SAA-C03 Practice Test 3 — 10 Questions

Question 1

A high-volume analytics dashboard writes streaming click events that must be processed by multiple independent consumers. Which service is most appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is the most appropriate service because it is designed for real-time streaming data ingestion and can be consumed by multiple independent consumers in parallel. Each shard within a Kinesis stream supports up to 5 read transactions per second and a total data read rate of 2 MB per second, allowing multiple consumer applications to process the same stream of click events concurrently without interfering with each other.

Answer

Amazon Route 53

Answer

Amazon EBS

Answer

AWS DataSync

Question 2

A CI/CD system creates an IAM role (CICDRole) used for deployments. Your organization uses IAM permission boundaries to prevent developers from granting themselves higher privileges. After an incident, you discover that CICDRole can perform unintended IAM actions because the role’s identity policy includes broad permissions. Which change most directly ensures permission boundaries continue to restrict CICDRole regardless of what is later added to the role’s identity policies?

Accepted Answer

Ensure CICDRole is created with the required permissions boundary ARN, and verify that the boundary policy does not allow the unintended IAM actions.. IAM permission boundaries define the maximum permissions that an IAM role can have, regardless of what is later added to its identity-based policies. By ensuring CICDRole is created with a permission boundary that explicitly denies the unintended IAM actions, even if broad permissions are added to the role's identity policy, the boundary will override and restrict those actions. This directly addresses the requirement to prevent privilege escalation through policy modifications.

Answer

Remove the permission boundary from CICDRole so that only the identity policy controls access.

Answer

Add an identity-policy deny for iam:CreatePolicy and iam:UpdateRole on all resources.

Answer

Rely on CloudTrail alerts to stop deployments from performing IAM changes after the fact.

Question 3

An S3 bucket in account A uses default server-side encryption with an AWS KMS customer-managed key (CMK) in account A. A team created an IAM role in account B that is allowed by IAM policy to perform s3:GetObject on the bucket. When the account B role tries to read objects, it fails with: AccessDeniedException: 'User is not authorized to perform kms:Decrypt'. Which change is most likely to fix the issue?

Accepted Answer

Update the CMK key policy in account A to allow the account B role principal to call kms:Decrypt (and kms:DescribeKey if needed).. When an S3 bucket uses SSE-KMS with a customer-managed key (CMK) in account A, the account B role must have explicit kms:Decrypt permission on that CMK. The key policy in account A controls access to the CMK, so adding the account B role principal to the key policy with kms:Decrypt (and kms:DescribeKey if needed) is required. Without this, even if the S3 bucket policy and IAM role allow s3:GetObject, the KMS decrypt call will fail.

Answer

Add kms:Decrypt permissions to the identity policy in account B only, without modifying the CMK key policy in account A.

Answer

Disable SSE-KMS on the S3 bucket so objects use SSE-S3 instead, eliminating the need for KMS permissions.

Answer

Attach a broad permissions boundary to the account B role allowing all kms:* actions to override the key policy.

Question 4

A Multi-AZ Amazon RDS database experiences incorrect writes at 10:15 UTC due to a buggy release. The team detects the problem at 10:25 UTC. They want to restore the data to a known-good point around 10:15 UTC, and validate the recovered data, without taking the current production instance offline during the recovery process. What is the most appropriate AWS action?

Accepted Answer

Perform a point-in-time restore (PITR) to a new DB instance using a restore time around 10:15 UTC, then test the restored instance before cutting over.. Amazon RDS point-in-time recovery (PITR) allows you to restore a DB instance to any second within the backup retention period, creating a new, independent DB instance. This lets you validate the recovered data without affecting the current production instance, which remains online and serving traffic. The team can then cut over to the restored instance after confirming it is clean.

Answer

Immediately reboot the RDS instance and rely on the reboot to roll back the bad writes.

Answer

Create a new Read Replica from the current primary and use it as the recovered database after applying reverse migrations.

Answer

Temporarily disable Multi-AZ to speed up storage rollback, then re-enable Multi-AZ.

Question 5

A developer accidentally corrupts part of a production Amazon RDS database, and the issue is discovered 45 minutes later. The team needs to restore the database to the state immediately before the change. Which two actions should be part of the recovery plan? Select two.

Accepted Answer

Enable automated backups with a retention period that covers the recovery window.. Automated backups must be enabled to allow point-in-time recovery (PITR) within the retention window. Since the corruption occurred 45 minutes ago, the retention period must cover at least that duration to restore to the state immediately before the change. Option B is correct because PITR restores the database to a specified time (down to the second) within the backup retention period, creating a new DB instance that reflects the state just before the corruption.

Answer

Convert the database to a single-AZ deployment for faster restores.

Answer

Delete the corrupted rows manually and continue without restoring.

Answer

Use a read replica as the only recovery source for all deletions.

Question 6

A solutions architect is designing an S3 bucket for a order processing API. The objects must never be publicly accessible, even if a developer later adds an overly broad bucket policy. What should the architect configure?

Accepted Answer

Enable S3 Block Public Access at the account or bucket level. S3 Block Public Access provides a definitive override that prevents any public access to objects, regardless of bucket policies or ACLs. By enabling this setting at the account or bucket level, the architect ensures that even if a developer later adds an overly broad bucket policy, the objects remain inaccessible to anonymous users. This is the only option that guarantees no public access can be inadvertently granted.

Answer

Enable server access logging on the bucket

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Create an IAM policy that denies s3:GetObject to anonymous users

Answer

Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration

Question 7

Developers for a B2B file exchange site need temporary elevated access to production resources for troubleshooting. The security team wants approvals, expiry, and audit logging. Which approach is best?

Accepted Answer

Use IAM Identity Center permission sets with time-bound access processes and CloudTrail auditing. IAM Identity Center (formerly AWS SSO) enables time-bound permission sets that grant temporary elevated access with automatic expiry, satisfying the security team's requirements for approvals and audit logging via AWS CloudTrail. This approach follows the principle of least privilege by providing just-in-time access rather than permanent permissions, and all actions are recorded in CloudTrail for compliance.

Answer

Attach AdministratorAccess permanently to every developer role

Answer

Create shared administrator access keys for the team

Answer

Disable CloudTrail during troubleshooting

Question 8

A microservice runs in private subnets with no NAT gateway. It must retrieve a secret from AWS Secrets Manager. Security requires that traffic to Secrets Manager stays within AWS’s private network (no public internet egress). The IAM role already grants secretsmanager:GetSecretValue for the needed secret. What is the best network setup to meet the requirement?

Accepted Answer

Create an Interface VPC Endpoint for Secrets Manager (com.amazonaws.<region>.secretsmanager) and allow it via the endpoint security group; optionally enable private DNS.. An Interface VPC Endpoint (AWS PrivateLink) for Secrets Manager allows the microservice to access the secret privately without traversing the public internet. Since the subnet has no NAT Gateway and no public IP, this is the only way to keep traffic within the AWS network. Enabling private DNS ensures the standard Secrets Manager endpoint resolves to the private IP of the endpoint, eliminating the need for route table changes.

Answer

Create an S3 Gateway VPC endpoint and use it for Secrets Manager requests because both services use HTTPS.

Answer

Assign a public IP address to the tasks so they can call Secrets Manager over the internet without NAT.

Answer

Change the route table to send all 0.0.0.0/0 traffic directly to an Internet Gateway.

Question 9

A worker service consumes messages from an Amazon SQS queue. Some messages are malformed and always fail validation. The worker retries, but it keeps reprocessing the same bad messages and consumes processing capacity that should be used for valid work. What is the best solution to prevent “poison messages” from blocking progress?

Accepted Answer

Configure a Dead-Letter Queue (DLQ) and set a redrive policy so messages move to the DLQ after a maximum number of receives.. A Dead-Letter Queue (DLQ) with a redrive policy is the standard AWS mechanism for handling poison messages. By setting a maximum receive count (e.g., 5), the SQS queue automatically moves messages that fail processing repeatedly to the DLQ, isolating them from the main queue. This prevents the worker from wasting capacity on invalid messages and allows the main queue to continue processing valid work without interruption.

Answer

Increase the visibility timeout so the worker gets fewer retries per hour.

Answer

Disable SQS retries by deleting messages immediately on any processing error.

Answer

Create a second worker that polls the queue less frequently until the malformed message is processed successfully.

Question 10

A SaaS company uses an S3 bucket for database backups created daily. Backups are rarely restored; the company’s documented RTO is 24 hours, and the compliance policy requires backups be kept for 90 days. The team currently stores all backups in S3 Standard, which is costly.

Which single lifecycle policy change is most cost-optimized while still meeting the 24-hour RTO and 90-day retention?

Accepted Answer

Add a lifecycle rule to transition backups older than 1 day to S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and keep them until day 90.. S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval provides retrieval times from minutes to hours, which meets the 24-hour RTO, and offers significant cost savings over S3 Standard for data that is rarely accessed. Transitioning backups older than 1 day to this storage class reduces costs while retaining them for the required 90-day compliance period.

Answer

Add a lifecycle rule to transition backups older than 1 day to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, and keep them until day 90.

Answer

Add a lifecycle rule to transition backups older than 1 day to S3 Glacier Deep Archive, and keep them until day 90 with no restore configuration.

Answer

Add a lifecycle rule to transition backups older than 1 day to S3 One Zone-IA, and delete them after 7 days.