SAA-C03 Practice Test 32 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A warehouse integration service must process every event at least once, but duplicate processing is acceptable if the consumer handles idempotency. Which eventing approach is most suitable? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

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

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon SQS standard queue and design consumers to be idempotent. Amazon SQS standard queues provide at-least-once delivery, ensuring every event is processed at least once, with the possibility of duplicates. Designing consumers to be idempotent handles duplicates without requiring custom scripts, aligning with the requirement to avoid operational overhead. This approach is serverless, scalable, and fits the warehouse integration use case.

Answer

Use CloudFront signed URLs

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Use UDP messages sent directly to workers

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Use an in-memory queue on one EC2 instance

Question 2

A solutions architect is designing a high-performance architecture for a web application that serves static content from Amazon S3 and dynamic content from an Application Load Balancer. The application must deliver low latency to users across multiple continents and reduce origin load. The team wants to use Amazon CloudFront. Which two actions should the architect take to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Configure the S3 bucket as a CloudFront origin with an Origin Access Control (OAC) and set the bucket policy to allow only the CloudFront distribution to access the objects.. A CloudFront distribution with multiple origins and cache behaviors lets static S3 content be cached at edge locations with long TTLs while dynamic ALB traffic forwards only necessary headers. Using OAC secures S3 access. Together, these reduce latency for global users and lower origin load. Multiple distributions or request rewriting do not provide the same performance and security benefits.

Answer

Use Lambda@Edge to rewrite all requests to a single origin and compress responses, eliminating the need for multiple cache behaviors and origins.

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Create a second CloudFront distribution with a different price class and use Route 53 latency-based routing to direct users to the distribution with the lowest latency.

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Set the Application Load Balancer as a custom origin, enable caching for dynamic content with a long default TTL, and forward all headers and cookies to the origin.

Question 3

A batch analytics job runs for several hours each night and can be interrupted and restarted. Which EC2 purchasing option should minimize cost?

Accepted Answer

Spot Instances. Spot Instances are the correct choice because they offer significant cost savings (up to 90% compared to On-Demand) and are ideal for fault-tolerant, interruptible workloads like batch processing. Since the job can be interrupted and restarted, it can handle Spot Instance terminations gracefully, making this the most cost-effective option.

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On-Demand Instances only

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Dedicated Hosts

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Provisioned IOPS volumes

Question 4

A latency-sensitive video platform uploads large files to S3 from users around the world. Which two features can improve upload performance?

Accepted Answer

S3 Transfer Acceleration. S3 Transfer Acceleration (B) uses AWS edge locations to route uploads over optimized network paths, reducing latency and packet loss for global users. S3 multipart upload (C) allows large files to be uploaded in parallel parts, improving throughput and enabling retries of individual parts without restarting the entire upload.

Answer

S3 Object Lock

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S3 Inventory

Question 5

A ticket booking system runs on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The design must tolerate the failure of one Availability Zone. What should the Auto Scaling group configuration include? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

Accepted Answer

Subnets in at least two Availability Zones with health checks enabled. An Auto Scaling group configured with subnets in at least two Availability Zones ensures that if one AZ fails, the remaining AZ(s) can continue to serve traffic. Health checks on the EC2 instances allow the Auto Scaling group to detect and replace unhealthy instances, maintaining the desired capacity across the surviving AZs. This aligns with the requirement for a managed AWS-native control to tolerate an AZ failure.

Answer

All instances in one larger subnet

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A Network Load Balancer in one subnet

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A single EC2 instance with detailed monitoring

Question 6

A partner integration sends a custom binary TCP protocol to a service running on EC2 instances in private subnets. The partners require static endpoint IPs for allowlisting, and the application must see the original client source IP for rate limiting. Which two changes best fit the protocol and network requirements? Select two.

Accepted Answer

Replace the Application Load Balancer with a Network Load Balancer.. A Network Load Balancer (NLB) is required because it supports TCP traffic natively at Layer 4, which is necessary for a custom binary TCP protocol that cannot be interpreted by an Application Load Balancer (ALB) at Layer 7. Additionally, an NLB preserves the original client source IP address by default when used with targets in private subnets, meeting the requirement for rate limiting based on the client IP. Static IP addresses can be assigned to the NLB via Elastic IPs, satisfying the partner's need for static endpoint IPs for allowlisting.

Answer

Put the service behind API Gateway REST API and use Lambda integration.

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Use CloudFront to cache the binary packets at edge locations.

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Terminate the traffic with an Amazon RDS proxy to stabilize the connections.

Question 7

A solutions architect is reviewing a workload that runs on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances in a single AWS Region. The application serves a global user base, and the team wants to reduce both data transfer costs and latency for users in Europe and Asia. The application is stateless and stores assets in Amazon S3. The team is also evaluating how to pay for the compute layer over the next three years, as usage is expected to be steady. Which two actions will reduce cost in this scenario? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Purchase a three-year Compute Savings Plan with a full upfront payment for the EC2 compute.. The workload has two distinct cost drivers: global asset delivery and steady compute. Caching assets at CloudFront edge locations reduces origin egress and internet transfer while improving latency for distant users. For the compute layer, a three-year Compute Savings Plan matches the expected steady usage and applies a significant discount over On-Demand. Together these address both transfer and compute costs without sacrificing availability.

Answer

Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on the bucket and direct all user downloads through the accelerated endpoint.

Answer

Move the S3 bucket to a Region closer to the European users and replicate back to the original Region.

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Convert the EC2 instances to Spot Instances to eliminate compute charges entirely.

Question 8

A financial analytics platform ingests events into an Amazon Kinesis Data Stream with four shards. During month-end peaks, producers receive ProvisionedThroughputExceededException errors and consumers fall behind. The architects want to increase capacity without changing producer code and must preserve the order of records that share the same partition key. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Increase the number of open shards using UpdateShardCount to a higher count.. Producer throttling on a Kinesis data stream is resolved by adding shards, since each shard provides a fixed write and read capacity. UpdateShardCount performs this online, and because the partition key still hashes to one shard, per-key ordering is maintained and no producer changes are required.

Answer

Enable server-side encryption on the stream and increase the retention period to 365 days.

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Switch the consumers to enhanced fan-out and raise the number of registered consumers.

Answer

Replace the Kinesis Data Stream with an Amazon SQS FIFO queue and have consumers poll it.

Question 9

A financial services company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application must be accessible only from a specific corporate IP range (203.0.113.0/24). The security team wants to restrict access at the load balancer level and also ensure that the instances themselves only accept traffic from the ALB. Which combination of security group configurations should a solutions architect implement?

Accepted Answer

Configure the ALB security group to allow inbound HTTP/HTTPS from 203.0.113.0/24. Configure the EC2 instances' security group to allow inbound traffic only from the ALB security group.. The most secure and maintainable configuration is to restrict the ALB to the corporate IP range and allow the instances to accept traffic only from the ALB security group. This ensures that all external traffic goes through the ALB and that instances are not directly accessible, while using security group references simplifies management.

Answer

Configure the ALB security group to allow inbound HTTP/HTTPS from 203.0.113.0/24. Configure the EC2 instances' security group to allow inbound traffic from the ALB's IP addresses.

Answer

Configure the ALB security group to allow inbound HTTP/HTTPS from 0.0.0.0/0. Configure the EC2 instances' security group to allow inbound traffic from 203.0.113.0/24.

Answer

Configure the ALB security group to allow inbound HTTP/HTTPS from 203.0.113.0/24. Configure the EC2 instances' security group to allow inbound traffic from 0.0.0.0/0.

Question 10

A team stores important documents in Amazon S3. They want to recover earlier versions if someone overwrites or deletes a file by mistake. What should they enable?

Accepted Answer

Amazon S3 Versioning. Amazon S3 Versioning is the correct choice because it allows you to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object stored in an S3 bucket. When enabled, S3 automatically maintains a unique version ID for each object, so if a file is overwritten or deleted, the previous version remains accessible. This directly addresses the requirement to recover earlier versions after accidental modification or deletion.

Answer

Amazon EBS snapshots

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Amazon CloudWatch logs

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VPC flow logs

Question 11

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 12

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

Use S3 Object Lock in compliance mode to prevent data deletion during the retention period.. 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

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

Answer

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

Question 13

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

Amazon DynamoDB as the primary database.. 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 RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ and Read Replicas.

Answer

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

Answer

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

Question 14

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 15

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

Configure the ECS service to use a spread placement strategy across Availability Zones.. 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

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

Answer

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

Answer

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