggered, aligning with the requirement to pay primarily for actual runtime. By using Amazon EventBridge (CloudWatch Events) to invoke the Lambda function on a daily schedule, the team eliminates the need to provision or manage servers, and the job's typical runtime of a few minutes (under 15 minutes, Lambda's maximum execution timeout) fits perfectly within Lambda's constraints.

Answer

Deploy the job on EC2 instances and keep them running continuously for the daily schedule.

Answer

Run the job in an RDS database using stored procedures scheduled by the database engine.

Answer

Use an Auto Scaling group with a fixed minimum size of one instance and disable scaling.

Question 17

A media processing workflow in private subnets downloads large amounts of data from S3 through a NAT gateway. NAT data processing charges are high. What should the architect use to reduce cost? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

Accepted Answer

Gateway VPC endpoint for Amazon S3. A Gateway VPC endpoint for Amazon S3 allows instances in private subnets to access S3 directly over the AWS network without traversing a NAT gateway, eliminating NAT data processing charges. This is a managed AWS-native control that meets the architecture review board's preference, as it uses AWS PrivateLink and does not require any changes to the S3 bucket or client configuration beyond route table updates.

Answer

S3 Object Lambda

Answer

AWS Shield Advanced

Answer

A larger NAT gateway

Question 18

An e-commerce application uses Aurora MySQL. Writes are modest, but the product-detail page generates many read-only queries and the writer instance CPU is high. The application can tolerate a small amount of replication lag on those reads. What should the team do?

Accepted Answer

Add Aurora read replicas and send read-only traffic to the reader endpoint.. Adding Aurora read replicas and directing read-only traffic to the reader endpoint offloads SELECT queries from the writer instance, reducing its CPU load. Aurora replicas share the same underlying storage volume, so replication lag is minimal (typically <100ms) and acceptable for the product-detail page. This scales read throughput without increasing writer instance size or cost.

Answer

Increase the writer instance size and keep all traffic on the primary.

Answer

Replace Aurora with DynamoDB to eliminate replication lag.

Answer

Enable Multi-AZ failover only, because it increases read throughput automatically.

Question 19

A risk simulation workload generates analytics files that are accessed unpredictably. Some files become hot again months later. The team wants automatic storage cost optimisation without retrieval delays. What should be used? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

Accepted Answer

S3 Intelligent-Tiering. S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves objects between access tiers (frequent, infrequent, and archive instant access) based on changing access patterns, with no retrieval delays for hot objects and no operational overhead. This matches the unpredictable access pattern where files become hot again months later, as Intelligent-Tiering monitors access at the object level and adjusts storage class without manual intervention or custom scripts.

Answer

Manual monthly review and object copying

Answer

S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval for all files

Answer

EFS One Zone for analytics files

Question 20

You run a web application on an EC2 Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). During scheduled traffic spikes, new instances launch but customers occasionally see 5xx errors for the first few minutes after scale-out. Operational logs show instances need ~4 minutes to warm up (load caches and initialize dependencies). ALB target health becomes healthy only after this warm-up. Which change most directly improves performance during spikes by reducing the time to serve traffic after scaling?

Accepted Answer

Use an Auto Scaling warm pool so instances are pre-initialized and ready to register quickly when the ASG scales out.. B is correct because a warm pool pre-initializes instances (e.g., loading caches and dependencies) before they are added to the Auto Scaling group. When the ASG scales out, these pre-warmed instances can be quickly moved into service, bypassing the ~4-minute warm-up delay and reducing the window for 5xx errors.

Answer

Configure a larger ALB deregistration delay so that old targets remain longer before termination.

Answer

Increase the number of desired instances immediately without using scaling policies, and then rely on manual reconfiguration.

Answer

Switch from ALB to NLB so instances become reachable sooner without waiting for health checks.