AWS SAA-C03 - Practice Test #3

Question 1

An analytics company stores petabytes of data in Amazon S3. Data scientists access these files unpredictably; some datasets are queried heavily for weeks and then ignored for months, while others are read sporadically. The finance team demands a drastic reduction in the AWS bill. What is the MOST cost-effective solution for this scenario?

Accepted Answer

Use the Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class for all objects.

Answer

Configure an S3 Lifecycle Policy to transition objects to S3 Standard-IA after 30 days.

Answer

Move all data to Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval and use expedited retrievals.

Answer

Store the data in Amazon S3 One Zone-IA to reduce replication costs.

Question 2

A global financial corporation uses a relational database to process critical banking transactions. They require a disaster recovery (DR) architecture that ensures the application can continue operating from a secondary region in case the primary region suffers a massive outage. The business demands a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 1 second and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 1 minute. Which architecture is the MOST RESILIENT to a Region-level disaster?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Aurora Global Database.

Answer

Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB clusters.

Answer

Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables.

Answer

Amazon RDS Cross-Region Read Replicas.

Question 3

A global e-learning platform distributes video content and static files to students worldwide. Users complain that videos take a long time to load and suffer from buffering. The content is currently hosted in an Amazon S3 bucket in `us-east-1` and is served directly from there via HTTP/HTTPS. Which configuration will provide the LOWEST latency for global users?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudFront Distribution with the S3 bucket as origin.

Answer

AWS Global Accelerator in front of the S3 bucket.

Answer

AWS App Mesh for optimized routing.

Answer

AWS Transit Gateway with Anycast routing.

Question 4

A company processes highly confidential medical data on Amazon EC2 instances located in a private subnet. The application needs to pull files from an Amazon S3 bucket and then save the processed results to an Amazon DynamoDB table. Strict compliance policies dictate that network traffic between the VPC and these AWS services must never pass through a gateway with public network access. Which solution guarantees that the data NEVER traverses the public internet?

Accepted Answer

Implement Gateway VPC Endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB and update the routing tables of the private subnet.

Answer

Configure NAT Gateways in the public subnets and update the routing tables.

Answer

Create Interface VPC Endpoints (AWS PrivateLink) for S3 and DynamoDB.

Answer

Deploy AWS Direct Connect from the VPC to the S3 and DynamoDB services.

Question 5

A retail company receives thousands of purchase orders in unpredictable bursts. Currently, a synchronous API processes each order and saves it to a database. However, during promotional events, the API gets overloaded, dropping orders and frustrating customers. The Solutions Architect needs to redesign the system to decouple order ingestion from processing, guaranteeing no orders are lost and eliminating the need to provision servers. Which configuration will meet these requirements with the LOWEST operational overhead? (Select 2 options)

Accepted Answer

Answer

Use Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to queue incoming orders as an asynchronous buffer.

Answer

Deploy an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling cluster to consume messages from the database.

Answer

Use AWS Lambda functions to consume and process messages from the queue automatically.

Answer

Integrate Amazon Kinesis Data Streams with a Network Load Balancer (NLB).

Answer

Implement Amazon ElastiCache in front of the API.

Question 6

A development team is building a traditional monolithic web application on AWS using Amazon EC2 instances and an Amazon RDS for MySQL database. The application must be able to withstand the failure of an entire AWS data center without end-users noticing a service outage. Which design guarantees HIGH AVAILABILITY against the failure of an Availability Zone (AZ)?

Accepted Answer

Configure an Auto Scaling Group for EC2 instances across at least two Availability Zones behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB), and enable Multi-AZ on the RDS instance.

Answer

Place all EC2 instances in a Cluster Placement Group and back up RDS every 5 minutes to Amazon S3.

Answer

Deploy the application and database in a single Availability Zone and use Amazon Route 53 with failover routing to a static page in S3.

Answer

Use EC2 Spot Instances distributed across three Regions and asynchronous cross-region replication in RDS.

Question 7

An e-commerce company runs a fleet of 50 Amazon EC2 instances hosting critical backend components. These instances operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, at a constant and predictable 70% utilization. The company plans to keep this architecture exactly the same for the next 3 years without changing the instance type or region. Which instance purchasing strategy minimizes costs for constant workloads?

Accepted Answer

Standard Reserved Instances for a 3-year term.

Answer

On-Demand Instances with aggressive auto-scaling.

Answer

Spot Instances managed via Spot Fleet.

Answer

Compute Savings Plans for a 1-year term.

Question 8

An online news application uses Amazon RDS for MySQL as its primary database. During breaking news events, the application experiences an extreme and sudden spike in read traffic, overwhelming the RDS database, increasing application latency, and exhausting database connections. The application reads the exact same articles thousands of times per second. How can unpredictable traffic spikes be handled in the most efficient manner?

Accepted Answer

Deploy an Amazon ElastiCache cluster in front of the RDS database.

Answer

Change the RDS storage type from General Purpose SSD to Provisioned IOPS SSD.

Answer

Create Multiple RDS Read Replicas using Auto Scaling and balance the traffic.

Answer

Migrate the database from Amazon RDS to Amazon DynamoDB and use DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX).

Question 9

Company A has purchased SaaS analytics software from Company B. Company B's software needs read-only access to a specific Amazon S3 bucket in Company A's AWS account to generate daily reports. How can cross-account access be secured in an auditable manner for third parties strictly following the PRINCIPLE OF LEAST PRIVILEGE?

Accepted Answer

Create an IAM Role in Company A's account with a trust policy allowing Company B's account to assume the role, requiring an External ID.

Answer

Create an IAM User in Company A's account, generate Access Keys, and share them securely with Company B.

Answer

Configure a Bucket Policy on S3 granting public read access restricted to Company B's static IP address.

Answer

Establish a VPC Peering connection between Company A's VPC and Company B's VPC.

Question 10

A development team has containerized their microservices using Docker. They want to deploy these containers on AWS so they scale automatically based on CPU usage. However, the operations team insists they have no time to patch operating systems (OS) or manage the scaling of underlying servers. Which architecture minimizes the need to manage server infrastructure?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) configured with the AWS Fargate launch type.

Answer

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) using Amazon EC2 Managed Node Groups.

Answer

Deploy containers on Amazon EC2 instances using an ECS-optimized AMI and Auto Scaling.

Answer

AWS Elastic Beanstalk using the multicontainer Docker platform environment.