AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Practice Exam (SAA-C03)
A solutions architect is designing a new service that will use an Amazon API Gateway API on the frontend. The service will need to persist data in a backend database using key-value requests. Initially, the data requirements will be around 1 GB and future growth is unknown. Requests can range from 0 to over 800 requests per second. Which combination of AWS services would meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)
1) Amazon DynamoDB 2) AWS Lambda
A company's application is running on Amazon EC2 instances in a single Region. In the event of a disaster, a solutions architect needs to ensure that the resources can also be deployed to a second Region. Which combination of actions should the solutions architect take to accomplish this? (Select TWO.)
1) Copy an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) of an EC2 instance and specify the second Region for the destination 2) Launch a new EC2 instance from an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) in the second Region
A company runs an application in an on-premises data center that collects environmental data from production machinery. The data consists of JSON files stored on network attached storage (NAS) and around 5 TB of data is collected each day. The company must upload this data to Amazon S3 where it can be processed by an analytics application. The data must be transferred securely. Which solution offers the MOST reliable and time-efficient data transfer?
AWS DataSync over AWS Direct Connect.
A persistent database must be migrated from an on-premises server to an Amazon EC2 instances. The database requires 64,000 IOPS and, if possible, should be stored on a single Amazon EBS volume. Which solution should a Solutions Architect recommend?
Create a Nitro-based Amazon EC2 instance with an Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD (i01) volume attached. Provision 64,000 IOPS for the volume.
A company wishes to restrict access to their Amazon DynamoDB table to specific, private source IP addresses from their VPC. What should be done to secure access to the table?
Create a gateway VPC endpoint and add an entry to the route table
A company runs an application that uses an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL database. The database is currently not encrypted. A Solutions Architect has been instructed that due to new compliance requirements all existing and new data in the database must be encrypted. The database experiences high volumes of changes and no data can be lost. How can the Solutions Architect enable encryption for the database without incurring any data loss?
Create a snapshot of the existing RDS DB instance. Create an encrypted copy of the snapshot. Create a new RDS DB instance from the encrypted snapshot and update the application. Use AWS DMS to synchronize data between the source and destination RDS DBs.
A company offers an online product brochure that is delivered from a static website running on Amazon S3. The company's customers are mainly in the United States, Canada, and Europe. The company is looking to cost-effectively reduce the latency for users in these regions. What is the most cost-effective solution to these requirements?
Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution and set the price class to use only U.S, Canada and Europe.
A company is deploying a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances running Linux across multiple Availability Zones within an AWS Region. The application requires a data storage solution that can be accessed by all of the EC2 instances simultaneously. The solution must be highly scalable and easy to implement. The storage must be mounted using the NFS protocol. Which solution meets these requirements?
Create an Amazon EFS file system with mount targets in each Availability Zone. Configure the application instances to mount the file system.
A new application will run across multiple Amazon ECS tasks. Front-end application logic will process data and then pass that data to a back-end ECS task to perform further processing and write the data to a datastore. The Architect would like to reduce-interdependencies so failures do no impact other components. Which solution should the Architect use?
Create an Amazon SQS queue and configure the front-end to add messages to the queue and the back-end to poll the queue for messages
A solutions architect is designing an application on AWS. The compute layer will run in parallel across EC2 instances. The compute layer should scale based on the number of jobs to be processed. The compute layer is stateless. The solutions architect must ensure that the application is loosely coupled and the job items are durably stored. Which design should the solutions architect use?
Create an Amazon SQS queue to hold the jobs that needs to be processed. Create an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group for the compute application. Set the scaling policy for the Auto Scaling group to add and remove nodes based on the number of items in the SQS queue
An application running on an Amazon ECS container instance using the EC2 launch type needs permissions to write data to Amazon DynamoDB. How can you assign these permissions only to the specific ECS task that is running the application?
Create an IAM policy with permissions to DynamoDB and assign It to a task using the taskRoleArn parameter
A developer created an application that uses Amazon EC2 and an Amazon RDS MySQL database instance. The developer stored the database user name and password in a configuration file on the root EBS volume of the EC2 application instance. A Solutions Architect has been asked to design a more secure solution. What should the Solutions Architect do to achieve this requirement?
Create an IAM role with permission to access the database. Attach this IAM role to the EC2 instance.
An AWS Organization has an OU with multiple member accounts in it. The company needs to restrict the ability to launch only specific Amazon EC2 instance types. How can this policy be applied across the accounts with the least effort?
Create an SCP with a deny rule that denies all but the specific instance types
A legacy tightly-coupled High Performance Computing (HPC) application will be migrated to AWS. Which network adapter type should be used?
Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA)
A company plans to make an Amazon EC2 Linux instance unavailable outside of business hours to save costs. The instance is backed by an Amazon EBS volume. There is a requirement that the contents of the instance's memory must be preserved when it is made unavailable. How can a solutions architect meet these requirements?
Hibernate the instance outside business hours. Start the instance again when required.
A new application is to be published in multiple regions around the world. The Architect needs to ensure only 2 IP addresses need to be whitelisted. The solution should intelligently route traffic for lowest latency and provide fast regional failover. How can this be achieved?
Launch EC2 instances into multiple regions behind an NLB and use AWS Global Accelerator
A company runs an application on six web application servers in an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group in a single Availability Zone. The application is fronted by an Application Load Balancer (ALB). A Solutions Architect needs to modify the infrastructure to be highly available without making any modifications to the application. Which architecture should the Solutions Architect choose to enable high availability?
Modify the Auto Scaling group to use two instances across each of three Availability Zones.
An application is being created that will use Amazon EC2 instances to generate and store data. Another set of EC2 instances will then analyze and modify the data. Storage requirements will be significant and will continue to grow over time. The application architects require a storage solution. Which actions would meet these needs?
Store the data in an Amazon EFS filesystem. Mount the file system on the application instances
A company is working with a strategic partner that has an application that must be able to send messages to one of the company's Amazon SQS queues. The partner company has its own AWS account. How can a Solutions Architect provide least privilege access to the partner?
Update the permission policy on the SQS queue to grant the sqs:SendMessage permission to the partner's AWS account.
A company delivers content to subscribers distributed globally from an application running on AWS. The application uses a fleet of Amazon EC2 instance in a private subnet behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Due to an update in copyright restrictions, it is necessary to block access for specific countries. What is the EASIEST method to meet this requirement?
Use Amazon CloudFront to serve the application and deny access to blocked countries
An Amazon VPC contains several Amazon EC2 instances. The instances need to make API calls to Amazon DynamoDB. A solutions architect needs to ensure that the API calls do not traverse the internet. How can this be accomplished? (Select TWO.)
1) Create a gateway endpoint for DynamoDB 2) Create a route table entry for the endpoint
A web application runs in public and private subnets. The application architecture consists of a web tier and database tier running on Amazon EC2 instances. Both tiers run in a single Availability Zone (AZ). Which combination of steps should a solutions architect take to provide high availability for this architecture? (Select TWO.)
1) Create an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group and Application Load Balancer (ALB) spanning multiple AZs 2)Create new public and private subnets in the same VPC, each in a new AZ. Migrate the database to an Amazon RDS multi-AZ deployment
An eCommerce company runs an application on Amazon EC2 instances in public and private subnets. The web application runs in a public subnet and the database runs in a private subnet. Both the public and private subnets are in a single Availability Zone. Which combination of steps should a solutions architect take to provide high availability for this architecture? (Select TWO.)
1) Create new public and private subnets in a different AZ. Migrate the database to an Amazon RDS multi-AZ deployment. 2) Create an EC2 Auto Scaling group and Application Load Balancer that spans across multiple AZs.
Amazon EC2 instances in a development environment run between 9am and 5pm Monday-Friday. Production instances run 24/7. Which pricing models should be used to optimize cost and ensure capacity is available? (Select TWO.)
1) On-demand capacity reservations for the development environment 2) Use Reserved instances for the production environment
Storage capacity has become an issue for a company that runs application servers on-premises. The servers are connected to a combination of block storage and NFS storage solutions. The company requires a solution that supports local caching without re-architecting its existing applications. Which combination of changes can the company make to meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)
1) Use an AWS Storage Gateway volume gateway to replace the block storage. 2) Use an AWS Storage Gateway file gateway to replace the NFS storage.
A company hosts a multiplayer game on AWS. The application uses Amazon EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone and users connect over Layer 4. Solutions Architect has been tasked with making the architecture highly available and also more cost-effective. How can the solutions architect best meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)
1)Configure an Auto Scaling group to add or remove instances in multiple Availability Zones automatically 2)Configure a Network Load Balancer in front of the EC2 instances
An Amazon S3 bucket in the us-east-1 Region hosts the static website content of a company. The content is made available through an Amazon CloudFront origin pointing to that bucket. A second copy of the bucket is created in the ap-southeast-1 Region using cross-region replication. The chief solutions architect wants a solution that provides greater availability for the website. Which combination of actions should a solutions architect take to increase availability? (Select TWO.)
1)Using us-east-1 bucket as the primary bucket and ap-southeast-1 bucket as the secondary bucket, create a CloudFront origin group. 2)Add an origin for ap-southeast-1 to CloudFront.
An organization has a large amount of data on Windows (SMB) file shares in their on-premises data center. The organization would like to move data into Amazon S3. They would like to automate the migration of data over their AWS Direct Connect link. Which AWS service can assist them?
AWS DataSync
A company runs a web application that serves weather updates. The application runs on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances in a Multi-AZ Auto scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The instances store data in an Amazon Aurora database. A solutions architect needs to make the application more resilient to sporadic increases in request rates. Which architecture should the solutions architect implement? (Select TWO.)
Add Amazon Aurora Replicas Add an Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the ALB
A company runs an application on an Amazon EC2 instance the requires 250 GB of storage space. The application is not used often and has small spikes in usage on weekday mornings and afternoons. The disk I/O can vary with peaks hitting a maximum of 3,000 IOPS. A Solutions Architect must recommend the most cost-effective storage solution that delivers the performance required. Which configuration should the Solutions Architect recommend? Which solution should the solutions architect recommend?
Amazon EBS General Purpose SSD (gp2)
A video production company is planning to move some of its workloads to the AWS Cloud. The company will require around 5 TB of storage for video processing with the maximum possible I/O performance. They also require over 400 TB of extremely durable storage for storing video files and 800 TB of storage for long-term archival. Which combinations of services should a Solutions Architect use to meet these requirements?
Amazon EC2 instance store for maximum performance, Amazon S3 for durable data storage, and Amazon S3 Glacier for archival storage.
A Microsoft Windows file server farm uses Distributed File System Replication (DFSR) to synchronize data in an on-premises environment. The infrastructure is being migrated to the AWS Cloud. Which service should the solutions architect use to replace the file server farm?
Amazon FSx
A company is migrating from an on-premises infrastructure to the AWS Cloud. One of the company's applications stores files on a Windows file server farm that uses Distributed File System Replication (DFSR) to keep data in sync. A solutions architect needs to replace the file server farm. Which service should the solutions architect use?
Amazon FSx
A team are planning to run analytics jobs on log files each day and require a storage solution. The size and number of logs is unknown and data will persist for 24 hours only. What is the MOST cost-effective solution?
Amazon S3 Standard
An application running on Amazon EC2 needs to asynchronously invoke an AWS Lambda function to perform data processing. The services should be decoupled. Which service can be used to decouple the compute services?
Amazon SNS
A company has deployed a new website on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Amazon Route 53 is used for the DNS service. The company has asked a Solutions Architect to create a backup website with support contact details that users will be directed to automatically if the primary website is down. How should the Solutions Architect deploy this solution cost-effectively?
Configure a static website using Amazon S3 and create a Route 53 failover routing policy.
A solutions architect is designing the infrastructure to run an application on Amazon EC2 instances. The application requires high availability and must dynamically scale based on demand to be cost efficient. What should the solutions architect do to meet these requirements?
Configure an Application Load Balancer in front of an Auto Scaling group to deploy instances to multiple Availability Zones
A company is investigating methods to reduce the expenses associated with on-premises backup infrastructure. The Solutions Architect wants to reduce costs by eliminating the use of physical backup tapes. It is a requirement that existing backup applications and workflows should continue to function. What should the Solutions Architect recommend?
Connect the backup applications to an AWS Storage Gateway using an iSCSI-virtual tape library (VTL).
A company hosts an application on Amazon EC2 instances behind Application Load Balancers in several AWS Regions. Distribution rights for the content require that users in different geographies must be served content from specific regions. Which configuration meets these requirements?
Create Amazon Route 53 records with a geolocation routing policy.
A company has two accounts for perform testing and each account has a single VPC: VPC-TEST1 and VPC-TEST2. The operations team require a method of securely copying files between Amazon EC2 instances in these VPCs. The connectivity should not have any single points of failure or bandwidth constraints. Which solution should a Solutions Architect recommend?
Create a VPC peering connection between VPC-TEST1 and VPC-TEST2
A Solutions Architect has deployed an application on several Amazon EC2 instances across three private subnets. The application must be made accessible to internet-based clients with the least amount of administrative effort. How can the Solutions Architect make the application available on the internet?
Create an Application Load Balancer and associate three public subnets from the same Availability Zones as the private instances. Add the private instances to the ALB.
A Solutions Architect has been tasked with re-deploying an application running on AWS to enable high availability. The application processes messages that are received in an ActiveMQ queue running on a single Amazon EC2 instance. Messages are then processed by a consumer application running on Amazon EC2. After processing the messages the consumer application writes results to a MySQL database running on Amazon EC2. Which architecture offers the highest availability and low operational complexity?
Deploy Amazon MQ with active/standby brokers configured across two Availability Zones. Create an Auto Scaling group for the consumer EC2 instances across two Availability Zones. Use an Amazon RDS MySQL database with Multi-AZ enabled.
A company uses an Amazon RDS MySQL database instance to store customer order data. The security team have requested that SSL/TLS encryption in transit must be used for encrypting connections to the database from application servers. The data in the database is currently encrypted at rest using an AWS KMS key. How can a Solutions Architect enable encryption in transit?
Download the AWS-provided root certificates. Use the certificates when connecting to the RDS DB instance.
A company has uploaded some highly critical data to an Amazon S3 bucket. Management are concerned about data availability and require that steps are taken to protect the data from accidental deletion. The data should still be accessible, and a user should be able to delete the data intentionally. Which combination of steps should a solutions architect take to accomplish this? (Select TWO.)
Enable MFA Delete on the S3 bucket. Enable versioning on the S3 bucket.
A solutions architect is creating a document submission application for a school. The application will use an Amazon S3 bucket for storage. The solution must prevent accidental deletion of the documents and ensure that all versions of the documents are available. Users must be able to upload and modify the documents. Which combination of actions should be taken to meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)
Enable versioning on the bucket
An Amazon RDS Read Replica is being deployed in a separate region. The master database is not encrypted but all data in the new region must be encrypted. How can this be achieved?
Encrypt a snapshot from the master DB instance, create a new encrypted master DB instance, and then create an encrypted cross-region Read Replica
A company needs to connect its on-premises data center network to a new virtual private cloud (VPC). There is a symmetrical internet connection of 100 Mbps in the data center network. The data transfer rate for an on-premises application is multiple gigabytes per day. Processing will be done using an Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose stream. What should a solutions architect recommend for maximum performance?
Kinesis Data Firehose can be connected to the VPC using AWS PrivateLink. Install a 1 Gbps AWS Direct Connect connection between the on-premises network and AWS. To send data from on-premises to Kinesis Data Firehose, use the PrivateLink endpoint.
A company uses Docker containers for many application workloads in an on-premise data center. The company is planning to deploy containers to AWS and the chief architect has mandated that the same configuration and administrative tools must be used across all containerized environments. The company also wishes to remain cloud agnostic to safeguard mitigate the impact of future changes in cloud strategy. How can a Solutions Architect design a managed solution that will align with open-source software?
Launch the containers on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and EKS worker nodes
An insurance company has a web application that serves users in the United Kingdom and Australia. The application includes a database tier using a MySQL database hosted in eu-west-2. The web tier runs from eu-west-2 and ap-southeast-2. Amazon Route 53 geoproximity routing is used to direct users to the closest web tier. It has been noted that Australian users receive slow response times to queries. Which changes should be made to the database tier to improve performance?
Migrate the database to an Amazon Aurora global database in MySQL compatibility mode. Configure read replicas in ap-southeast-2
A financial services company has a web application with an application tier running in the U.S and Europe. The database tier consists of a MySQL database running on Amazon EC2 in us-west-1. Users are directed to the closest application tier using Route 53 latency-based routing. The users in Europe have reported poor performance when running queries. Which changes should a Solutions Architect make to the database tier to improve performance?
Migrate the database to an Amazon Aurora global database in MySQL compatibility mode. Configure the application tier in Europe to use the local reader endpoint.
A website runs on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) which serves as an origin for an Amazon CloudFront distribution. An AWS WAF is being used to protect against SQL injection attacks. A review of security logs revealed an external malicious IP that needs to be blocked from accessing the website. What should a solutions architect do to protect the application?
Modify the configuration of AWS WAF to add an IP match condition to block the malicious IP address
A solutions architect is creating a system that will run analytics on financial data for several hours a night, 5 days a week. The analysis is expected to run for the same duration and cannot be interrupted once it is started. The system will be required for a minimum of 1 year. What should the solutions architect configure to ensure the EC2 instances are available when they are needed?
On-Demand Capacity Reservations
A company runs a large batch processing job at the end of every quarter. The processing job runs for 5 days and uses 15 Amazon EC2 instances. The processing must run uninterrupted for 5 hours per day. The company is investigating ways to reduce the cost of the batch processing job. Which pricing model should the company choose?
On-Demand Instances
A surveying team is using a fleet of drones to collect images of construction sites. The surveying team's laptops lack the inbuilt storage and compute capacity to transfer the images and process the data. While the team has Amazon EC2 instances for processing and Amazon S3 buckets for storage, network connectivity is intermittent and unreliable. The images need to be processed to evaluate the progress of each construction site. What should a solutions architect recommend?
Process and store the images using AWS Snowball Edge devices.
There are two applications in a company: a sender application that sends messages containing payloads, and a processing application that receives messages containing payloads. The company wants to implement an AWS service to handle messages between these two different applications. The sender application sends on average 1,000 messages each hour and the messages depending on the type sometimes take up to 2 days to be processed. If the messages fail to process, they must be retained so that they do not impact the processing of any remaining messages. Which solution meets these requirements and is the MOST operationally efficient?
Provide an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue for the sender and processor applications. Set up a dead-letter queue to collect failed messages.
A solutions architect needs to backup some application log files from an online ecommerce store to Amazon S3. It is unknown how often the logs will be accessed or which logs will be accessed the most. The solutions architect must keep costs as low as possible by using the appropriate S3 storage class. Which S3 storage class should be implemented to meet these requirements?
S3 Intelligent-Tiering
A company requires that all AWS IAM user accounts have specific complexity requirements and minimum password length. How should a Solutions Architect accomplish this?
Set a password policy for the entire AWS account.
A company runs a dynamic website that is hosted on an on-premises server in the United States. The company is expanding to Europe and is investigating how they can optimize the performance of the website for European users. The website's backed must remain in the United States. The company requires a solution that can be implemented within a few days. What should a Solutions Architect recommend?
Use Amazon CloudFront with a custom origin pointing to the on-premises servers.
An organization want to share regular updates about their charitable work using static webpages. The pages are expected to generate a large amount of views from around the world. The files are stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. A solutions architect has been asked to design an efficient and effective solution. Which action should the solutions architect take to accomplish this?
Use Amazon CloudFront with the S3 bucket as its origin
An eCommerce application consists of three tiers. The web tier includes EC2 instances behind an Application Load balancer, the middle tier uses EC2 instances and an Amazon SQS queue to process orders, and the database tier consists of an Auto Scaling DynamoDB table. During busy periods customers have complained about delays in the processing of orders. A Solutions Architect has been tasked with reducing processing times. Which action will be MOST effective in accomplishing this requirement?
Use Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to scale out the middle tier instances based on the SQS queue depth.
A retail company with many stores and warehouses is implementing IoT sensors to gather monitoring data from devices in each location. The data will be sent to AWS in real time. A solutions architect must provide a solution for ensuring events are received in order for each device and ensure that data is saved for future processing. Which solution would be MOST efficient?
Use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams for real-time events with a partition key for each device. Use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to save data to Amazon S3
A company provides a REST-based interface to an application that allows a partner company to send data in near-real time. The application then processes the data that is received and stores it for later analysis. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances. The partner company has received many 503 Service Unavailable Errors when sending data to the application and the compute capacity reaches its limits and is unable to process requests when spikes in data volume occur. Which design should a Solutions Architect implement to improve scalability?
Use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to ingest the data. Process the data using AWS Lambda functions.
A web application allows users to upload photos and add graphical elements to them. The application offers two tiers of service: free and paid. Photos uploaded by paid users should be processed before those submitted using the free tier. The photos are uploaded to an Amazon S3 bucket which uses an event notification to send the job information to Amazon SQS. How should a Solutions Architect configure the Amazon SQS deployment to meet these requirements?
Use a separate SQS Standard queue for each tier. Configure Amazon EC2 instances to prioritize polling for the paid queue over the free queue
A company runs an application in a factory that has a small rack of physical compute resources. The application stores data on a network attached storage (NAS) device using the NFS protocol. The company requires a daily offsite backup of the application data. Which solution can a Solutions Architect recommend to meet this requirement?
Use an AWS Storage Gateway file gateway hardware appliance on premises to replicate the data to Amazon S3.
The database tier of a web application is running on a Windows server on-premises. The database is a Microsoft SQL Server database. The application owner would like to migrate the database to an Amazon RDS instance. How can the migration be executed with minimal administrative effort and downtime?
Use the AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) to directly migrate the database to RDS
