SAA-C03 Design High-Performing Architectures Practice Question
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?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is treating session affinity as a way to balance load, when it actually pins clients to single targets and worsens imbalance.
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
✓
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 analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the idle timeout on the Application Load Balancer.
Why it's wrong here
The idle timeout controls how long an idle connection is held open before it is closed; it does not influence which target receives a given request. Raising it can even hold connections open longer without improving balance. The uneven distribution is a routing-algorithm issue, so this setting does not address the root cause.
- ✗
Change the load balancer from Application Load Balancer to Network Load Balancer.
Why it's wrong here
A Network Load Balancer operates at the connection level and is optimized for extreme throughput and static IPs, not for HTTP-aware request distribution. For a stateless HTTP application, moving to a Network Load Balancer changes the routing model without addressing the imbalance, and it removes Layer 7 features that help balance request-level work.
- ✓
Configure the target group to use the least outstanding requests routing algorithm.
Why this is correct
The least outstanding requests algorithm sends each new request to the target with the fewest in-flight requests, which naturally evens out load when request durations vary. It is well suited to stateless HTTP workloads and prevents slow or busy instances from accumulating a queue while idle targets sit unused, improving overall balance across healthy targets.
- ✗
Enable sticky sessions (session affinity) on the target group.
Why it's wrong here
Sticky sessions deliberately bind a client to a single target for the life of the cookie, which concentrates that client's load on one instance and makes distribution less even over time. For a stateless application there is no session state to preserve, so stickiness only adds imbalance and skews the load away from the goal of even distribution.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This SAA-C03 question is part of Courseiva's 935-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
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.