SAA-C03 Design High-Performing Architectures Practice Test 18 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A analytics dashboard uses RDS MySQL and receives many read-only reporting queries that slow down the primary database. What should the architect add? The team wants the control to be enforceable during normal operations.

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

Accepted Answer

RDS read replica and route reporting queries to it. B is correct because an RDS read replica is designed to offload read-heavy workloads from the primary database instance. By routing reporting queries to the read replica, the primary database is freed from processing these read-only requests, improving overall performance. This solution is enforceable during normal operations as the read replica is always available for reads, unlike a Multi-AZ standby which is not accessible for reads.

Answer

S3 lifecycle policy

Answer

Multi-AZ standby and route reads to the standby

Answer

A larger NAT gateway

Question 2

A media archive requires consistent high IOPS for a transactional database on EC2. Which EBS volume type is most suitable? The team wants the control to be enforceable during normal operations.

Accepted Answer

Provisioned IOPS SSD such as io2. The io2 Provisioned IOPS SSD volume type is designed for latency-sensitive transactional database workloads that require consistent high IOPS. It allows you to specify a guaranteed IOPS rate (up to 256,000 IOPS for io2 Block Express) and provides 99.999% durability, making it ideal for enforcing performance control during normal operations.

Answer

st1 Throughput Optimized HDD

Answer

Instance store only

Answer

sc1 Cold HDD

Question 3

A company needs to implement session management for a web application. Sessions must persist across multiple EC2 instances, survive EC2 failures, and be accessible with sub-millisecond latency. Sessions must also be sortable by last-access time to expire the oldest sessions first. Which caching solution should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis with sessions stored as sorted sets. Amazon ElastiCache for Redis satisfies all requirements: multi-instance session sharing (sessions stored externally), sub-millisecond latency, survival of EC2 failures (stored outside instances), and sorted sets (ZSET data structure) for ordering sessions by last-access score.

Memcached supports only simple key-value pairs — it cannot perform sorted set operations to order sessions by last-access time. Memcached also lacks replication, meaning a node failure loses all cached sessions.

Answer

Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached with session data stored as key-value pairs

Answer

Amazon DynamoDB with TTL enabled for session expiration

Answer

ElastiCache for Redis with sticky sessions enabled on the Application Load Balancer

Question 4

A company needs to replicate a DynamoDB table to three AWS regions so that users in each region can read and write to a local copy with the lowest possible latency. Changes must propagate to all regions within seconds. Which solution should a solutions architect implement?

Accepted Answer

Configure DynamoDB Global Tables with replica tables in each of the three regions. DynamoDB Global Tables provide multi-region, multi-active (multi-master) replication. Each region maintains a full replica of the table, and applications can read and write to any region with local latency. Changes propagate to all other regions typically within one second.

DynamoDB Streams + Lambda is the underlying mechanism that Global Tables uses internally, but building a custom replication pipeline adds significant operational complexity. Global Tables is the managed, purpose-built solution requiring no custom code.

Answer

Enable DynamoDB Streams and use Lambda functions to replicate changes to tables in the other two regions

Answer

Create DynamoDB read replicas in each region and use the primary table for all writes

Answer

Use Amazon S3 cross-region replication to back up DynamoDB exports to each region

Question 5

A company is deploying a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster with 16 EC2 instances. The workload requires the lowest possible network latency and highest throughput between all nodes for tightly coupled parallel MPI computations. Which EC2 placement group type should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Cluster placement group. Cluster placement groups pack instances physically close together within a single Availability Zone, providing the lowest possible network latency and highest network throughput between instances. They support enhanced networking (SR-IOV) and Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for inter-node MPI communication.

Tightly coupled parallel HPC workloads require all nodes to communicate frequently with minimal latency. Cluster placement groups are specifically designed for this use case. The trade-off is all instances are in one AZ — if the AZ fails, the entire cluster is affected.

Answer

Partition placement group

Answer

Spread placement group

Answer

No placement group — use Auto Scaling across multiple AZs

Question 6

A media company is designing a high-performance architecture to serve video content to users worldwide. The solution must minimize latency for end users and reduce the load on the origin servers. The video files are stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. Which three options should be combined to meet these requirements? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon CloudFront as a content delivery network (CDN) with the S3 bucket as the origin.. Amazon CloudFront as a CDN with the S3 bucket as the origin minimizes latency by caching video content at edge locations worldwide, serving users from the nearest edge. This reduces load on the origin S3 bucket by handling requests at the edge. Regional Edge Caches further improve cache hit ratios for less popular content by caching it at regional locations, reducing the need to fetch from the origin. Origin shield in CloudFront consolidates requests from multiple edge locations into a single request to the S3 origin, significantly reducing the number of direct requests and lowering origin load.

Answer

Enable S3 default encryption using AWS KMS to improve data transfer performance.

Answer

Use Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached to cache video metadata at the edge.

Answer

Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on the bucket to speed up uploads.

Question 7

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 8

A DevOps team is designing a high-performance CI/CD pipeline to build and test code changes. The pipeline needs to scale to handle hundreds of concurrent builds, with fast build times and minimal idle compute cost. The builds are containerized and require consistent, reproducible environments. Which three options should be used to meet these requirements? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Use Amazon S3 as a cache store for CodeBuild to speed up dependency download.. AWS CodePipeline is the correct orchestration service to define and manage the CI/CD pipeline stages (build, test, deploy) in a serverless, highly available manner. Pre-built Docker images cached in Amazon ECR ensure consistent, reproducible environments and drastically reduce build times by avoiding image rebuilds. Using Amazon S3 as a cache store for CodeBuild allows storing and retrieving dependency caches (e.g., Maven .m2, npm node_modules) across builds, minimizing download times and speeding up the pipeline.

Answer

Use Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling with a custom AMI for build agents.

Answer

Use self-managed Jenkins on EC2 Spot Instances to reduce costs.

Answer

Use AWS CodeBuild with a large number of concurrent build projects.

Question 9

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 ElastiCache for Redis with cluster mode enabled.. 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 S3 as a primary data store accessed via Select and Range queries.

Answer

Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ and Read Replicas.

Answer

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

Question 10

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 11

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?

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 12

A company runs a media-processing pipeline that ingests thousands of small files per minute into Amazon S3 and triggers AWS Lambda functions for each object. Processing each file takes 2-3 seconds, and the team is seeing throttling errors and duplicated processing under load. They want to decouple ingestion from processing, buffer bursty traffic, and avoid duplicate deliveries to Lambda. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Configure an Amazon S3 event notification to send events to an Amazon SQS standard queue, then have Lambda poll the queue with a batch size of 10 and a visibility timeout longer than the processing time.. Decoupling ingestion from processing with an SQS queue lets the pipeline absorb bursts while Lambda scales consumers based on backlog depth. A visibility timeout longer than the function execution time ensures that a message is not redelivered before processing completes, which prevents duplicates. Direct invocation from S3 does not provide buffering, and concurrency or acceleration features do not solve throttling or duplicate delivery.

Answer

Increase the Lambda reserved concurrency to the maximum account limit and keep the direct S3 event notification to Lambda, so functions run in parallel and finish faster.

Answer

Use an S3 event notification to invoke an AWS Step Functions state machine that processes each file and retries on failure, with a Map state for parallelism.

Answer

Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on the bucket and configure Lambda provisioned concurrency to handle the burst of events without cold starts.

Question 13

A company runs a stateless web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Traffic has grown, and the operations team notices that individual instances are often underutilized while others are saturated because traffic is not evenly distributed. The team wants the load balancer to distribute requests more evenly across healthy targets. Which action should the team take?

Accepted Answer

Configure the target group to use the least outstanding requests routing algorithm.. Even distribution of HTTP requests depends on the target group's routing algorithm. Least outstanding requests routes each new request to the target with the fewest active requests, which smooths out variance in request processing time. Round-robin alone can pile requests onto a slow target, so the least outstanding requests option is the right lever for a stateless workload.

Answer

Increase the idle timeout on the Application Load Balancer.

Answer

Change the load balancer from Application Load Balancer to Network Load Balancer.

Answer

Enable sticky sessions (session affinity) on the target group.

Question 14

A financial analytics team runs a read-heavy workload on Amazon Aurora MySQL. The primary instance is experiencing high CPU during end-of-day reporting, and read replicas are lagging by several seconds. The application requires strong read consistency for account balances but can tolerate eventual consistency for historical reports. Which change should a solutions architect make to improve performance while meeting consistency requirements?

Accepted Answer

Route balance queries to the primary instance endpoint and historical report queries to the reader endpoint, and enable Aurora Auto Scaling to add read replicas based on replica utilization.. Strongly consistent reads must target the primary instance, while eventually consistent reporting can be served by Aurora read replicas. Aurora Auto Scaling dynamically adds replicas based on load, increasing read capacity and reducing lag. This split preserves correctness for account balances and offloads reporting from the primary, improving overall performance without compromising consistency.

Answer

Enable Aurora Auto Scaling for read replicas and direct all queries, including balance lookups, to the reader endpoint to distribute load evenly.

Answer

Create a second Aurora cluster that replicates from the primary using binary log replication, and direct all reporting queries to the second cluster's writer endpoint.

Answer

Increase the primary instance size and enable the query cache, then send all read traffic to the primary to ensure strong consistency for every query.

Question 15

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.

Answer

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.

Answer

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.