SAA-C03 Practice Exam 56 — 20 Questions

Question 1

A financial analytics platform stores results in an Amazon S3 bucket. Compliance requires that objects be recoverable for 30 days after deletion and that no user, including administrators, be able to permanently erase them during that window. Objects must also remain readable throughout the retention period. Which approach should the architect implement?

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

Accepted Answer

Enable S3 Object Lock in compliance mode with a 30-day retention period on the bucket.. Meeting the requirement means using a control enforced by the storage service that no identity can override. S3 Object Lock in compliance mode provides exactly that: locked object versions cannot be deleted or overwritten by any principal until the retention period lapses, and they remain readable. Governance mode, versioning with policies, and lifecycle expiration all leave a deletion path open for privileged users.

Answer

Enable S3 Object Lock in governance mode with a 30-day retention period on the bucket.

Answer

Enable S3 Versioning and add a bucket policy that denies s3:DeleteObject to all principals.

Answer

Configure an S3 Lifecycle rule to transition objects to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval after one day and expire them after 30 days.

Question 2

A startup runs a customer-facing web application on a single Amazon EC2 instance in one Availability Zone, with the database on the same instance. The founders want the application to survive the failure of that Availability Zone with minimal changes and no server management for the database tier. Which action should the solutions architect take first?

Accepted Answer

Move the database to Amazon RDS with a Multi-AZ DB instance deployment and place the application instances in an Auto Scaling group spanning multiple Availability Zones.. The core problem is that both the application and database reside in a single Availability Zone. Relocating the database to Amazon RDS with Multi-AZ deployment gives automatic failover and removes database server management, while running the application in a multi-AZ Auto Scaling group provides compute redundancy. Together these changes let the application survive a zonal failure with minimal rework.

Answer

Create an Amazon Machine Image of the instance and copy it to a second Region for disaster recovery.

Answer

Enable termination protection on the EC2 instance and take regular Amazon EBS snapshots.

Answer

Place an Application Load Balancer in front of the single instance and enable sticky sessions.

Question 3

A media company stores original video assets in an Amazon S3 bucket in the us-east-1 Region. Editors in Europe report slow downloads, and the legal team requires that a copy of every asset exist in eu-west-1 within 15 minutes of upload, with the ability to fail over reads to the European copy during a Regional impairment. Which S3 feature should the architects enable?

Accepted Answer

S3 Cross-Region Replication with a replication rule that targets the eu-west-1 bucket and uses S3 Replication Time Control.. The requirement is a durable, timely copy of each object in a second Region, which is exactly what Cross-Region Replication provides. Adding S3 Replication Time Control turns the timing expectation into a defined service level, aligning the solution with the 15-minute RPO the legal team specified. Other S3 features change routing or transform data but do not create the required replica.

Answer

S3 Multi-Region Access Points configured against the existing us-east-1 bucket, with no replication rule created.

Answer

S3 Object Lambda access points in eu-west-1 that transform objects on retrieval from the us-east-1 bucket.

Answer

S3 Same-Region Replication to a second bucket in us-east-1, with an S3 Transfer Acceleration endpoint used by the European editors.

Question 4

A financial services company is designing a new payment processing platform. The platform must continue to accept and process transactions even if an entire AWS Region becomes unavailable, and it must not lose any accepted transaction. The architects have decided to run active-active deployments in two Regions and use Amazon Route 53 for traffic management. Which two additional design elements are required to meet the durability and availability goals? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Use an Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing policy with health checks on both Regional endpoints so traffic shifts away from an unhealthy Region.. An active-active, multi-Region platform needs two things beyond compute in each Region: a routing layer that detects a failed Region and steers traffic to the healthy one, and a data layer that keeps a writable, replicated copy of transactions in both Regions. Health-checked latency routing handles the first, while a multi-Region database with idempotent writes handles the second and protects accepted transactions from loss.

Answer

Store all transaction records in a single Amazon S3 bucket in the primary Region and enable S3 Versioning for durability.

Answer

Configure an Amazon Route 53 failover routing policy with a primary record in one Region and a secondary record in the other, and take hourly Amazon EBS snapshots of the application servers.

Answer

Deploy the application tier into a single Region and use AWS Global Accelerator to route European users through the nearest edge location for lower latency.

Question 5

A financial analytics platform runs a stateless containerized service on Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate tasks spread across three Availability Zones. The service reads from an Amazon Aurora MySQL cluster and must continue serving read traffic if one Availability Zone fails. The team wants the read capacity to remain available with the least operational overhead and no changes to application connection strings during a zone failure. Which approach meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Add Aurora Replicas in multiple Availability Zones and connect the service to the cluster reader endpoint so reads are load-balanced and fail over automatically.. The Aurora cluster reader endpoint is purpose-built to distribute read connections across replicas and to remove unhealthy replicas, including those in a failed Availability Zone. Deploying replicas in multiple zones and using that endpoint delivers automatic read failover with no application changes and minimal operational effort.

Answer

Place a Network Load Balancer in front of each Aurora Replica and configure the service to connect through the load balancer DNS name.

Answer

Increase the size of the Aurora writer instance so it can absorb read traffic if a replica becomes unavailable.

Answer

Create a separate Aurora cluster in each Availability Zone and have the service choose a cluster endpoint based on a health check.

Question 6

A startup runs a stateless web application on a single Amazon EC2 instance in one Availability Zone. The application must remain available if the instance fails or if its Availability Zone becomes unavailable. The startup wants a managed solution that requires minimal operational overhead. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Create an Auto Scaling group spanning at least two Availability Zones and attach it to an Application Load Balancer.. An Auto Scaling group that spans at least two Availability Zones can replace a failed instance and can also launch instances in a healthy zone when one zone becomes unavailable. Attaching an Application Load Balancer provides a stable endpoint and health-based routing, delivering a managed, resilient architecture with minimal operational effort.

Answer

Launch a second EC2 instance in the same Availability Zone and configure an Elastic IP address for failover.

Answer

Migrate the application to AWS Lambda and expose it through an API Gateway REST API.

Answer

Create an Auto Scaling group with a desired capacity of one instance and place it in a single Availability Zone.

Question 7

A company runs a stateful web application on a single Amazon EC2 instance in a public subnet. The application stores session data on the instance's root volume. The company wants to make the application highly available across two Availability Zones and ensure that session data is preserved if an instance fails. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Move the session data to an Amazon ElastiCache for Redis cluster with Multi-AZ enabled, and configure an Auto Scaling group across two Availability Zones behind an Application Load Balancer.. The recommended solution is to externalize session data to an ElastiCache for Redis cluster with Multi-AZ enabled and run the application in an Auto Scaling group across two Availability Zones behind an Application Load Balancer. This design ensures that session data survives instance failures and the application remains available if one AZ fails. The load balancer distributes traffic to healthy instances.

Answer

Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) of the instance, launch two new instances in two Availability Zones, and configure an Application Load Balancer with sticky sessions.

Answer

Attach an Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume to the instance and create a snapshot schedule. Launch a second instance in another Availability Zone and attach the same EBS volume.

Answer

Enable termination protection on the instance and create a scheduled AWS Lambda function to reboot the instance if it becomes unhealthy.

Question 8

A company runs a critical API on Amazon EC2 behind an Application Load Balancer in a single AWS Region. The business requires the API to keep serving traffic if an entire Availability Zone becomes unavailable, and the recovery must not depend on any manual step. The database is Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL configured as a Single-AZ instance. Which combination of changes should a solutions architect implement to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Configure the Auto Scaling group to span at least two Availability Zones with a health check grace period, and convert the RDS instance to a Multi-AZ DB instance deployment.. Automatic recovery across an Availability Zone failure needs redundant compute and a database that fails over on its own. A multi-AZ Auto Scaling group keeps the API serving through the load balancer, and Multi-AZ RDS maintains a synchronous standby that is promoted automatically to the same endpoint, so no human action is required.

Answer

Enable Multi-AZ on the Application Load Balancer by adding a second listener in a different Availability Zone.

Answer

Take hourly RDS snapshots and configure an Auto Scaling lifecycle hook to restore the snapshot into a new Availability Zone during a failure.

Answer

Create an RDS read replica in a second Availability Zone and update the application to write to the replica when the primary fails.

Question 9

A financial services company stores monthly regulatory reports in an Amazon S3 bucket. The reports are accessed frequently for the first 60 days after creation for audits and internal review. After that period, they are almost never accessed but must be retained for seven years and retrieved within 12 hours if a regulator requests them. The compliance team requires that the objects remain in a single bucket and that retrieval costs be minimized. Which storage solution meets these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Accepted Answer

Apply a lifecycle policy that transitions objects to S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval after 60 days.. The objects are hot for 60 days and then cold for years, with a retrieval-time requirement measured in hours rather than milliseconds. A lifecycle transition to S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval after 60 days matches that pattern: it lowers storage cost for the long retention period and its standard retrieval completes well within 12 hours. Keeping everything in a single bucket is supported because lifecycle rules operate within the bucket.

Answer

Use S3 Intelligent-Tiering and let it move objects between frequent and infrequent access tiers automatically.

Answer

Keep all objects in S3 Standard and rely on S3 Versioning to reduce storage charges over time.

Answer

Apply a lifecycle policy that transitions objects to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval after 60 days.

Question 10

A solutions architect is designing a highly available relational database tier for a customer-facing order system that must survive the loss of an entire Availability Zone with minimal administrative effort and no application connection-string changes during failover. (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Enable a Multi-AZ DB cluster deployment for the RDS database so a writer and two readable standbys span three Availability Zones. Both Multi-AZ deployment types keep a synchronous standby copy of the data in another Availability Zone and expose a stable endpoint that survives automatic failover, which removes the need to edit connection strings. A Multi-AZ DB cluster goes further by adding two readable standbys across three zones and offering faster failover. The remaining choices rely on asynchronous replicas, manual promotion, or snapshot restores that all require operator action.

Answer

Create manual read replicas in each Availability Zone and repoint the application to a replica after failover

Answer

Store the database on an EC2 instance with an EBS volume and take nightly snapshots to a second Availability Zone

Answer

Rely on the RDS automated backup retention window to restore the instance into a different Availability Zone during an outage

Question 11

A startup runs a stateless image-resizing API on a fleet of EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The instances store uploaded source images on their own instance store volumes before processing. During a routine scale-in event, an instance was terminated and several in-flight uploads were lost. The architect must make the design resilient to instance loss without changing the API code. What should the architect do?

Accepted Answer

Store uploaded images in Amazon S3 and have instances read from and write to the bucket instead of local disk. The root cause is that uploaded images live on instance store volumes, which are ephemeral and destroyed when an instance terminates. Relocating the source images to Amazon S3 removes the dependency on any single instance and gives the fleet shared, durable storage, so scale-in no longer causes loss. The remaining options delay or observe termination or reduce its frequency, but none preserve the data itself.

Answer

Increase the Auto Scaling group's minimum capacity so that instances are rarely terminated

Answer

Enable detailed CloudWatch monitoring and create an alarm that notifies operators before scale-in occurs

Answer

Configure an EC2 Auto Scaling lifecycle hook to delay instance termination until uploads complete

Question 12

A financial services company stores regulatory documents in an Amazon S3 bucket. The documents are accessed frequently for the first 90 days, then almost never, but must remain immediately retrievable for seven years. Retrieval latency of a few minutes is unacceptable, and the company wants the lowest storage cost that still meets the access requirement. Which S3 storage class should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval. The requirement is long-term, low-cost storage with immediate retrieval and no minutes-long latency. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval provides millisecond access at a lower storage cost than S3 Standard-IA, making it the best fit for rarely accessed documents retained for years. A lifecycle rule can move objects from S3 Standard to Glacier Instant Retrieval after the active 90-day period.

Answer

S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval

Answer

S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA)

Answer

S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA)

Question 13

A solutions architect is reviewing an Amazon S3 bucket that stores application assets. The bucket has S3 Versioning enabled and accumulates many noncurrent object versions that are no longer needed. The team wants to reduce storage cost while preserving the ability to recover from accidental deletions of current objects. Which two actions should the architect take? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Configure a lifecycle rule to expire noncurrent versions after a defined number of days.. The two cost drivers are accumulated noncurrent versions and lingering incomplete multipart uploads. A lifecycle rule expiring noncurrent versions removes unneeded old copies while preserving current-object recovery, and a rule aborting incomplete multipart uploads eliminates billable orphaned parts. Together they reduce storage cost without disabling versioning or harming retrieval of active assets.

Answer

Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on the bucket to reduce storage charges.

Answer

Transition current object versions to S3 Glacier Deep Archive immediately upon creation.

Answer

Disable S3 Versioning on the bucket to stop new versions from being created.

Question 14

A retail company runs a stateless web tier on a fleet of On-Demand EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Traffic is steady and predictable throughout the year, and the team has committed to running this exact instance family and Region for at least the next three years. Leadership wants to reduce compute cost as much as possible while keeping the ability to change instance size within the same family. Which purchasing option should the solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

A 3-year EC2 Instance Savings Plan with the All Upfront payment option. The workload is steady, long-lived, and already pinned to one instance family and Region, which is exactly the profile that EC2 Instance Savings Plans reward most heavily. Committing for three years with All Upfront yields the maximum discount, and the plan continues to allow size changes within the family, satisfying the flexibility requirement that rules out a size-locked reservation.

Answer

Spot Instances with a capacity-optimized allocation strategy

Answer

A 3-year Standard Reserved Instance for a specific instance size

Answer

A 3-year Compute Savings Plan with the No Upfront payment option

Question 15

A company runs a stateless web tier on a fleet of On-Demand EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Traffic is steady and predictable, and the team has committed to running this tier for the next three years with no planned architectural changes. Management wants the lowest possible compute cost while preserving the ability to change instance families during the term if a better price-performance option emerges. Which purchasing approach best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Purchase a 3-year Compute Savings Plan with a committed hourly spend.. A Compute Savings Plan is the right choice because it discounts a committed hourly spend across any EC2 instance family, size, and Region, plus Lambda and Fargate. That flexibility directly supports the requirement to change instance families during the three-year term, unlike a Standard Reserved Instance or an EC2 Instance Savings Plan, which are tied to a specific family or Region. Spot capacity is cheaper but cannot guarantee availability for a steady production tier.

Answer

Run the fleet on Spot Instances with a capacity-optimized allocation strategy.

Answer

Purchase a 3-year EC2 Instance Savings Plan scoped to the current instance family and Region.

Answer

Purchase a 3-year Standard Reserved Instance for each instance in the fleet.

Question 16

A startup runs a nightly batch job on a single EC2 instance that reads a large dataset from Amazon S3, performs transformations, and writes results back to S3. The job takes about two hours, and the team wants the job to restart automatically if the instance fails or is terminated by AWS. The job is idempotent and can safely resume from the beginning. What is the MOST operationally efficient way to meet this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Place the instance in an Auto Scaling group with a minimum and desired capacity of one, use a launch template that installs and starts the job at boot, and configure a lifecycle hook to keep the instance in service until the job completes.. A single-instance Auto Scaling group is the managed way to keep exactly one healthy instance running and to replace it automatically when it is terminated or fails. Supplying the job through a launch template's user data means every replacement instance starts the job again, and because the job is idempotent, restarting from the beginning is acceptable. No custom alarm or recovery scripting is required.

Answer

Use EC2 Auto Recovery to recover the instance onto new hardware and attach an Amazon EBS volume that persists the job's progress.

Answer

Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm on the StatusCheckFailed metric that invokes an AWS Lambda function to call the EC2 RebootInstances API.

Answer

Convert the job into an AWS Lambda function with a 15-minute timeout and trigger it on a nightly Amazon EventBridge schedule.

Question 17

A retail company runs an e-commerce platform on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Traffic follows a predictable pattern: high during business hours and very low overnight. The operations team wants to reduce EC2 costs without affecting availability during peak hours. The instances currently run continuously and are managed by an Auto Scaling group with a minimum capacity of 4 and a maximum of 20. Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Accepted Answer

Configure a scheduled scaling action on the Auto Scaling group to reduce the desired capacity during off-peak hours and increase it before peak hours.. For workloads with a predictable daily or weekly traffic pattern, scheduled scaling is the most direct way to align capacity with demand. It reduces the number of running instances during known low-traffic periods without waiting for a metric-based policy to react. Reserved Instances or target tracking do not eliminate the cost of idle overnight capacity in this scenario.

Answer

Enable detailed monitoring on all instances and create a target tracking scaling policy based on CPU utilization.

Answer

Purchase 4 Standard Reserved Instances for a 3-year term and let the Auto Scaling group launch On-Demand instances beyond that baseline.

Answer

Replace the Auto Scaling group with a larger number of smaller instances to improve granularity of scaling.

Question 18

A team runs a containerized API on Amazon ECS on Fargate in a single Region. Traffic is steady during business hours but drops to near zero overnight, and the team wants to reduce cost without rewriting the application. The team already uses Application Load Balancer and CloudWatch. Which two actions will reduce cost while keeping the API available? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Use Fargate Spot capacity for a portion of the ECS tasks and keep a baseline of on-demand Fargate tasks behind the load balancer.. Combining Fargate Spot for part of the fleet with a small on-demand baseline lowers the hourly compute rate while preserving availability, and target tracking on ALB request count per target shrinks the task count overnight so the service pays only for needed capacity. Together they reduce cost without rewriting the application and keep the API reachable through the load balancer.

Answer

Reduce the Fargate task CPU and memory to the minimum supported values for all tasks regardless of load.

Answer

Switch the ECS service launch type to EC2 and purchase 3-year All Upfront Reserved Instances for the cluster.

Answer

Enable ECS Exec on all tasks and remove the Application Load Balancer to save on ALB hourly charges.

Question 19

A financial analytics team runs a batch job every night that scans a 4 TB Amazon Redshift provisioned cluster table to compute aggregates for a reporting dashboard. The dashboard queries are read-only, run for several hours each morning, and compete with ETL writes on the same cluster, causing slow dashboard response times. The team wants to isolate the dashboard workload and improve query performance without changing the ETL job. Which solution meets these requirements with the LEAST operational effort?

Accepted Answer

Create a Redshift Serverless workgroup and use Redshift data sharing to expose the provisioned cluster's data to the serverless workgroup for the dashboard queries.. Redshift data sharing separates compute so the dashboard reads live producer data through a serverless consumer without copying or snapshotting. That removes contention with the ETL writes and lets the dashboard scale independently, all with minimal setup. Concurrency scaling still shares the cluster, snapshot restores give stale data, and moving to Athena requires a costly migration and SQL rewrite.

Answer

Enable concurrency scaling on the provisioned cluster and configure a workload management (WLM) queue for the dashboard queries.

Answer

Take a nightly snapshot of the cluster and restore it into a second provisioned cluster that serves only the dashboard queries.

Answer

Move the table to Amazon S3 and query it with Amazon Athena, pointing the dashboard at the Athena results.

Question 20

A healthcare company stores 80 TB of medical imaging data in Amazon S3. The data is written once and must be retained for seven years for compliance. New images are accessed frequently for the first 30 days, then almost never after that, but auditors occasionally request a specific image with no advance notice and expect it within minutes. The company wants to minimize storage cost while meeting the retrieval requirement. Which two actions should a solutions architect recommend? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Configure an S3 Lifecycle policy to transition objects to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval after 30 days.. Transitioning to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval after 30 days matches the long-term, rarely accessed pattern while preserving millisecond retrieval for auditor requests, which keeps storage cost low. Adding a seven-year compliance-mode Object Lock enforces the regulatory retention mandate. Together these actions satisfy both the cost and compliance requirements without compromising retrieval speed.

Answer

Enable S3 Versioning on the bucket to protect the imaging data from accidental deletion.

Answer

Configure an S3 Lifecycle policy to transition objects to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after 30 days.

Answer

Configure an S3 Lifecycle policy to transition objects to S3 Standard-IA after 30 days.