SAA-C03 Design Resilient Architectures Practice Question
A logistics company runs a shipment-tracking service on a single Amazon EC2 instance in one Availability Zone. The instance stores tracking state in an attached Amazon EBS volume and writes nightly backups to Amazon S3. The company needs the service to survive the loss of an entire Availability Zone with minimal data loss and automatic recovery, while keeping changes minimal. Which design change should a solutions architect recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming that making a single instance more durable, through snapshots, monitoring, or network addressing, converts it into a highly available system.
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
✓
Create an Amazon Machine Image of the instance and place an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer across at least two Availability Zones, storing state in Amazon RDS Multi-AZ.
Surviving an Availability Zone failure requires eliminating single-AZ dependencies. Running stateless application instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer spreads compute across multiple zones and replaces failed capacity automatically, while Amazon RDS Multi-AZ keeps a synchronously updated standby in a different zone that takes over with the same endpoint, satisfying both automatic recovery and minimal data loss.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Enable termination protection and detailed monitoring on the existing instance, and increase the EBS volume size to improve durability.
Why it's wrong here
Termination protection only prevents accidental API deletion of the instance, and detailed monitoring merely increases metric granularity. Neither action protects against an Availability Zone outage, because the compute, the EBS volume, and the instance remain tied to one physical location that can fail independently.
- ✓
Create an Amazon Machine Image of the instance and place an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer across at least two Availability Zones, storing state in Amazon RDS Multi-AZ.
Why this is correct
Distributing stateless compute across multiple Availability Zones with an Auto Scaling group and an Application Load Balancer removes the single-AZ failure domain, and moving state to Amazon RDS Multi-AZ provides a synchronously replicated standby with automatic failover, so the service survives an AZ loss with minimal data loss and no manual intervention.
- ✗
Take more frequent EBS snapshots and copy them to another AWS Region so the volume can be restored after an outage.
Why it's wrong here
Cross-Region snapshots improve disaster recovery for data, but restoring a volume and launching a replacement instance is a manual process that introduces substantial recovery time and data loss up to the last snapshot. The scenario requires automatic recovery with minimal data loss, which snapshot-based restoration cannot deliver.
- ✗
Attach an additional Elastic Network Interface to the instance and assign an Elastic IP address so clients reconnect quickly after a failure.
Why it's wrong here
An Elastic IP and extra network interface address connectivity, not availability. If the instance's Availability Zone is lost, the instance itself is unavailable and the address cannot be reassigned automatically, so the service still experiences an outage until an operator intervenes manually.
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 |
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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.