Question 1easymultiple choice
Full question →easymultiple choiceObjective-mapped
Exhibit
Auto Scaling group: web-asg Attached subnets: subnet-1111 (us-west-2a) Load balancer subnets: subnet-1111 (us-west-2a) Desired capacity: 2 Health check type: ELB
Based on the exhibit, the web tier becomes unavailable if us-west-2a has an outage. What is the best change to improve resilience with the least redesign?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Good practice is not just finding the correct option. The wrong answers often show the exact trap the exam wants you to fall into.
A
Distractor review
Increase the Auto Scaling group desired capacity from 2 to 3 in the same subnet.
Adding more instances in the same Availability Zone does not protect the service from a full AZ outage. The failure domain is still the same.
B
Best answer
Attach the Application Load Balancer and Auto Scaling group to subnets in a second Availability Zone.
Spanning the load balancer and Auto Scaling group across at least two Availability Zones removes the single-AZ dependency shown in the exhibit. If us-west-2a fails, the remaining AZ can continue serving traffic and Auto Scaling can replace unhealthy instances there. This is the smallest architectural change that directly improves availability.
C
Distractor review
Replace the Application Load Balancer with a Network Load Balancer.
A different load balancer type does not fix the fact that all compute and load balancer resources are currently in one Availability Zone. The outage risk remains.
D
Distractor review
Increase the health check grace period so instances stay registered longer.
A longer grace period may reduce premature replacement during startup, but it does not help if the entire Availability Zone fails. The service still has one point of failure.
Common exam trap
Common exam trap: usable hosts are not the same as total addresses
Subnetting questions often tempt you into counting all addresses. In normal IPv4 subnets, the network and broadcast addresses are not usable host addresses.
Technical deep dive
How to think about this question
Subnetting questions test whether you can identify the network, broadcast address, usable range, mask and correct subnet. Slow down enough to calculate the block size correctly.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- CIDR notation defines the prefix length.
- Block size helps identify subnet boundaries.
- Network and broadcast addresses are not usable hosts in normal IPv4 subnets.
- The required host count determines the smallest suitable subnet.
TExam Day Tips
- Write the block size before choosing the subnet.
- Check whether the question asks for hosts, subnets or a specific address range.
- Do not confuse /24, /25, /26 and /27 host counts.
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More questions from this exam
Keep practising from the same exam bank, or move into a focused topic page if this question exposed a weak area.
Question 1
A team needs to distribute TCP traffic (not HTTP) across multiple services. The services must see the original client source IP for auditing. Which AWS load balancer is the best fit?
Question 2
A team wants to run containerized services with AWS-managed orchestration and autoscaling. They do NOT require Kubernetes compatibility. Which AWS service choice is most appropriate to meet these goals?
Question 3
A solutions architect is designing an S3 bucket for a IoT ingestion API. The objects must never be publicly accessible, even if a developer later adds an overly broad bucket policy. What should the architect configure? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.
Question 4
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Question 5
A team wants to delegate IAM management to developers, but must ensure developers can never grant themselves permissions beyond a specific limit. Which AWS mechanism best matches this requirement?
Question 6
A solutions architect is designing an S3 bucket for a healthcare document service. The objects must never be publicly accessible, even if a developer later adds an overly broad bucket policy. What should the architect configure?
FAQ
Questions learners often ask
What does this SAA-C03 question test?
CIDR notation defines the prefix length.
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Attach the Application Load Balancer and Auto Scaling group to subnets in a second Availability Zone. — The exhibit shows both the Auto Scaling group and the Application Load Balancer are attached only to one subnet in one Availability Zone. To survive an AZ outage, both layers should span multiple AZs. That way, traffic can continue to reach healthy targets in the remaining AZ, and Auto Scaling can replace capacity there. This is a standard high-availability change with minimal redesign. Why others are wrong: Increasing desired capacity in the same AZ only adds more instances to the same failure domain. Replacing the load balancer type does not remove the single-AZ dependency. A longer health check grace period can help with slow boot times, but it does nothing for an Availability Zone outage.
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.
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