Amazon SAA-C03 Exam Practice Test Instant Access

Question 1

A company hosts a website analytics application on a single Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instance. The analytics application is highly resilient and is designed to run in stateless mode.

The company notices that the application is showing signs of performance degradation during busy times and is presenting 5xx errors. The company needs to make the application scale seamlessly.

Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

ACreate an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) of the web application. Use the AMI to launch a second EC2 On-Demand Instance. Use an Application Load Balancer to distribute the load across the two EC2 instances.

BCreate an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) of the web application. Use the AMI to launch a second EC2 On-Demand Instance. Use Amazon Route 53 weighted routing to distribute the load across the two EC2 instances.

CCreate an AWS Lambda function to stop the EC2 instance and change the instance type. Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm to invoke the Lambda function when CPU utilization is more than 75%.

DCreate an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) of the web application. Apply the AMI to a launch template. Create an Auto Scaling group that includes the launch template. Configure the launch template to use a Spot Fleet. Attach an Application Load Balancer to the Auto Scaling group.

Answer : D

Auto Scalingis the most effective solution for ensuring seamless scalability of a stateless application. Key points:

Dleverages Auto Scaling with a Spot Fleet for cost efficiency and attaches an ALB to distribute traffic.

A and Bdo not provide automated scaling and would require manual intervention to add more instances.

Cchanges the instance type but does not scale out horizontally, which is required here.

AWS Documentation Reference:

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Question 2

A company uses Amazon S3 to host its static website. The company wants to add a contact form to the webpage. The contact form will have dynamic server-side components for users to input their name, email address, phone number, and user message.

The company expects fewer than 100 site visits each month. The contact form must notify the company by email when a customer fills out the form.

Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

AHost the dynamic contact form in Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). Set up Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) to connect to a third-party email provider.

BCreate an Amazon API Gateway endpoint that returns the contact form from an AWS Lambda function. Configure another Lambda function on the API Gateway to publish a message to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic.

CHost the website by using AWS Amplify Hosting for static content and dynamic content. Use server-side scripting to build the contact form. Configure Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to deliver the message to the company.

DMigrate the website from Amazon S3 to Amazon EC2 instances that run Windows Server. Use Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server to host the webpage. Use client-side scripting to build the contact form. Integrate the form with Amazon WorkMail.

Answer : B

Using API Gateway and Lambda enables serverless handling of form submissions with minimal cost and infrastructure. When coupled with Amazon SNS, it allows instant email notifications without running servers, making it ideal for low-traffic workloads.

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Question 3

A company has an application with a REST-based interface that allows data to be received in near-real time from a third-party vendor. Once received, the application processes and stores the data for further analysis. The application is running on Amazon EC2 instances.

The third-party vendor has received many 503 Service Unavailable Errors when sending data to the application. When the data volume spikes, the compute capacity reaches its maximum limit and the application is unable to process all requests.

Which design should a solutions architect recommend to provide a more scalable solution?

AUse Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to ingest the data. Process the data using AWS Lambda functions.

BUse Amazon API Gateway on top of the existing application. Create a usage plan with a quota limit for the third-party vendor.

CUse Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to ingest the data. Put the EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer.

DRepackage the application as a container. Deploy the application using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) using the EC2 launch type with an Auto Scaling group.

Answer : A

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams provides a highly scalable and durable service for ingesting real-time streaming data. By decoupling ingestion and processing, Kinesis can handle large spikes in traffic without service disruption. Lambda functions (or other consumers) can then process the data as it arrives, scaling automatically. This pattern avoids 503 errors due to compute saturation and delivers a resilient, serverless, and highly scalable architecture.

Reference Extract from AWS Documentation / Study Guide:

'Kinesis Data Streams provides a scalable and durable real-time data streaming service. Coupling Kinesis with AWS Lambda enables event-driven processing, elasticity, and decoupling between ingestion and processing layers.'

Source: AWS Certified Solutions Architect -- Official Study Guide, Streaming and Serverless section.

Question 4

A company discovers that an Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) cluster for the company's web application workload is not encrypting data at rest. The company needs to resolve thesecurity issue.

Which solution will meet this requirement?

AStop the existing DAX cluster. Enable encryption at rest for the existing DAX cluster, and start the cluster again.

BDelete the existing DAX cluster. Recreate the DAX cluster, and configure the new cluster to encrypt the data at rest.

CUpdate the configuration of the existing DAX cluster to encrypt the data at rest.

DIntegrate the existing DAX cluster with AWS Security Hub to automatically enable encryption at rest.

Answer : B

DAX does not support enabling encryption at rest on an existing cluster. To use encryption at rest, you must create a new DAX cluster with encryption enabled at creation time and migrate workloads accordingly.

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Question 5

A solutions architect is configuring a VPC that has public subnets and private subnets. The VPC and subnets use IPv4 CIDR blocks. There is one public subnet and one private subnet in each of three Availability Zones (AZs). An internet gateway is attached to the VPC.

The private subnets require access to the internet to allow Amazon EC2 instances to download software updates.

Which solution will meet this requirement?

ACreate a NAT gateway in one of the public subnets. Update the route tables that are attached to the private subnets to forward non-VPC traffic to the NAT gateway.

BCreate three NAT instances in each private subnet. Create a private route table for each Availability Zone that forwards non-VPC traffic to the NAT instances.

CAttach an egress-only internet gateway in the VPC. Update the route tables of the private subnets to forward non-VPC traffic to the egress-only internet gateway.

DCreate a NAT gateway in one of the private subnets. Update the route tables that are attached to the private subnets to forward non-VPC traffic to the NAT gateway.

Answer : A

Private subnets require outbound internet access to download updates, but they must not have public IPs or direct inbound access.

The recommended AWS solution is to create a NAT gateway in a public subnet. Private subnet route tables are updated to route internet-bound traffic (0.0.0.0/0) to the NAT gateway. The NAT gateway then uses the internet gateway attached to the VPC to communicate with the internet.

Option B (NAT instances) is an older approach and less scalable/maintainable than NAT gateways. Option C (egress-only internet gateway) is for IPv6 outbound-only traffic, not IPv4. Option D is invalid because NAT gateways must be deployed in public subnets.

AWS Well-Architected Framework --- Reliability Pillar (https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS_Well-Architected_Framework.pdf)

NAT Gateways (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/vpc-nat-gateway.html)

VPC Internet Gateways and Subnet Routing (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/VPC_Internet_Gateway.html)

Question 6

A company is developing a social media application. The company anticipates rapid and unpredictable growth in users and data volume. The application needs to handle a continuous high volume of user requests. User requests include long-running processes that store large amounts of user-generated content and user profiles in a relational format. The processes must run in a specific order. The company requires an architecture that can scale resources to meet demand spikes without downtime or performance degradation. The company must ensure that the components of the application can evolve independently without affecting other parts of the system. Which combination of AWS services will meet these requirements?

ADeploy the application on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) with the AWS Fargate launch type. Use Amazon RDS as the database. Use Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to decouple message processing between components.

BDeploy the application on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) with the AWS Fargate launch type. Use Amazon RDS as the database. Use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to decouple message processing between components.

CUse Amazon DynamoDB as the database. Use AWS Lambda functions to implement the application. Configure Amazon DynamoDB Streams to invoke the Lambda functions. Use AWS Step Functions to manage workflows between services.

DUse an AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment with auto scaling to deploy the application. Use Amazon RDS as the database. Use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to decouple message processing between components.

Answer : A

ECS with Fargate: Allows containerized workloads to scale rapidly without managing underlying servers, handling unpredictable growth effectively.

RDS for Relational Data: Manages large relational datasets efficiently while supporting high availability.

SQS for Decoupling: Ensures message processing occurs in a specific order, decoupling application components and allowing independent evolution.

AWS ECS with Fargate Documentation,AWS SQS Documentation

Question 7

A company is building a new web application on AWS. The application needs to consume files from a legacy on-premises application that runs a batch process and outputs approximately 1 GB of data every night to an NFS file mount.

A solutions architect needs to design a storage solution that requires minimal changes to the legacy application and keeps costs low.

Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

ADeploy an Outpost in AWS Outposts to the on-premises location where the legacy application is stored. Configure the legacy application and the web application to store and retrieve the files in Amazon S3 on the Outpost.

BDeploy an AWS Storage Gateway Volume Gateway on premises. Point the legacy application to the Volume Gateway. Configure the web application to use the Amazon S3 bucket that the Volume Gateway uses.

CDeploy an Amazon S3 interface endpoint on AWS. Reconfigure the legacy application to store the files directly on an Amazon S3 endpoint. Configure the web application to retrieve the files from Amazon S3.

DDeploy an Amazon S3 File Gateway on premises. Point the legacy application to the File Gateway. Configure the web application to retrieve the files from the S3 bucket that the File Gateway uses.

Answer : D

Amazon S3 File Gateway provides a local NFS mount point, which can be used with minimal changes by the legacy application. Files are transparently uploaded to Amazon S3, allowing the web application to access them directly from S3. This is the most cost-effective and operationally simple way to bridge legacy on-premises NFS output with S3, requiring no changes to the batch process.

AWS Documentation Extract:

''With S3 File Gateway, you can provide applications a local file interface to Amazon S3. S3 File Gateway presents a file-based interface (NFS or SMB), allowing you to use S3 as your scalable, durable storage while making files available to legacy applications.''

(Source: AWS Storage Gateway documentation)

A: Outposts is far more costly and complex than needed.

B: Volume Gateway presents iSCSI block storage, not NFS.

C: Requires re-coding the legacy app to use S3 APIs, not NFS.

Amazon AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate SAA-C03 Exam Practice Test