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mediummultiple choiceObjective-mapped

Your ecommerce app runs behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) and uses an RDS database for orders. During an AZ impairment in us-east-1, customers report that checkout takes several minutes to recover. The current design places EC2 instances only in private subnets of AZ-a, while the ALB spans multiple subnets. The RDS DB instance is Multi-AZ. Management wants automatic recovery within the same Region.

Which change best addresses the issue with minimal operational overhead?

Question 1mediummultiple choice
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Your ecommerce app runs behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) and uses an RDS database for orders. During an AZ impairment in us-east-1, customers report that checkout takes several minutes to recover. The current design places EC2 instances only in private subnets of AZ-a, while the ALB spans multiple subnets. The RDS DB instance is Multi-AZ. Management wants automatic recovery within the same Region.

Which change best addresses the issue with minimal operational overhead?

Full question →

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

Best answer

Move the EC2 instances into Auto Scaling Groups that span private subnets in at least two AZs, keeping the ALB spanning those subnets.

An Auto Scaling Group across multiple AZs ensures healthy capacity exists when an AZ becomes impaired, and the ALB can route to instances in any available AZ.

B

Distractor review

Switch from RDS Single-AZ to RDS Multi-AZ, keeping the EC2 instances in only AZ-a because failover will still reach them.

RDS failover helps database availability, but the observed checkout delay stems from lack of compute capacity in the impaired AZ.

C

Distractor review

Terminate the ALB and use a Network Load Balancer (NLB) in front of the existing single-AZ EC2 instances.

Changing load balancer type does not fix the dependency on instances only in AZ-a, so recovery will still be impacted.

D

Distractor review

Add more EC2 instances in AZ-a and increase the ALB health check thresholds to avoid unnecessary replacements during impairments.

Overprovisioning in a single AZ reduces but does not eliminate unavailability when that AZ is degraded and cannot serve traffic.

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

A solutions architect is designing an S3 bucket for a claims portal. The objects must never be publicly accessible, even if a developer later adds an overly broad bucket policy. What should the architect configure?

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: Move the EC2 instances into Auto Scaling Groups that span private subnets in at least two AZs, keeping the ALB spanning those subnets. — The symptom indicates the ALB may still be healthy, but the application has no resilient compute capacity because EC2 is confined to a single AZ. Placing the application tier in an Auto Scaling Group across at least two AZs allows AWS to launch replacement instances in the healthy AZ(s) automatically. The ALB can then route requests to targets in multiple AZs, reducing recovery time. RDS Multi-AZ is already in place, so the missing resilience is on the compute tier. Why others are wrong: Switching or reconfiguring only RDS does not resolve the multi-minute checkout delay when the impaired AZ contains the only running instances. Replacing ALB with NLB keeps the same single-AZ compute bottleneck and does not create an alternate path for traffic. Adding instances or raising health check thresholds can mask failures temporarily, but it cannot overcome the absence of capacity in other AZs during an impairment.

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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