SAA-C03 Design High-Performing Architectures Practice Test 8 — 15 Questions

Question 1

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? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

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

Accepted Answer

Provisioned concurrency during campaign windows. Provisioned concurrency keeps a specified number of Lambda execution environments initialized and ready to respond immediately, eliminating cold starts. By enabling it only during campaign windows, you ensure consistent latency for the travel booking site during traffic spikes without incurring cost during off-peak periods. This directly addresses the requirement to avoid custom scripts, as it is a native AWS feature configured via the Lambda API or console.

Answer

A larger deployment package

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CloudTrail data events

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Reserved concurrency only

Question 2

A media archive requires consistent high IOPS for a transactional database on EC2. Which EBS volume type is most suitable? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

Accepted Answer

Provisioned IOPS SSD such as io2. A Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) volume is the correct choice because it delivers consistent, high IOPS required for transactional databases, with a 99.999% durability guarantee and the ability to provision IOPS independently of storage capacity. This avoids custom operational scripts by providing predictable performance natively through the EBS volume type.

Answer

st1 Throughput Optimized HDD

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Instance store only

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sc1 Cold HDD

Question 3

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? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

Accepted Answer

AWS Global Accelerator. AWS Global Accelerator uses the AWS global network to route traffic from global users to the Application Load Balancer, reducing latency and jitter by leveraging Anycast IP addresses and edge locations. It does not cache responses, making it ideal for dynamic content where low latency is required without custom operational scripts.

Answer

S3 Cross-Region Replication

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CloudFront only with long TTLs

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AWS Backup cross-Region copy

Question 4

A video platform uses Amazon Aurora. The workload has many short-lived database connections from Lambda functions, causing connection storms. What should be added? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

Accepted Answer

RDS Proxy. RDS Proxy is the correct choice 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, without requiring custom scripts or application changes.

Answer

S3 Select

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An internet gateway

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A larger Route 53 hosted zone

Question 5

A retail API uses EC2 instances behind an ALB. CPU is consistently high during peak traffic, and request latency rises. What should be configured? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

Accepted Answer

Auto Scaling policy based on an appropriate CloudWatch metric. An Auto Scaling policy based on a CloudWatch metric like CPUUtilization or ALB TargetResponseTime can dynamically add or remove EC2 instances to match demand. This directly addresses the high CPU and rising latency during peak traffic without requiring custom scripts, as the scaling actions are fully managed by AWS. The ALB distributes traffic across the scaled instances, reducing per-instance load and improving response times.

Answer

S3 Object Lock

Answer

A VPC endpoint for CloudWatch only

Answer

Disable health checks

Question 6

A document portal needs low-latency full-text search across product descriptions and filtered attributes. Which managed service is most suitable? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

Accepted Answer

Amazon OpenSearch Service. Amazon OpenSearch Service is the correct choice because it is a fully managed service that provides low-latency full-text search and filtering capabilities, ideal for indexing and searching product descriptions and attributes. It eliminates the need for custom operational scripts by handling cluster management, scaling, and backups automatically, aligning with the requirement to avoid custom operational overhead.

Answer

AWS Config

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Amazon EFS

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Amazon SQS

Question 7

A high-volume analytics dashboard writes streaming click events that must be processed by multiple independent consumers. Which service is most appropriate? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

Accepted Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is the correct choice because it is designed for real-time streaming data ingestion and processing by multiple independent consumers. Each consumer can read from the stream at its own pace using its own shard iterator, enabling parallel processing of click events without custom scripts. This aligns with the requirement for a high-volume analytics dashboard where multiple downstream applications need to consume the same stream independently.

Answer

Amazon Route 53

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Amazon EBS

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AWS DataSync

Question 8

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? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudFront distribution with the S3 bucket as origin. Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) that caches static content at edge locations worldwide, reducing latency for users in distant countries by serving files from the nearest edge. Using the S3 bucket as the origin, CloudFront distributes the content globally without requiring any custom operational scripts, directly addressing the slow load times for static assets.

Answer

RDS read replicas

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A larger S3 bucket

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An EC2 Auto Scaling group in one Region

Question 9

A telemetry pipeline uses RDS MySQL and receives many read-only reporting queries that slow down the primary database. What should the architect add? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

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 reporting queries to it, the architect reduces load on the primary MySQL instance without custom scripts. This is a native, managed feature of RDS that supports asynchronous replication.

Answer

Multi-AZ standby and route reads to the standby

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S3 lifecycle policy

Answer

A larger NAT gateway

Question 10

A latency-sensitive video platform uploads large files to S3 from users around the world. Which two features can improve upload performance? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

Accepted Answer

S3 Transfer Acceleration. S3 Transfer Acceleration (B) uses AWS edge locations to route uploads over optimized network paths, reducing latency for users far from the destination bucket. S3 Multipart Upload (C) allows parallel uploads of file parts, improving throughput and resilience for large files. Both features enhance upload performance without requiring custom scripts.

Answer

S3 Object Lock

Answer

S3 Inventory

Question 11

A Lambda-based retail API 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? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

Accepted Answer

Provisioned concurrency during campaign windows. Provisioned concurrency initializes a specified number of execution environments in advance, eliminating cold starts during campaign windows. This ensures consistent response times for the Lambda-based retail API under unpredictable traffic spikes without requiring custom scripts.

Answer

A larger deployment package

Answer

Reserved concurrency only

Answer

CloudTrail data events

Question 12

A document portal requires consistent high IOPS for a transactional database on EC2. Which EBS volume type is most suitable? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

Accepted Answer

Provisioned IOPS SSD such as io2. Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes (io2) are designed for latency-sensitive transactional workloads that require consistent, high IOPS. They deliver a predictable performance level with a 99.9% durability guarantee, making them ideal for a database on EC2 without needing custom scripts to manage performance.

Answer

sc1 Cold HDD

Answer

Instance store only

Answer

st1 Throughput Optimized HDD

Question 13

A travel booking site uses EC2 instances behind an ALB. CPU is consistently high during peak traffic, and request latency rises. What should be configured? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

Accepted Answer

Auto Scaling policy based on an appropriate CloudWatch metric. An Auto Scaling policy based on a CloudWatch metric like CPUUtilization or request latency directly addresses the high CPU and rising latency by automatically adding EC2 instances during peak traffic. This eliminates the need for custom scripts and ensures the application scales horizontally to maintain performance.

Answer

A VPC endpoint for CloudWatch only

Answer

S3 Object Lock

Answer

Disable health checks

Question 14

A high-volume telemetry pipeline writes streaming click events that must be processed by multiple independent consumers. Which service is most appropriate? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.

Accepted Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is designed for real-time streaming of high-volume data, such as click events, and allows multiple independent consumers to process the same stream concurrently via enhanced fan-out or shared throughput. It provides durable, ordered data retention and integrates with AWS Lambda, Kinesis Data Analytics, and Kinesis Data Firehose without requiring custom operational scripts.

Answer

AWS DataSync

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Amazon EBS

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Amazon Route 53

Question 15

A DynamoDB table for a retail API has a partition key based only on the current date. Write throttling occurs during business hours. What is the best design change? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.

Accepted Answer

Use a higher-cardinality partition key that distributes writes across partitions. Using only the current date as a partition key creates a hot partition because all writes for the day target a single partition, leading to throttling. A higher-cardinality partition key, such as a composite key combining date with a unique attribute like user ID or order ID, distributes writes evenly across multiple partitions, fully utilizing DynamoDB's provisioned throughput. This is the best managed-native solution to resolve write throttling without changing the table's capacity or moving data.

Answer

Create a global secondary index with the same date key

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Reduce the table's write capacity

Answer

Move the table to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval