SAA-C03 Design Resilient Architectures Practice Question
A company is designing a high-throughput, fault-tolerant payment processing system running on Amazon EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones. The architecture must withstand the sudden failure of any single AZ without dropping active database transactions or corrupting state. Which TWO design practices should the solutions architect implement?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates select Multi-AZ RDS instances instead of Aurora clusters, missing the specific requirement for high-throughput payment processing systems running across multiple Availability Zones with automatic failover.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Deploy an Amazon Aurora database cluster configured across multiple Availability Zones with an automatic failover replica.
Deploying the EC2 instances across an Auto Scaling group spanning multiple Availability Zones ensures compute capacity automatically rebalances during failures. Utilizing Amazon Aurora Multi-AZ deployments provides high availability and automatic failover for relational databases. Together, these practices protect both the compute and data tiers from localized outages.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Deploy an Amazon Aurora database cluster configured across multiple Availability Zones with an automatic failover replica.
Why this is correct
Amazon Aurora automatically replicates storage across three Availability Zones and promotes a read replica to primary within seconds if the primary instance fails. This prevents database downtime and protects against data corruption during infrastructure failures.
- ✗
Store application state files on a single Amazon EBS General Purpose SSD attached to the primary EC2 instance.
Why it's wrong here
Amazon EBS volumes are tied to a specific Availability Zone and cannot span multiple zones natively. Relying on a single EBS volume creates a single point of failure that will cause data loss or downtime if that Availability Zone experiences an outage.
- ✗
Configure an Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing policy to direct user traffic directly to EC2 instances in each zone.
Why it's wrong here
Route 53 latency-based routing optimizes performance globally across regions rather than managing intra-region Availability Zone failover. An Application Load Balancer should be used in front of EC2 instances for localized traffic distribution and health checking.
- ✓
Distribute Amazon EC2 instances across an Auto Scaling group configured with subnets spanning at least three Availability Zones.
Why this is correct
Spanning an Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones allows AWS to automatically launch replacement instances in healthy zones if one zone fails. This maintains required compute capacity and preserves application availability without manual intervention.
- ✗
Pin all payment processing worker threads to a single static EC2 instance to simplify debugging and transaction logging.
Why it's wrong here
Pinning all workload threads to a single EC2 instance eliminates fault tolerance and introduces a severe single point of failure. If that instance or its underlying host fails, the entire payment processing capability will experience an outage.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Amazon Web Services exam blueprint
This SAA-C03 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the SAA-C03 exam.