SAA-C03 Design High-Performing Architectures Practice Test 11 — 15 Questions

Question 1

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?

Accepted Answer

DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX). DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a fully managed, in-memory cache for Amazon DynamoDB that delivers up to 10x read performance improvement by caching frequently accessed data. For a read-heavy workload querying the same product catalogue data, DAX reduces read latency to microseconds and offloads read requests from the DynamoDB table, lowering consumed read capacity units and table load.

Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

Answer

S3 Transfer Acceleration

Answer

AWS Glue Data Catalog

Question 2

A analytics dashboard uses RDS MySQL and receives many read-only reporting queries that slow down the primary database. What should the architect add?

Accepted Answer

RDS read replica and route reporting queries to it. Adding an RDS read replica offloads read-heavy reporting queries from the primary MySQL instance, preserving write performance. The read replica asynchronously replicates data using MySQL's native binlog replication, and routing reporting queries to its endpoint reduces contention on the primary.

Answer

S3 lifecycle policy

Answer

Multi-AZ standby and route reads to the standby

Answer

A larger NAT gateway

Question 3

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

Accepted Answer

S3 multipart upload. S3 multipart upload is correct because it allows large files to be uploaded in parallel parts, which reduces the impact of network latency and improves throughput. For a latency-sensitive mobile game backend, this feature enables faster uploads by splitting the file into smaller chunks that can be uploaded concurrently, even over unstable connections.

Answer

S3 Object Lock

Answer

S3 Inventory

Question 4

A Lambda-based travel booking site has unpredictable traffic spikes and users see latency caused by cold starts. The function must respond consistently during expected campaign windows. What should be configured?

Accepted Answer

Provisioned concurrency during campaign windows. Provisioned concurrency initializes a specified number of execution environments in advance, eliminating cold starts for those instances. During campaign windows, this ensures consistent sub‑millisecond latency because the function is always warm and ready to handle requests immediately.

Answer

A larger deployment package

Answer

CloudTrail data events

Answer

Reserved concurrency only

Question 5

A media archive requires consistent high IOPS for a transactional database on EC2. Which EBS volume type is most suitable?

Accepted Answer

Provisioned IOPS SSD such as io2. The scenario requires consistent high IOPS for a transactional database, which demands low-latency, predictable performance. Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes like io2 are designed specifically for such workloads, offering up to 256,000 IOPS per volume with 99.999% durability, making them the most suitable choice for consistent high IOPS.

Answer

st1 Throughput Optimized HDD

Answer

Instance store only

Answer

sc1 Cold HDD

Question 6

A telemetry pipeline uses an Application Load Balancer in one Region. Global users need lower network latency to the application without caching dynamic responses. What should be considered?

Accepted Answer

AWS Global Accelerator. AWS Global Accelerator uses the Anycast IP address concept to route traffic through the AWS global network to the optimal endpoint, reducing latency and jitter for global users. It does not cache content, making it ideal for dynamic responses that cannot be cached, and it integrates directly with an Application Load Balancer in a single Region.

Answer

S3 Cross-Region Replication

Answer

CloudFront only with long TTLs

Answer

AWS Backup cross-Region copy

Question 7

A video platform 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 sits between Lambda functions and the Aurora database, pooling and reusing database connections. This prevents the Lambda functions from overwhelming the database with many short-lived connections, which can cause connection storms and degrade performance. RDS Proxy also reduces the overhead of establishing new connections and improves scalability.

Answer

S3 Select

Answer

An internet gateway

Answer

A larger Route 53 hosted zone

Question 8

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 9

A document portal needs low-latency full-text search across product descriptions and filtered attributes. Which managed service is most suitable?

Accepted Answer

Amazon OpenSearch Service. Amazon OpenSearch Service is purpose-built for full-text search, log analytics, and real-time application monitoring. It provides low-latency indexing and querying of unstructured and semi-structured data, making it ideal for searching product descriptions and filtering attributes. The service uses a RESTful API and supports advanced query DSL for complex search operations.

Answer

AWS Config

Answer

Amazon EFS

Answer

Amazon SQS

Question 10

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 11

A global mobile game backend serves mostly static images and JavaScript files from an S3 origin. Users in distant countries report slow load times. What should improve performance most?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudFront distribution with the S3 bucket as origin. Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) that caches static content (images, JavaScript files) at edge locations worldwide. By distributing content closer to users, it significantly reduces latency and improves load times for a global audience, making it the most effective solution for this use case.

Answer

RDS read replicas

Answer

A larger S3 bucket

Answer

An EC2 Auto Scaling group in one Region

Question 12

A DynamoDB table for a travel booking site has a partition key based only on the current date. Write throttling occurs during business hours. What is the best design change?

Accepted Answer

Use a higher-cardinality partition key that distributes writes across partitions. Option D is correct because using a low-cardinality partition key like the current date concentrates all writes into a single partition, causing throttling when write demand exceeds that partition's 1,000 WCU limit. A higher-cardinality key (e.g., combining date with user ID or session ID) distributes writes evenly across multiple partitions, allowing the table to use its full provisioned write capacity without throttling.

Answer

Create a global secondary index with the same date key

Answer

Move the table to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval

Answer

Reduce the table's write capacity

Question 13

A read-heavy media archive repeatedly queries the same product catalogue data from DynamoDB with millisecond latency requirements. Which service can reduce read latency and table load?

Accepted Answer

DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX). DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a fully managed, in-memory cache for DynamoDB that delivers up to 10x read performance improvement by reducing response times from single-digit milliseconds to microseconds. For a read-heavy workload repeatedly querying the same product catalogue data, DAX caches the hot items, offloading read requests from the DynamoDB table and significantly reducing table read capacity consumption.

Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

Answer

AWS Glue Data Catalog

Answer

S3 Transfer Acceleration

Question 14

A telemetry pipeline uses RDS MySQL and receives many read-only reporting queries that slow down the primary database. What should the architect add?

Accepted Answer

RDS read replica and route reporting queries to it. RDS Read Replicas are designed specifically to offload read-heavy workloads from the primary database. By creating a read replica and routing the reporting queries to it, the primary database is freed from processing these read-only queries, reducing contention and improving overall performance. This is the most cost-effective and architecturally appropriate solution for read scaling in RDS MySQL.

Answer

Multi-AZ standby and route reads to the standby

Answer

S3 lifecycle policy

Answer

A larger NAT gateway

Question 15

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

Answer

S3 Inventory