An internal service is hosted behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) with targets spread across two Availability Zones. If the targets in one Availability Zone become unhealthy, the service must continue serving traffic from the healthy AZ. What change most directly improves resilience at the load-balancing layer?

Turn off health checks and rely only on instance CPU utilization to route traffic.

ALB routing depends on target health as determined by health checks. Turning health checks off prevents the ALB from detecting and removing unhealthy targets from service, so traffic can still be routed to failing targets.

Configure ALB listener rules to route all traffic to a single target group in one Availability Zone.

Routing to a single AZ removes multi-AZ redundancy at the routing layer. If that AZ becomes unhealthy, clients will be impacted.

Store requests in an SQS queue before routing them to the ALB.

SQS can decouple producers and consumers and provide buffering, but it does not change how the ALB determines target health or decides which targets receive traffic. The stated requirement focuses on load-balancing behavior when targets become unhealthy.

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: Configure target group health checks so the ALB stops sending traffic to unhealthy targets and continues routing to healthy targets in the other Availability Zone. — Configure ALB target group health checks. When health checks mark targets as unhealthy, the ALB automatically stops sending requests to them and only routes to targets that remain healthy across the configured Availability Zones. This directly addresses the scenario where unhealthy targets in one AZ would otherwise reduce availability at the load balancer layer. Disabling health checks prevents the ALB from reactively removing unhealthy targets from rotation. Forcing traffic to a single target group/AZ eliminates multi-AZ availability. SQS buffering may improve decoupling, but it does not instruct the ALB which targets are healthy, so it does not directly ensure reachability during target failures.

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.