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AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 Exam Questions and Answers – Page 1 Part 1

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The latest AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 certification actual real practice exam question and answer (Q&A) dumps are available free, which are helpful for you to pass the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 exam and earn AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 certification.

Exam Question 1

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?

A. Amazon EFS
B. Amazon FSx
C. Amazon S3
D. AWS Storage Gateway

Correct Answer

B. Amazon FSx

Answer Description

Migrating Existing Files to Amazon FSx for Windows File Server Using AWS DataSync

We recommend using AWS DataSync to transfer data between Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file systems. DataSync is a data transfer service that simplifies, automates, and accelerates moving and replicating data between on-premises storage systems and other AWS storage services over the internet or AWS Direct Connect. DataSync can transfer your file system data and metadata, such as ownership, time stamps, and access permissions.

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides fully managed, highly reliable file storage that is accessible over the industry-standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol.

Amazon FSx is built on Windows Server and provides a rich set of administrative features that include end-user file restore, user quotas, and Access Control Lists (ACLs).

Additionally, Amazon FSX for Windows File Server supports Distributed File System Replication (DFSR) in both Single-AZ and Multi-AZ deployments as can be seen in the feature comparison table below.

CORRECT: “Amazon FSx” is the correct answer.

INCORRECT: “Amazon EFS” is incorrect as EFS only supports Linux systems. INCORRECT: “Amazon S3” is incorrect as this is not a suitable replacement for a Microsoft filesystem.

INCORRECT: “AWS Storage Gateway” is incorrect as this service is primarily used for connecting on-premises storage to cloud storage. It consists of a software device installed on-premises and can be used with SMB shares but it actually stores the data on S3. It is also used for migration. However, in this case the company need to replace the file server farm and Amazon FSx is the best choice for this job.

References

Exam Question 2

A company has a legacy application that processes data in two parts. The second part of the process takes longer than the first, so the company has decided to rewrite the application as two microservices running on Amazon ECS that can scale independently.

How should a solutions architect integrate the microservices?

A. Implement code in microservice 1 to send data to an Amazon S3 bucket. Use S3 event notifications to invoke microservice 2.
B. Implement code in microservice 1 to publish data to an Amazon SNS topic. Implement code in microservice 2 to subscribe to this topic.
C. Implement code in microservice 1 to send data to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. Implement code in microservice 2 to read from Kinesis Data Firehose.
D. Implement code in microservice 1 to send data to an Amazon SQS queue. Implement code in microservice 2 to process messages from the queue.

Correct Answer

C. Implement code in microservice 1 to send data to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. Implement code in microservice 2 to read from Kinesis Data Firehose.

Answer Description

This is a good use case for Amazon SQS. The microservices must be decoupled so they can scale independently. An Amazon SQS queue will enable microservice 1 to add messages to the queue. Microservice 2 can then pick up the messages and process them. This ensures that if there’s a spike in traffic on the frontend, messages do not get lost due to the backend process not being ready to process them.

CORRECT: “Implement code in microservice 1 to send data to an Amazon SQS queue. Implement code in microservice 2 to process messages from the queue” is the correct answer. INCORRECT: “Implement code in microservice 1 to send data to an Amazon S3 bucket. Use S3 event notifications to invoke microservice 2” is incorrect as a message queue would be preferable to an S3 bucket.

INCORRECT: “Implement code in microservice 1 to publish data to an Amazon SNS topic. Implement code in microservice 2 to subscribe to this topic” is incorrect as notifications to topics are pushed to subscribers. In this case we want the second microservice to pickup the messages when ready (pull them).

INCORRECT: “Implement code in microservice 1 to send data to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. Implement code in microservice 2 to read from Kinesis Data Firehose” is incorrect as this is not how Firehose works. Firehose sends data directly to destinations, it is not a message queue.

References

Exam Question 3

A company captures clickstream data from multiple websites and analyzes it using batch processing. The data is loaded nightly into Amazon Redshift and is consumed by business analysts. The company wants to move towards near-real-time data processing for timely insights. The solution should process the streaming data with minimal effort and operational overhead.

Which combination of AWS services are MOST cost-effective for this solution? (Choose two.)

A. Amazon EC2
B. AWS Lambda
C. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
D. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
E. Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics

Correct Answer

A. Amazon EC2
D. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

Answer Description

Kinesis Data Streams and Kinesis Client Library (KCL) – Data from the data source can be continuously captured and streamed in near real-time using Kinesis Data Streams. With the Kinesis Client Library (KCL), you can build your own application that can preprocess the streaming data as they arrive and emit the data for generating incremental views and downstream analysis. Kinesis Data Analytics – This service provides the easiest way to process the data that is streaming through Kinesis Data Stream or Kinesis Data Firehose using SQL. This enables customers to gain actionable insight in near real-time from the incremental stream before storing it in Amazon S3.

Lambda architecture building blocks on AWS

References

Exam Question 4

A company’s application runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The instances run in an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. On the first day of every month at midnight, the application becomes much slower when the month-end financial calculation batch executes. This causes the CPU utilization of the EC2 instances to immediately peak to 100%, which disrupts the application.

What should a solutions architect recommend to ensure the application is able to handle the workload and avoid downtime?

A. Configure an Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the ALB.
B. Configure an EC2 Auto Scaling simple scaling policy based on CPU utilization.
C. Configure an EC2 Auto Scaling scheduled scaling policy based on the monthly schedule.
D. Configure Amazon ElastiCache to remove some of the workload from the EC2 instances.

Correct Answer

C. Configure an EC2 Auto Scaling scheduled scaling policy based on the monthly schedule.

Answer Description

Scheduled Scaling for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Scheduled scaling allows you to set your own scaling schedule. For example, let’s say that every week the traffic to your web application starts to increase on Wednesday, remains high on Thursday, and starts to decrease on Friday. You can plan your scaling actions based on the predictable traffic patterns of your web application. Scaling actions are performed automatically as a function of time and date.

Scheduled scaling allows you to set your own scaling schedule. In this case the scaling action can be scheduled to occur just prior to the time that the reports will be run each month. Scaling actions are performed automatically as a function of time and date. This will ensure that there are enough EC2 instances to serve the demand and prevent the application from slowing down.

CORRECT: “Configure an EC2 Auto Scaling scheduled scaling policy based on the monthly schedule” is the correct answer.

INCORRECT: “Configure an Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the ALB” is incorrect as this would be more suitable for providing access to global users by caching content.

INCORRECT: “Configure an EC2 Auto Scaling simple scaling policy based on CPU utilization” is incorrect as this would not prevent the slow-down from occurring as there would be a delay between when the CPU hits 100% and the metric being reported and additional instances being launched.

INCORRECT: “Configure Amazon ElastiCache to remove some of the workload from the EC2 instances” is incorrect as ElastiCache is a database cache, it cannot replace the compute functions of an EC2 instance.

References

Exam Question 5

A company runs a multi-tier web application that hosts news content. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The instances run in an EC2 Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones and use an Amazon Aurora database. A solutions architect needs to make the application more resilient to periodic increases in request rates.

Which architecture should the solutions architect implement? (Choose two.)

A. Add AWS Shield.
B. Add Aurora Replica.
C. Add AWS Direct Connect.
D. Add AWS Global Accelerator.
E. Add an Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the Application Load Balancer.

Correct Answer

B. Add Aurora Replica.
E. Add an Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the Application Load Balancer.

Answer Description

AWS Global Accelerator: Acceleration for latency-sensitive applications. Many applications, especially in areas such as gaming, media, mobile apps, and financials, require very low latency for a great user experience. To improve the user experience, Global Accelerator directs user traffic to the application endpoint that is nearest to the client, which reduces internet latency and jitter.
Global Accelerator routes traffic to the closest edge location by using Anycast, and then routes it to the closest regional endpoint over the AWS global network. Global Accelerator quickly reacts to changes in network performance to improve your users’ application performance.

Amazon CloudFront: Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment.

The architecture is already highly resilient but the may be subject to performance degradation if there are sudden increases in request rates. To resolve this situation Amazon Aurora Read Replicas can be used to serve read traffic which offloads requests from the main database. On the frontend an Amazon CloudFront distribution can be placed in front of the ALB and this will cache content for better performance and also offloads requests from the backend.

CORRECT: “Add Amazon Aurora Replicas” is the correct answer.

CORRECT: “Add an Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the ALB” is the correct answer.

INCORRECT: “Add and Amazon WAF in front of the ALB” is incorrect. A web application firewall protects applications from malicious attacks. It does not improve performance.

INCORRECT: “Add an Amazon Transit Gateway to the Availability Zones” is incorrect as this is used to connect on-premises networks to VPCs.

INCORRECT: “Add an Amazon Global Accelerator endpoint” is incorrect as this service is used for directing users to different instances of the application in different regions based on latency.

References

Exam Question 6

A product team is creating a new application that will store a large amount of data. The data will be analyzed hourly and modified by multiple Amazon EC2 Linux instances. The application team believes the amount of space needed will continue to grow for the next 6 months.

Which set of actions should a solutions architect take to support these needs?

A. Store the data in an Amazon EBS volume. Mount the EBS volume on the application instances.
B. Store the data in an Amazon EFS file system. Mount the file system on the application instances.
C. Store the data in Amazon S3 Glacier. Update the vault policy to allow access to the application instances.
D. Store the data in Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA). Update the bucket policy to allow access to the application instances.

Correct Answer

B. Store the data in an Amazon EFS file system. Mount the file system on the application instances.

Answer Description

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides a simple, scalable, fully managed elastic NFS file system for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. It is built to scale on demand to petabytes without disrupting applications, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, eliminating the need to provision and manage capacity to accommodate growth.

“The data will be analyzed hourly and modified by multiple Amazon EC2 Linux instances.”

Amazon EFS is designed to provide massively parallel shared access to thousands of Amazon EC2 instances, enabling your applications to achieve high levels of aggregate throughput and IOPS with consistent low latencies.

Amazon EFS is well suited to support a broad spectrum of use cases from home directories to business-critical applications. Customers can use EFS to lift-and-shift existing enterprise applications to the AWS Cloud. Other use cases include big data analytics, web serving and content management, application development and testing, media and entertainment workflows, database backups, and container storage.

Amazon EFS is a regional service storing data within and across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) for high availability and durability. Amazon EC2 instances can access your file system across AZs, regions, and VPCs, while on-premises servers can access using AWS Direct Connect or AWS VPN.

Exam Question 7

A company is migrating a three-tier application to AWS. The application requires a MySQL database. In the past, the application users reported poor application performance when creating new entries. These performance issues were caused by users generating different real-time reports from the application during working hours.

Which solution will improve the performance of the application when it is moved to AWS?

A. Import the data into an Amazon DynamoDB table with provisioned capacity. Refactor the application to use DynamoDB for reports.
B. Create the database on a compute optimized Amazon EC2 instance. Ensure compute resources exceed the on-premises database.
C. Create an Amazon Aurora MySQL Multi-AZ DB cluster with multiple read replicas. Configure the application to use the reader endpoint for reports.
D. Create an Amazon Aurora MySQL Multi-AZ DB cluster. Configure the application to use the backup instance of the cluster as an endpoint for the reports.

Correct Answer

C. Create an Amazon Aurora MySQL Multi-AZ DB cluster with multiple read replicas. Configure the application to use the reader endpoint for reports.

Answer Description

Amazon RDS Read Replicas Now Support Multi-AZ Deployments

Starting today, Amazon RDS Read Replicas for MySQL and MariaDB now support Multi-AZ deployments. Combining Read Replicas with Multi-AZ enables you to build a resilient disaster recovery strategy and simplify your database engine upgrade process.

Amazon RDS Read Replicas enable you to create one or more read-only copies of your database instance within the same AWS Region or in a different AWS Region. Updates made to the source database are then asynchronously copied to your Read Replicas. In addition to providing scalability for read-heavy workloads, Read Replicas can be promoted to become a standalone database instance when needed.

Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments provide enhanced availability for database instances within a single AWS Region. With Multi-AZ, your data is synchronously replicated to a standby in a different Availability Zone (AZ). In the event of an infrastructure failure, Amazon RDS performs an automatic failover to the standby, minimizing disruption to your applications.

You can now use Read Replicas with Multi-AZ as part of a disaster recovery (DR) strategy for your production databases. A well-designed and tested DR plan is critical for maintaining business continuity after a disaster. A Read Replica in a different region than the source database can be used as a standby database and promoted to become the new production database in case of a regional disruption.

You can also combine Read Replicas with Multi-AZ for your database engine upgrade process. You can create a Read Replica of your production database instance and upgrade it to a new database engine version. When the upgrade is complete, you can stop applications, promote the Read Replica to a standalone database instance, and switch over your applications. Since the database instance is already a Multi-AZ deployment, no additional steps are needed.

Overview of Amazon RDS Read Replicas

Deploying one or more read replicas for a given source DB instance might make sense in a variety of scenarios, including the following:

Scaling beyond the compute or I/O capacity of a single DB instance for read-heavy database workloads. You can direct this excess read traffic to one or more read replicas.

Serving read traffic while the source DB instance is unavailable. In some cases, your source DB instance might not be able to take I/O requests, for example due to I/O suspension for backups or scheduled maintenance. In these cases, you can direct read traffic to your read replicas. For this use case, keep in mind that the data on the read replica might be “stale” because the source DB instance is unavailable.

Business reporting or data warehousing scenarios where you might want business reporting queries to run against a read replica, rather than your primary, production DB instance.

Implementing disaster recovery. You can promote a read replica to a standalone instance as a disaster recovery solution if the source DB instance fails.

The MySQL-compatible edition of Aurora delivers up to 5X the throughput of standard MySQL running on the same hardware, and enables existing MySQL applications and tools to run without requiring modification.

References

Exam Question 8

A solutions architect is deploying a distributed database on multiple Amazon EC2 instances. The database stores all data on multiple instances so it can withstand the loss of an instance. The database requires block storage with latency and throughput to support several million transactions per second per server.

Which storage solution should the solutions architect use?

A. Amazon EBS
B. Amazon EC2 instance store
C. Amazon EFS
D. Amazon S3

Correct Answer

B. Amazon EC2 instance store

Answer Description

It is block storage made for high throughput and low latency.

References

Exam Question 9

Organizers for a global event want to put daily reports online as static HTML pages. The pages are expected to generate millions of views from users 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?

A. Generate presigned URLs for the files.
B. Use cross-Region replication to all Regions.
C. Use the geoproximity feature of Amazon Route 53.
D. Use Amazon CloudFront with the S3 bucket as its origin.

Correct Answer

D. Use Amazon CloudFront with the S3 bucket as its origin.

Answer Description

Using Amazon S3 Origins, MediaPackage Channels, and Custom Origins for Web Distributions

Using Amazon S3 Buckets for Your Origin
When you use Amazon S3 as an origin for your distribution, you place any objects that you want CloudFront to deliver in an Amazon S3 bucket. You can use any method that is supported by Amazon S3 to get your objects into Amazon S3, for example, the Amazon S3 console or API, or a third-party tool. You can create a hierarchy in your bucket to store the objects, just as you would with any other Amazon S3 bucket.

Using an existing Amazon S3 bucket as your CloudFront origin server doesn’t change the bucket in any way; you can still use it as you normally would to store and access Amazon S3 objects at the standard Amazon S3 price. You incur regular Amazon S3 charges for storing the objects in the bucket.

Using Amazon S3 Buckets Configured as Website Endpoints for Your Origin
You can set up an Amazon S3 bucket that is configured as a website endpoint as custom origin with CloudFront.

When you configure your CloudFront distribution, for the origin, enter the Amazon S3 static website hosting endpoint for your bucket. This value appears in the Amazon S3 console, on the Properties tab, in the Static website hosting pane. For example: http://bucket-name.s3-website-region.amazonaws.com

For more information about specifying Amazon S3 static website endpoints, see Website endpoints in the Amazon Simple Storage Service Developer Guide.

When you specify the bucket name in this format as your origin, you can use Amazon S3 redirects and Amazon S3 custom error documents. For more information about Amazon S3 features, see the Amazon S3 documentation.

Using an Amazon S3 bucket as your CloudFront origin server doesn’t change it in any way. You can still use it as you normally would and you incur regular Amazon S3 charges.

Amazon CloudFront can be used to cache the files in edge locations around the world and this will improve the performance of the webpages.

To serve a static website hosted on Amazon S3, you can deploy a CloudFront distribution using one of these configurations:

Using a REST API endpoint as the origin with access restricted by an origin access identity (OAI) Using a website endpoint as the origin with anonymous (public) access allowed

Using a website endpoint as the origin with access restricted by a Referer header CORRECT: “Use Amazon CloudFront with the S3 bucket as its origin” is the correct answer.

INCORRECT: “Generate presigned URLs for the files” is incorrect as this is used to restrict access which is not a requirement.

INCORRECT: “Use cross-Region replication to all Regions” is incorrect as this does not provide a mechanism for directing users to the closest copy of the static webpages.

INCORRECT: “Use the geoproximity feature of Amazon Route 53” is incorrect as this does not include a solution for having multiple copies of the data in different geographic locations.

References

Exam Question 10

A start-up company has a web application based in the us-east-1 Region with multiple Amazon EC2 instances running behind an Application Load Balancer across multiple Availability Zones. As the company’s user base grows in the us-west-1 Region, it needs a solution with low latency and high availability.

What should a solutions architect do to accomplish this?

A. Provision EC2 instances in us-west-1. Switch the Application Load Balancer to a Network Load Balancer to achieve cross-Region load balancing.
B. Provision EC2 instances and an Application Load Balancer in us-west-1. Make the load balancer distribute the traffic based on the location of the request.
C. Provision EC2 instances and configure an Application Load Balancer in us-west-1. Create an accelerator in AWS Global Accelerator that uses an endpoint group that includes the load balancer endpoints in both Regions.
D. Provision EC2 instances and configure an Application Load Balancer in us-west-1. Configure Amazon Route 53 with a weighted routing policy. Create alias records in Route 53 that point to the Application Load Balancer.

Correct Answer

C. Provision EC2 instances and configure an Application Load Balancer in us-west-1. Create an accelerator in AWS Global Accelerator that uses an endpoint group that includes the load balancer endpoints in both Regions.

Answer Description

Register endpoints for endpoint groups: You register one or more regional resources, such as Application Load Balancers, Network Load Balancers, EC2 Instances, or Elastic IP addresses, in each endpoint group. Then you can set weights to choose how much traffic is routed to each endpoint.

Endpoints in AWS Global Accelerator: Endpoints in AWS Global Accelerator can be Network Load Balancers, Application Load Balancers, Amazon EC2 instances, or Elastic IP addresses. A static IP address serves as a single point of contact for clients, and Global Accelerator then distributes incoming traffic across healthy endpoints. Global Accelerator directs traffic to endpoints by using the port (or port range) that you specify for the listener that the endpoint group for the endpoint belongs to.

Each endpoint group can have multiple endpoints. You can add each endpoint to multiple endpoint groups, but the endpoint groups must be associated with different listeners.

Global Accelerator continually monitors the health of all endpoints that are included in an endpoint group. It routes traffic only to the active endpoints that are healthy. If Global Accelerator doesn’t have any healthy endpoints to route traffic to, it routes traffic to all endpoints.

ELB provides load balancing within one Region, AWS Global Accelerator provides traffic management across multiple Regions […] AWS Global Accelerator complements ELB by extending these capabilities beyond a single AWS Region, allowing you to provision a global interface for your applications in any number of Regions. If you have workloads that cater to a global client base, we recommend that you use AWS Global Accelerator. If you have workloads hosted in a single AWS Region and used by clients in and around the same Region, you can use an Application Load Balancer or Network Load Balancer to manage your resources.

References