SAA-C03 Practice Exam 57 — 20 Questions

Question 1

A media company streams live video from on-premises encoders to viewers across North America. The encoders push a single RTMP feed to AWS, and the company wants the lowest possible glass-to-glass latency for viewers while distributing to thousands of concurrent viewers. The team does not want to manage any streaming servers. Which solution BEST meets these requirements?

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

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Elemental MediaLive to ingest the RTMP feed and MediaPackage to package it, then deliver to viewers with Amazon CloudFront.. A fully managed live workflow needs a live ingest/transcode stage, a packaging origin, and a global delivery layer. MediaLive handles the live input and encoding, MediaPackage produces just-in-time streaming formats, and CloudFront scales the last mile to many viewers. Together they deliver low latency without any streaming servers to operate or patch.

Answer

Use AWS Elemental MediaConvert to ingest the live RTMP feed and deliver it through an Amazon API Gateway WebSocket API.

Answer

Store the RTMP feed in an Amazon S3 bucket and have viewers stream directly from S3 using presigned URLs.

Answer

Run FFmpeg on a large Amazon EC2 instance to transcode the feed and serve it to viewers through an Application Load Balancer.

Question 2

A company runs a stateless web application on a fleet of EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The instances are in an Auto Scaling group that scales between 4 and 40 instances, and utilization is highly variable. The company wants to reduce compute cost while keeping the ability to change instance families and Regions over the next three years. Which purchasing strategy should the company use?

Accepted Answer

Purchase a Compute Savings Plan with a commitment equal to the steady-state baseline usage.. A Compute Savings Plan discounts eligible compute regardless of family, size, tenancy, or Region, which matches the requirement to change instance families and Regions over three years. Committing only to the steady-state baseline keeps the discount on always-on capacity while variable burst capacity is billed at On-Demand rates, so the company controls cost without sacrificing flexibility.

Answer

Purchase a 3-year Standard Reserved Instance for each of the 40 instances.

Answer

Use Spot Instances for the entire Auto Scaling group and remove the On-Demand capacity.

Answer

Purchase a 1-year EC2 Instance Savings Plan scoped to the current instance family and Region.

Question 3

A company hosts a public website on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The site is static HTML, CSS, and images, and the same content is served to all visitors. Origin CPU is high because every request is forwarded to the instances, and visitors in remote Regions see slow page loads. The team wants to reduce origin load and improve global latency with the least operational effort. Which solution should be used?

Accepted Answer

Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the ALB as the origin and configure cache behaviors for the static paths. For a static site served identically to all visitors, edge caching removes the majority of requests from the origin. CloudFront caches the static paths at edge locations, reducing EC2 CPU and improving latency for remote visitors, and it can be added in front of the existing ALB with only configuration changes, satisfying the low-effort requirement.

Answer

Enable AWS Global Accelerator with the ALB as the endpoint

Answer

Configure the ALB with cross-zone load balancing and enable sticky sessions

Answer

Move the static assets to an Amazon S3 bucket and serve them directly with S3 website hosting

Question 4

A media company serves a global audience from an Amazon S3 bucket in the us-east-1 Region. Users in Asia and Europe report high latency when downloading large video files directly from the bucket. The company wants to reduce download latency for these users without changing the application's bucket names or rewriting the application to use a different endpoint. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the S3 bucket as the origin, and have users access the distribution domain name.. CloudFront caches S3 content at edge locations close to viewers, so global users download from a nearby edge rather than the us-east-1 origin. This lowers latency for large media files and requires no change to the bucket or application code beyond pointing clients at the distribution domain. Transfer Acceleration targets faster transfers but not edge caching, replication forces endpoint selection changes, and relocating the bucket favors only one region.

Answer

Move the S3 bucket to a Region closer to the majority of users.

Answer

Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on the bucket and have clients use the accelerated endpoint.

Answer

Enable S3 Cross-Region Replication to buckets in Asia and Europe, and update the application to select the nearest bucket.

Question 5

A data engineering team ingests a continuous stream of clickstream events into Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. Downstream consumers process the events, but the team observes that a single consumer is handling a disproportionate share of the records, causing hot shards and throttling. The team wants the stream to distribute records as evenly as possible across shards. Which change should the team make?

Accepted Answer

Increase the number of open shards and configure the producer to use a random partition key for each record.. Skew in Kinesis comes from the partition key mapping many records to the same shard hash range. Choosing a high-cardinality, evenly distributed key such as a random value spreads records across all shards, and adding shards provides more capacity. Together these changes balance the stream and relieve hot-shard throttling.

Answer

Increase the retention period of the stream to 365 days to smooth out the load.

Answer

Enable enhanced fan-out on the stream so each consumer gets dedicated throughput.

Answer

Switch the producer to use an explicit partition key equal to the event's source IP address.

Question 6

A development team is building a new application that stores session state in a relational database. The application experiences unpredictable read traffic, and the team wants a fully managed database that can scale read capacity automatically and provide a reader endpoint that distributes connections across multiple replicas. Which AWS service should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Aurora with Aurora Replicas and the reader endpoint.. Aurora is a managed relational database whose Aurora Replicas serve read traffic, and the cluster reader endpoint spreads incoming read connections across those replicas automatically. That directly matches the need for automatic read scaling with a reader endpoint. DynamoDB is non-relational, RDS Multi-AZ standbys do not serve reads, and Redshift is an analytics warehouse rather than an OLTP database.

Answer

Amazon Redshift with concurrency scaling enabled.

Answer

Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity mode.

Answer

Amazon RDS for SQL Server with Multi-AZ deployment.

Question 7

A startup runs a stateless web application on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. Traffic is steady during business hours, but the team has configured the scaling policy with a target tracking metric of average CPU utilization at 50 percent. Users report intermittent 5xx errors during sudden traffic surges. Which change will most directly improve the application's ability to absorb rapid traffic increases?

Accepted Answer

Add a step scaling policy that reacts to Amazon CloudWatch alarms on request count per target and adds capacity in larger increments as the breach grows.. Sudden traffic surges require capacity that reacts to demand quickly and in proportion to the breach. Step scaling with CloudWatch alarms adds instances in larger, tiered increments as the metric worsens, shortening the period where the fleet is undersized. Scheduled scaling fits predictable peaks, and raising the CPU target or tuning deregistration affects cost or scale-in, not surge response.

Answer

Enable connection draining on the Application Load Balancer with a long deregistration delay so that in-flight requests complete before instances are removed.

Answer

Switch the Auto Scaling group to a scheduled scaling policy that adds instances at fixed times each morning based on historical traffic patterns.

Answer

Increase the target tracking value for average CPU utilization from 50 percent to 80 percent so that existing instances are used more fully before scaling out.

Question 8

A read-heavy document portal repeatedly queries the same product catalogue data from DynamoDB with millisecond latency requirements. Which service can reduce read latency and table load? The team wants the control to be enforceable during normal operations.

Accepted Answer

DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX). DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is an in-memory cache specifically designed for DynamoDB that can reduce read latency from single-digit milliseconds to microseconds, while offloading read traffic from the underlying table. This directly addresses the read-heavy workload and millisecond latency requirements, and the team can enforce its use during normal operations by configuring the application to route reads through the DAX cluster endpoint.

Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

Answer

S3 Transfer Acceleration

Answer

AWS Glue Data Catalog

Question 9

A retail API uses EC2 instances behind an ALB. CPU is consistently high during peak traffic, and request latency rises. What should be configured?

Accepted Answer

Auto Scaling policy based on an appropriate CloudWatch metric. An Auto Scaling policy based on an appropriate CloudWatch metric (such as CPUUtilization or ALBRequestCountPerTarget) dynamically adds or removes EC2 instances to match demand. This directly addresses the high CPU and rising latency by distributing the load across more instances, preventing performance degradation during peak traffic.

Answer

S3 Object Lock

Answer

A VPC endpoint for CloudWatch only

Answer

Disable health checks

Question 10

A logistics company runs an Amazon RDS for MySQL database that supports a parcel-tracking API. During the morning peak, read queries for tracking history saturate the primary instance's CPU, slowing writes. The reads can tolerate a few seconds of staleness, and the team wants to offload them without changing the database engine. Which action should the team take?

Accepted Answer

Create one or more read replicas and update the application to send tracking-history queries to the replica endpoint.. A read replica is a dedicated copy of the primary that serves read-only queries, so routing the tracking-history requests to it removes that CPU pressure from the primary instance while writes continue unimpeded. Replication is asynchronous, producing lag on the order of seconds, which matches the workload's tolerance for slightly stale reads. This keeps the MySQL engine and requires only an endpoint change in the application.

Answer

Enable Multi-AZ on the DB instance and point the read queries at the standby instance.

Answer

Increase the size of the RDS DB instance and enable storage autoscaling on the primary.

Answer

Migrate the database to Amazon DynamoDB with a global secondary index on the tracking ID.

Question 11

A mobile game backend uses Amazon Aurora. The workload has many short-lived database connections from Lambda functions, causing connection storms. What should be added?

Accepted Answer

RDS Proxy. RDS Proxy is the correct solution because it sits between Lambda functions and the Aurora database, pooling and reusing database connections. This prevents connection storms by reducing the overhead of establishing new connections for each short-lived Lambda invocation, and it also helps manage IAM authentication for Lambda functions without storing database credentials.

Answer

An internet gateway

Answer

S3 Select

Answer

A larger Route 53 hosted zone

Question 12

A startup has three sandbox accounts and one production account. The CTO wants lower cost and operational overhead while keeping central purchasing and spend visibility. Which two actions are best? Select two.

Accepted Answer

Enable consolidated billing under AWS Organizations so discounts and shared purchasing apply across accounts.. Option A is correct because AWS Organizations consolidated billing places all four accounts under a single payer account, which aggregates usage for volume discounts (such as S3 tiered pricing and Reserved Instance/Savings Plans sharing), centralizes purchasing, and provides a single bill for spend visibility — exactly matching the CTO's goals of lower cost, less overhead, and central purchasing. Option C is correct because replacing self-managed EC2-based databases and file servers with managed services like Amazon RDS and Amazon S3 reduces operational overhead (patching, backups, scaling handled by AWS) and typically lowers total cost, aligning with the startup's desire to minimize operational burden. Option B is wrong because separate payer accounts fragment billing, forfeit volume discounts and RI/SP sharing, and increase overhead rather than reduce it. Option D is wrong because Dedicated Hosts are a premium-priced option intended for licensing/compliance needs, not a cost-saving measure for sandbox workloads. Option E is wrong because AWS Budgets is a free cost-visibility and alerting tool; disabling it removes the very spend visibility the CTO wants, and consolidated billing alone does not provide budget alerts or thresholds.

Answer

Move each sandbox to its own payer account to isolate spend from the rest.

Answer

Buy Dedicated Hosts for sandbox workloads to get a lower blended rate.

Answer

Disable AWS Budgets because consolidated billing already solves visibility.

Question 13

A company hosts a B2B file exchange site on EC2. Administrators must connect without opening SSH or RDP ports to the internet. What should the architect use? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

Accepted Answer

AWS Systems Manager Session Manager with the required instance role. AWS Systems Manager Session Manager allows administrators to establish secure shell access to EC2 instances without opening inbound SSH or RDP ports, using the Systems Manager agent and an IAM instance role. This meets the requirement for no internet-exposed ports and avoids custom operational scripts because Session Manager is a fully managed AWS service.

Answer

A bastion host with SSH open to 0.0.0.0/0

Answer

A public Elastic IP address on each instance

Answer

An internet gateway attached to the private subnet

Question 14

A company serves mostly static images and JavaScript files from an origin in one AWS Region. They want to reduce origin load and improve global performance. Which change most directly increases cache-hit ratio for static assets while avoiding stale content?

Accepted Answer

Use versioned file names (e.g., app.abc123.js) and configure a long TTL with appropriate revalidation behavior.. Using versioned file names (e.g., app.abc123.js) allows you to set a long Cache-Control max-age TTL (e.g., one year) without risking stale content. When the file changes, the new version gets a new URL, so clients and edge caches immediately fetch the fresh object, maximizing cache hits for unchanged assets while avoiding stale content.

Answer

Set Cache-Control headers on the origin to always be no-cache so clients revalidate frequently.

Answer

Disable query string forwarding so all URLs without query strings share one cached object even when content differs.

Answer

Forward all headers, including cookies, to maximize personalization in edge cached responses.

Question 15

An administrator needs the ability to read and update infrastructure for a specific AWS account, but only when using MFA. The security team wants to eliminate long-lived administrator access keys and ensure that even if someone obtains temporary session credentials, actions are only allowed with MFA present.

Which IAM design best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Create an IAM role for administration and use a permissions policy that allows only the required read/write actions. Add a condition to deny all allowed actions unless aws:MultiFactorAuthPresent is true.. It uses an IAM role with a condition key `aws:MultiFactorAuthPresent` set to `true` to enforce MFA for all API calls made with temporary credentials. This eliminates long-lived access keys and ensures that even if temporary session credentials are compromised, actions are denied unless MFA was used during the session. The policy explicitly denies all allowed actions when MFA is not present, meeting the security team's requirement for MFA on every administrative action.

Answer

Create an IAM user for administrators with AdministratorAccess and require MFA only at the IAM user login.

Answer

Attach policies to an IAM user that allow read/write actions and enable MFA in the account, but do not use condition keys in IAM policies.

Answer

Use a role with the correct actions but enforce MFA only in the application by prompting users for an OTP before every API call.

Question 16

A compute workload uses temporary scratch space for intermediate results (reproducible), and it can tolerate data loss if the instance is terminated. The workload benefits from very high local I/O throughput. Which storage option is the best fit for the scratch data?

Accepted Answer

Instance store for local temporary files that can be lost when the instance stops.. Instance store volumes provide very high local I/O throughput because they are physically attached to the host server, making them ideal for temporary scratch data that is reproducible and can tolerate loss. Since the workload explicitly accepts data loss on instance termination and does not require persistence across reboots, instance store is the best fit for this use case.

Answer

Amazon EBS General Purpose (gp3) volumes to persist intermediate results across reboots.

Answer

Amazon EFS for a shared file system between multiple instances.

Answer

Amazon S3 for scratch data so it is always durable and accessible from anywhere.

Question 17

A startup runs two EC2-based workloads in the same AWS Region. Its customer-facing API is always on, and its nightly video transcoding fleet can restart jobs from checkpoints if an instance is interrupted. The finance team wants the lowest monthly compute cost without changing the application design. Which two actions should the team take? Select two.

Accepted Answer

Buy a Compute Savings Plan to cover the always-on API baseline usage.. A Compute Savings Plan offers the lowest cost for steady-state workloads like the always-on API, providing up to 66% savings over On-Demand in exchange for a 1- or 3-year commitment. It applies to any EC2 instance family within a Region, making it flexible and cost-effective for the baseline usage. Option C is correct because Spot Instances can be up to 90% cheaper than On-Demand and are ideal for fault-tolerant workloads like the transcoding fleet, which can resume from checkpoints if interrupted.

Answer

Purchase an All Upfront Reserved Instance for the transcoding fleet only.

Answer

Increase the API instance size so CPU utilization stays below 30 percent.

Answer

Move the API tier to Dedicated Hosts to improve isolation and lower spend.

Question 18

A company runs its customer-facing web app on EC2 behind an Application Load Balancer. The database is Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The requirement is that if a single Availability Zone fails, the database must automatically fail over within the same AWS Region with minimal application changes. Which database setup best meets this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Deploy the RDS PostgreSQL instance as Multi-AZ with automatic failover enabled.. RDS Multi-AZ for PostgreSQL automatically provisions and maintains a synchronous standby replica in a different Availability Zone. If the primary AZ fails, Amazon RDS automatically fails over to the standby, typically within 60–120 seconds, with no changes required to the application's connection string (the DNS name remains the same). This meets the requirement for minimal application changes and automatic failover within the same Region.

Answer

Use an RDS single-AZ instance and periodically restore from automated backups if needed.

Answer

Create a read replica in a different AZ and use it only when the primary fails.

Answer

Use RDS with Multi-AZ disabled, but increase storage IOPS to prevent failover.

Question 19

A media company runs a 24/7 ingestion API on EC2 behind an Application Load Balancer and a nightly transcoding job that can resume from checkpoints. The API fleet runs at roughly 65 percent CPU all day, while the batch workers sit idle most of the time. The company wants to cut compute cost without risking the API. Which two changes should they make? Select two.

Accepted Answer

Purchase a Compute Savings Plan for the always-on API fleet.. Option A is correct because the API fleet is an always-on, steady-state workload running 24/7 at ~65% CPU, which is exactly the profile a Compute Savings Plan discounts (up to 66% off On-Demand) while remaining flexible across instance families, sizes, Regions, and even Fargate/Lambda, so it lowers cost without changing capacity or risking the API. Option B is correct because the transcoding job is fault-tolerant and can resume from checkpoints, making it ideal for EC2 Spot Instances, which offer up to 90% off On-Demand; a Spot interruption only triggers a two-minute warning and the job simply resumes from its last checkpoint. Option C is wrong because Dedicated Hosts are for licensing/compliance or BYOL requirements and are typically more expensive, not a cost-optimization lever for a standard ALB-fronted API. Option D is wrong because buying Standard RIs and keeping batch workers running 24/7 pays for idle capacity the workload does not need, defeating the cost goal. Option E is wrong because raising the Auto Scaling minimum does not prevent Spot interruptions and would increase cost by keeping more idle workers running.

Answer

Replace the API fleet with Dedicated Hosts to lock in lower rates.

Answer

Buy Standard Reserved Instances for the batch workers and keep them running 24/7.

Answer

Increase the worker Auto Scaling minimum to prevent Spot interruptions.

Question 20

A team runs a stateless web app on Amazon EC2 behind an Application Load Balancer. During traffic spikes, new EC2 instances take several minutes to finish bootstrapping before they can receive traffic. Which Auto Scaling configuration most directly reduces the time until additional capacity is available?

Accepted Answer

Use an Auto Scaling warm pool so pre-initialized instances are ready to enter service.. An Auto Scaling warm pool allows you to maintain a pool of pre-initialized instances that are ready to quickly enter the target group and start serving traffic. Instead of waiting for new instances to boot and configure during a scale-out event, the warm pool provides instances that have already completed bootstrapping, drastically reducing the time to additional capacity.

Answer

Increase the ALB target group deregistration delay.

Answer

Reduce the Auto Scaling group minimum size to one instance.

Answer

Replace the Application Load Balancer with a Network Load Balancer.