SAA-C03 CloudFront Caching Practice Question
A inventory service exposes a static website from S3 and CloudFront. Users should still receive cached pages if the S3 origin has a short outage. Which feature helps most? The architecture review board prefers a managed AWS-native control.
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse data protection features (like Backup Vault Lock) or data retrieval tools (like S3 Select) with caching and origin resilience, overlooking that CloudFront's TTL-based caching is the direct AWS-managed solution for serving content during origin outages.
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
✓
CloudFront caching with appropriate TTLs
CloudFront caching with appropriate TTLs allows cached responses to be served to users even when the S3 origin is temporarily unavailable. By setting a minimum TTL (e.g., 0 seconds for fresh content, but a higher default or maximum TTL for stale content), CloudFront can continue delivering previously cached pages from edge locations during an S3 outage, ensuring high availability and resilience. This is a managed AWS-native feature that aligns with the architecture review board's preference.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
CloudFront caching with appropriate TTLs
Why this is correct
CloudFront can serve cached content from edge locations when the origin is temporarily unavailable.
- ✗
AWS Backup Vault Lock
Why it's wrong here
Backup Vault Lock protects backups, not CloudFront delivery.
- ✗
IAM Access Analyzer
Why it's wrong here
Access Analyzer reviews permissions and does not serve cached content.
- ✗
S3 Select
Why it's wrong here
S3 Select retrieves subsets of object data and does not increase origin outage tolerance.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every SAA-C03 question from scratch — 302 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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.