SAA-C03 Design High-Performing Architectures Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  Place the EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone to reduce network latency.

  Why it's wrong here

  Placing EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone (AZ) would indeed minimize intra-AZ network latency between instances, but it critically compromises the application's high availability and fault tolerance. A high-performance web application requires resilience against AZ-level failures, which multi-AZ deployments provide. Furthermore, the primary latency concern for a web application is typically user-to-server latency, which is better addressed by edge caching or network optimization services rather than restricting compute to a single AZ.

• ✓

  Use Amazon CloudFront to cache both static and dynamic content at edge locations.

  Why this is correct

  Amazon CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that significantly enhances web application performance by caching both static assets (like images, CSS, JavaScript) and dynamic content (API responses) at geographically distributed edge locations worldwide. This reduces the physical distance between users and the content, dramatically lowering latency and improving load times. By serving content from the cache, CloudFront also offloads requests from the origin servers, improving their responsiveness and scalability.

• ✓

  Integrate the ALB with AWS Global Accelerator to route traffic over the AWS global network.

  Why this is correct

  Integrating an Application Load Balancer (ALB) with AWS Global Accelerator routes user traffic over the highly optimized AWS global network backbone, bypassing the often congested public internet. Global Accelerator provides static Anycast IP addresses at AWS edge locations, directing users to the nearest healthy endpoint (e.g., an ALB in a specific region). This optimization significantly reduces latency and improves application performance, especially for a global user base, by ensuring traffic takes the fastest, most reliable path to the application.

• ✓

  Use a larger EC2 instance type with higher network bandwidth, such as the c5n or m5n family.

  Why this is correct

  Using larger EC2 instance types with higher network bandwidth, such as those from the c5n or m5n families, directly addresses potential network bottlenecks within the application servers. These instances are equipped with enhanced networking capabilities (e.g., Elastic Network Adapter - ENA) that provide significantly higher packet per second (PPS) performance and network throughput. This is crucial for a high-performance web application that needs to handle a large volume of concurrent connections and data transfer efficiently without becoming constrained by the instance's network capacity.

• ✗

  Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on the bucket for faster downloads.

  Why it's wrong here

  S3 Transfer Acceleration is designed to speed up uploads of data to an S3 bucket from clients located far from the bucket's region, by routing the data through CloudFront edge locations. While it uses the CloudFront network, its primary benefit is for ingress (uploads) to S3, not for accelerating downloads of web application content served by EC2 instances or CloudFront itself. For faster downloads of web content, CloudFront is the appropriate service.

• ✗

  Use an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ database for read replicas to offload read traffic.

  Why it's wrong here

  An Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployment provides high availability and automatic failover for a database by synchronously replicating data to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone. However, the standby instance is not used for read traffic. To offload read traffic from the primary database and improve read performance and scalability, Amazon RDS Read Replicas are required. This option incorrectly conflates the high availability feature of Multi-AZ with the read scaling capability of read replicas.

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