Amazon SAA-C03 Online Practice Questions and Exam Preparation

Amazon SAA-C03 Online Questions & Answers

• Question 441:

  A package delivery company has an application that uses Amazon EC2 instances and an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster. As the application becomes more popular, EC2 instance usage increases only slightly.

  DB cluster usage increases at a much faster rate. The company adds a read replica, which reduces the DB cluster usage for a short period of time. However, the load continues to increase. The operations that cause the increase in DB cluster usage are all repeated read statements that are related to delivery details.

  The company needs to alleviate the effect of repeated reads on the DB cluster.

  Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

  A. Implement an Amazon ElastiCache for Redis cluster between the application and the DB cluster.
  B. Add an additional read replica to the DB cluster.
  C. Configure Aurora Auto Scaling for the Aurora read replicas.
  D. Modify the DB cluster to have multiple writer instances.
  A. Implement an Amazon ElastiCache for Redis cluster between the application and the DB cluster.

• Question 442:

  A company has an on-premises application that generates a large amount of time-sensitive data that is backed up to Amazon S3. The application has grown and there are user complaints about internet bandwidth limitations. A solutions architect needs to design a long-term solution that allows for both timely backups to Amazon S3 and with minimal impact on internet connectivity for internal users.

  Which solution meets these requirements?

  A. Establish AWS VPN connections and proxy all traffic through a VPC gateway endpoint.
  B. Establish a new AWS Direct Connect connection and direct backup traffic through this new connection.
  C. Order daily AWS Snowball devices. Load the data onto the Snowball devices and return the devices to AWS each day.
  D. Submit a support ticket through the AWS Management Console. Request the removal of S3 service limits from the account.
  B. Establish a new AWS Direct Connect connection and direct backup traffic through this new connection.

• Question 443:

  A company runs its application by using Amazon EC2 instances and AWS Lambda functions. The EC2 instances run in private subnets of a VPC. The Lambda functions need direct network access to the EC2 instances for the application to work.

  The application will run for 1 year. The number of Lambda functions that the application uses will increase during the 1- year period. The company must minimize costs on all application resources.

  Which solution will meet these requirements?

  A. Purchase an EC2 Instance Savings Plan. Connect the Lambda functions to the private subnets that contain the EC2 instances.
  B. Purchase an EC2 Instance Savings Plan. Connect the Lambda functions to new public subnets in the same VPC where the EC2 instances run.
  C. Purchase a Compute Savings Plan. Connect the Lambda functions to the private subnets that contain the EC2 instances.
  D. Purchase a Compute Savings Plan. Keep the Lambda functions in the Lambda service VPC.
  C. Purchase a Compute Savings Plan. Connect the Lambda functions to the private subnets that contain the EC2 instances.

• Question 444:

  A company is running a legacy system on an Amazon EC2 instance. The application code cannot be modified, and the system cannot run on more than one instance. A solutions architect must design a resilient solution that can improve the recovery time for the system.

  What should the solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements?

  A. Enable termination protection for the EC2 instance.
  B. Configure the EC2 instance for Multi-AZ deployment.
  C. Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm to recover the EC2 instance in case of failure.
  D. Launch the EC2 instance with two Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes that use RAID configurations for storage redundancy.
  C. Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm to recover the EC2 instance in case of failure.

• Question 445:

  An ecommerce company is preparing to deploy a web application on AWS to ensure continuous service for customers. The architecture includes a web application that the company hosts on Amazon EC2 instances, a relational database in Amazon RDS, and static assets that the company stores in Amazon S3.

  The company wants to design a robust and resilient architecture for the application.

  Which solution will meet these requirements?

  A. Deploy Amazon EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone. Deploy an RDS DB instance in the same Availability Zone. Use Amazon S3 with versioning enabled to store static assets.
  B. Deploy Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. Deploy a Multi-AZ RDS DB instance. Use Amazon CloudFront to distribute static assets.
  C. Deploy Amazon EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone. Deploy an RDS DB instance in a second Availability Zone for cross-AZ redundancy. Serve static assets directly from the EC2 instances.
  D. Use AWS Lambda functions to serve the web application. Use Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 for the database. Store static assets in Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) One Zone-Infrequent Access (One Zone-IA).
  B. Deploy Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. Deploy a Multi-AZ RDS DB instance. Use Amazon CloudFront to distribute static assets.

• Question 446:

  An ecommerce company hosts a three-tier web application in a VPC. The web tier runs on Amazon EC2 instances in two Availability Zones. The company stores a product catalog and customer sales information in Amazon DynamoDB.

  The company's finance team uses a reporting application to generate reports of daily product sales. When the finance team runs the daily reports, a sudden performance decrease affects website customers.

  The company wants to improve the performance of the system.

  Which solution will meet these requirements with MINIMAL changes to the current architecture?

  A. Migrate the application to larger EC2 instances. Migrate the database to Amazon RDS for MySQL. Configure a read replica of the database in a second Availability Zone.
  B. Increase the compute capacity of the EC2 instances. Migrate the database to Amazon ElastiCache (Memcached).
  C. Implement DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX).
  D. Configure DynamoDB streams.
  C. Implement DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX).

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  Explanation

  DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a fully managed, in-memory cache for DynamoDB that delivers up to a 10x performance improvement--even at millions of requests per second. DAX requires minimal changes to existing applications and offloads the read workload from DynamoDB during report generation.

  References:

  " DAX provides in-memory acceleration for DynamoDB tables, reducing response times from milliseconds to microseconds with minimal application changes. "

  Source: AWS Certified Solutions Architect?Official Study Guide, DynamoDB and Performance section.

• Question 447:

  A company's reporting system delivers hundreds of .csv files to an Amazon S3 bucket each day. The company must convert these files to Apache Parquet format and must store the files in a transformed data bucket.

  Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST development effort?

  A. Create an Amazon EMR cluster with Apache Spark installed. Write a Spark application to transform the data. Use EMR File System (EMRFS) to write files to the transformed data bucket.
  B. Create an AWS Glue crawler to discover the data. Create an AWS Glue extract, transform, and load (ETL) job to transform the data. Specify the transformed data bucket in the output step.
  C. Use AWS Batch to create a job definition with Bash syntax to transform the data and output the data to the transformed data bucket. Use the job definition to submit a job. Specify an array job as the job type.
  D. Create an AWS Lambda function to transform the data and output the data to the transformed data bucket. Configure an event notification for the S3 bucket. Specify the Lambda function as the destination for the event notification.
  B. Create an AWS Glue crawler to discover the data. Create an AWS Glue extract, transform, and load (ETL) job to transform the data. Specify the transformed data bucket in the output step.

• Question 448:

  An application running on an Amazon EC2 instance in VPC-A needs to access files in another EC2 instance in VPC-B. Both VPCs are in separate AWS accounts. The network administrator needs to design a solution to configure secure access to EC2 instance in VPC-B from VPC-A. The connectivity should not have a single point of failure or bandwidth concerns.

  Which solution will meet these requirements?

  A. Set up a VPC peering connection between VPC-A and VPC-B.
  B. Set up VPC gateway endpoints for the EC2 instance running in VPC-B.
  C. Attach a virtual private gateway to VPC-B and set up routing from VPC-A.
  D. Create a private virtual interface (VIF) for the EC2 instance running in VPC-B and add appropriate routes from VPC-A.
  A. Set up a VPC peering connection between VPC-A and VPC-B.

• Question 449:

  A company hosts a two-tier website that runs on Amazon EC2 instances. The website has a database that runs on Amazon RDS for MySQL. All users are required to log in to the website to see their own customized pages.

  The website typically experiences low traffic. Occasionally, the website experiences sudden increases in traffic and becomes unresponsive. During these increases in traffic, the database experiences a heavy write load. A solutions architect must improve the website's availability without changing the application code.

  What should the solutions architect do to meet these requirements?

  A. Create an Amazon ElastiCache (Redis OSS) cluster. Configure the application to cache common database queries in the ElastiCache cluster.
  B. Create an Auto Scaling group. Configure Amazon CloudWatch alarms to scale the number of EC2 instances based on the percentage of CPU in use during the traffic increases.
  C. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution that points to the EC2 instances as the origin. Enable caching of dynamic content, and configure a write throttle from the EC2 instances to the RDS database.
  D. Migrate the database to an Amazon Aurora Serverless cluster. Set the maximum Aurora capacity units (ACUs) to a value high enough to respond to the traffic increases. Configure the EC2 instances to connect to the Aurora database.
  D. Migrate the database to an Amazon Aurora Serverless cluster. Set the maximum Aurora capacity units (ACUs) to a value high enough to respond to the traffic increases. Configure the EC2 instances to connect to the Aurora database.

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  Explanation

  Comprehensive and Detailed 250 to 300 words of Explanation (AWS documentation-based, no links):

  The key constraint is no application code changes, while the observed failure mode during spikes is heavy write load on the database that makes the site unresponsive. Scaling the web tier alone (Option B) may not help if the database is the bottleneck; in fact, adding more EC2 instances can increase concurrent write pressure and worsen the database overload. Caching (Option A) would require modifying the application to use Redis for query caching, which violates the no-code-change requirement. Option C is not a fit:

  CloudFront caching is effective for cacheable content, but authenticated, personalized pages are typically not cacheable without application changes, and "write throttle" is not a standard CloudFront feature to protect the database.

  Migrating from RDS for MySQL to Amazon Aurora Serverless is a managed approach designed to automatically adjust database capacity to match workload demand, which is well suited to "low baseline traffic with occasional sudden spikes." By setting an appropriate maximum capacity, Aurora Serverless can scale to handle bursts more gracefully than a fixed-size RDS instance, improving availability during unpredictable demand. This reduces operational overhead because capacity management is largely handled by the service rather than by manual instance resizing or complex scaling scripts.

  The final step--configuring EC2 instances to connect to the new Aurora endpoint--is an infrastructure configuration change, not an application code rewrite. The application continues to speak the same MySQL-compatible protocol (Aurora MySQL-compatible), preserving compatibility while improving resilience to spikes.

  Therefore, D best meets the requirement to improve availability during sudden traffic increases driven by heavy database writes, with minimal operational effort and no application code changes.

• Question 450:

  A company's HTTP application is behind a Network Load Balancer (NLB). The NLB's target group is configured to use an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group with multiple EC2 instances that run the web service. The company notices that the NLB is not detecting HTTP errors for the application. These errors require a manual restart of the EC2 instances that run the web service. The company needs to improve the application's availability without writing custom scripts or code.

  What should a solutions architect do to meet these requirements?

  A. Enable HTTP health checks on the NLB, supplying the URL of the company's application.
  B. Add a cron job to the EC2 instances to check the local application's logs once each minute. If HTTP errors are detected. the application will restart.
  C. Replace the NLB with an Application Load Balancer. Enable HTTP health checks by supplying the URL of the company's application. Configure an Auto Scaling action to replace unhealthy instances.
  D. Create an Amazon Cloud Watch alarm that monitors the UnhealthyHostCount metric for the NLB. Configure an Auto Scaling action to replace unhealthy instances when the alarm is in the ALARM state.
  C. Replace the NLB with an Application Load Balancer. Enable HTTP health checks by supplying the URL of the company's application. Configure an Auto Scaling action to replace unhealthy instances.