A DynamoDB-backed multi-tenant app experiences throttling during a promotion. Most writes and reads target tenant "ACME" and use the same partition key value, causing a hot partition. Which design change most directly improves performance?

Increase the table’s read capacity without changing the partition key

Even with more provisioned capacity, a single heavily used partition key value remains limited by per-partition throughput characteristics. Increasing capacity does not eliminate the hot-partition bottleneck.

Switch all reads to strongly consistent reads to guarantee faster results

Strongly consistent reads typically consume more capacity and do not remove the hot partition issue. If reads are still routed to the same hot partition key value, throttling can continue or worsen.

Store ACME data in S3 and query it directly to avoid DynamoDB throttling

S3 is not a low-latency, high-throughput substitute for DynamoDB item access patterns in an API workload. Moving to S3 would increase latency and require a different data access strategy and query mechanism.

What does this SAA-C03 question test?

Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: Add a "shard" component to the partition key (for example, tenantId + hashed bucket) to spread traffic across partitions — Hot-partition throttling in DynamoDB is most commonly caused by excessive traffic concentrated on a single partition key value. The most direct and effective fix is to change the partition key design so requests are distributed across multiple partition key values. A common approach is adding a shard component (for example, tenantId + hashed bucket) to the partition key. This spreads reads and writes across more physical partitions, improving utilization and reducing the per-partition throughput limit that triggers throttling during promotions. Increasing capacity cannot override the fact that DynamoDB still routes most requests for a single partition key value to the same underlying partition(s). Strongly consistent reads increase consumed capacity and do not change the routing problem to a hot partition. Migrating to S3 changes the service and access pattern entirely and does not address the per-partition throttling behavior of DynamoDB.

What should I do if I get this SAA-C03 question wrong?

Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.