SAA-C03 Design Resilient Architectures Practice Question
A financial services company is hosting a critical web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application must remain available even if an entire AWS Region experiences a major outage. The database tier uses Amazon Aurora Global Databases. Which solution provides the most resilient multi-Region architecture with automated failover?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often choose solutions that provide multi-region high availability without considering automated cross-region database failover or active-passive failover mechanisms necessary for disaster recovery in financial applications.
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 the application stack across two AWS Regions, use Amazon Route 53 with active-passive failover and automated health checks, and configure Amazon Aurora Global Databases with cross-region replication.
Deploying Route 53 with active-passive failover and automated health checks combined with a secondary Region ensures automatic traffic rerouting during a regional disaster. Aurora Global Databases minimize replication lag and permit fast promotion of the secondary region database, maintaining data consistency and business continuity for critical financial applications requiring minimal recovery time objectives.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Configure an Application Load Balancer in a single Region with EC2 instances distributed across multiple Availability Zones, and back the application with a standard Aurora MySQL database instance.
Why it's wrong here
A single Region architecture creates a single point of failure if the entire AWS Region suffers an outage. Standard Aurora databases lack cross-region replication capabilities required for high availability across geographical boundaries during catastrophic regional failures.
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Use Amazon Route 53 with weighted routing policies to distribute traffic between two AWS Regions, and configure standard cross-region database replication using Amazon RDS snapshots taken every hour.
Why it's wrong here
Weighted routing does not perform automated health checks to reroute traffic away from a failed Region instantly. Hourly RDS snapshots introduce a high RPO and manual intervention is required to restore databases, which violates critical resiliency requirements.
- ✓
Deploy the application stack across two AWS Regions, use Amazon Route 53 with active-passive failover and automated health checks, and configure Amazon Aurora Global Databases with cross-region replication.
Why this is correct
Route 53 active-passive routing with health checks automatically detects regional failures and redirects user traffic to the secondary Region. Aurora Global Databases provide low-latency cross-region replication and fast failover capabilities to ensure uninterrupted application availability.
- ✗
Set up an AWS Global Accelerator standard accelerator with endpoint groups in two AWS Regions, and use Amazon DynamoDB global tables with local secondary indexes for data storage.
Why it's wrong here
While AWS Global Accelerator and DynamoDB global tables offer high availability, the scenario specifies an Amazon Aurora relational database tier rather than DynamoDB, making this architecture incompatible with the existing relational database requirements of the application.
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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.