SAA-C03 Practice Test 7 — 10 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

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 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

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 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

Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on the bucket for faster downloads.

Answer

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

Answer

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

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

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.

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 Aurora cluster to include at least one Aurora Replica in a different Availability Zone than the primary instance.. 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

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

Answer

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

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