Easy — SAA-C03 Practice Quiz

Question 1

A media company hosts a popular news website on a fleet of EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer in a single Region. During breaking-news events, traffic spikes cause the instances to become overloaded serving repeated requests for the same static images, CSS, and JavaScript files, degrading page load times for global users. The team wants to reduce load on the origin and improve latency for visitors worldwide with minimal application changes. Which solution best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Deploy an Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the ALB and configure caching behaviors so static assets are served from edge locations.

Answer

Increase the size of each EC2 instance (vertical scaling) to handle more concurrent connections during traffic spikes.

Answer

Place an Amazon SQS queue between the ALB and the EC2 instances to buffer incoming static asset requests.

Answer

Enable cross-Region read replicas of the backend database to reduce the load caused by static asset requests.

Question 2

A company's monthly AWS bill has grown steadily over the past year. The finance team asks the solutions architect to identify concrete opportunities to reduce spend, including underutilized EC2 instances, potential Savings Plans purchases, and unusual cost trends broken down by service and linked account. The architect wants a single native tool that provides historical cost analysis, forecasting, and rightsizing recommendations. Which AWS service should the architect use?

Accepted Answer

AWS Cost Explorer

Answer

AWS Budgets

Answer

Amazon CloudWatch

Answer

AWS Trusted Advisor

Question 3

A development team has deployed a Python application on an Amazon EC2 instance. The application needs to read and write objects in an Amazon S3 bucket. Currently, the developers have embedded long-term IAM user access keys in the application's configuration file. A security review flagged this as a violation of AWS security best practices. Which solution should the solutions architect recommend to provide the application secure access to S3 while following the principle of least privilege?

Accepted Answer

Create an IAM role with a policy granting the required S3 permissions, attach it to the EC2 instance as an instance profile, and remove the hardcoded keys.

Answer

Store the IAM user access keys in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store and have the application retrieve them at runtime.

Answer

Rotate the embedded IAM user access keys every 30 days using a scheduled AWS Lambda function.

Answer

Configure a bucket policy that allows anonymous access from the EC2 instance's public IP address so the application no longer needs credentials.

Question 4

A company is migrating a fleet of Windows-based application servers to Amazon EC2. The application requires a shared file system that all instances can mount concurrently using the SMB protocol, with full support for Windows NTFS permissions and Active Directory integration. The team needs a fully managed solution that scales automatically. Which AWS storage service should the solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server

Answer

Amazon EFS with multiple mount targets

Answer

Amazon FSx for Lustre linked to an S3 bucket

Answer

Amazon EBS Multi-Attach io2 volume shared across instances

Question 5

A financial services company runs a critical transaction-processing application on a single Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance in one Availability Zone. During a recent AZ-level infrastructure event, the database became unavailable for several hours, causing an outage. The company needs the database to automatically fail over to another Availability Zone with minimal data loss and no application code changes. Which solution meets these requirements MOST effectively?

Accepted Answer

Enable a Multi-AZ deployment for the RDS instance so a synchronously replicated standby is maintained in a second Availability Zone.

Answer

Create a read replica in a second Availability Zone and point the application to the replica's endpoint during failures.

Answer

Configure automated daily snapshots and restore the database into another Availability Zone when an outage occurs.

Answer

Increase the instance size to a larger instance class to improve the database's resilience to AZ failures.

Question 6

A media company hosts a marketing microsite that consists entirely of static HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and image files. Traffic is highly unpredictable, occasionally spiking to millions of requests during product launches. The company currently runs the site on a single EC2 instance behind an Application Load Balancer and wants a solution that requires no server management, scales automatically to any load, and minimizes cost. Which architecture should the solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Store the static files in an Amazon S3 bucket configured for static website hosting and serve them globally through Amazon CloudFront.

Answer

Deploy the site across an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones behind the existing Application Load Balancer.

Answer

Migrate the site to a container running on Amazon ECS with Fargate and place it behind a Network Load Balancer.

Answer

Run the site on a larger EC2 instance type with an attached provisioned IOPS EBS volume to handle traffic spikes.