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.

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  RDS read replicas

  Why it's wrong here

  RDS read replicas are designed to scale relational database read throughput by asynchronously copying database transactions to secondary instances. They do not serve or cache static assets stored in Amazon S3, nor do they have any integration with S3 bucket contents. A read replica would still be deployed in a specific AWS Region and would require DNS routing and an application change to use, so it would not reduce latency for users downloading images globally.

• ✓

  Amazon CloudFront distribution with the S3 bucket as origin

  Why this is correct

  An Amazon CloudFront distribution with the S3 bucket as origin places your static images and other objects at a global network of edge locations, so users receive data from the nearest point of presence rather than traversing the internet to the origin bucket. CloudFront caches objects based on cache-control headers or default TTLs, dramatically reducing latency and origin load, and it integrates with S3 via Origin Access Control to keep the bucket private while still serving public content. This directly solves the global latency problem described in the scenario.

• ✗

  A larger S3 bucket

  Why it's wrong here

  Increasing the size of the S3 bucket has no effect on delivery latency because S3 performance is designed to scale automatically without needing larger buckets; latency is governed by geographic distance and network path between the user and the bucket's region. A bigger bucket does not create edge caches or replicate content to multiple locations, so a user in another hemisphere still traverses the same public internet path to the origin. S3 bucket size is simply a storage quota, not a delivery performance mechanism.

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  An EC2 Auto Scaling group in one Region

  Why it's wrong here

  An EC2 Auto Scaling group in one Region adds compute capacity within that single region, but it does not cache static S3 content or place content closer to a global user base. Without a CDN or edge layer, users must still cross the internet to that region, and scaling EC2 instances only helps if the bottleneck is application compute, not geographic distance to static objects. Additionally, introducing EC2 to serve S3 content would require custom software and significant operational overhead for no global latency benefit.

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