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.
Question 1201
Exam Question
A company stores 200 GB of data each month in Amazon S3. The company needs to perform analytics on this data at the end of each month to determine the number of items sold in each sales region for the previous month.
Which analytics strategy is MOST cost-effective for the company to use?
A. Create an Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) cluster. Query the data in Amazon ES. Visualize the data by using Kibana.
B. Create a table in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Query the data in Amazon S3 by using Amazon Athena. Visualize the data in Amazon QuickSight.
C. Create an Amazon EMR cluster. Query the data by using Amazon EMR, and store the results in Amazon S3. Visualize the data in Amazon QuickSight.
D. Create an Amazon Redshift cluster. Query the data in Amazon Redshift, and upload the results to Amazon S3. Visualize the data in Amazon QuickSight.
Correct Answer
B. Create a table in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Query the data in Amazon S3 by using Amazon Athena. Visualize the data in Amazon QuickSight.
Explanation
The most cost-effective analytics strategy for the company to use would be:
B. Create a table in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Query the data in Amazon S3 using Amazon Athena. Visualize the data in Amazon QuickSight.
By creating a table in the AWS Glue Data Catalog and using Amazon Athena to query the data in Amazon S3, the company can directly analyze the data without the need for additional infrastructure setup or data movement. Amazon Athena is a serverless query service that allows you to run SQL queries on data stored in Amazon S3. It offers a pay-per-query pricing model, which means you only pay for the queries you run and the amount of data scanned.
Amazon QuickSight can be used to visualize the analyzed data. QuickSight is a fully managed business intelligence service that allows you to create interactive dashboards and reports. It integrates well with other AWS services, including Athena, making it a suitable choice for visualizing the data analyzed by Athena.
The other options (A, C, D) involve additional infrastructure setup and management, which may incur higher costs and complexity compared to the cost-effective approach using AWS Glue Data Catalog, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight. Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) (A) requires setting up and managing an Elasticsearch cluster. Amazon EMR (C) and Amazon Redshift (D) involve provisioning and managing cluster resources. These options may be more suitable for scenarios with larger data volumes or more complex analytics requirements.
Reference
Question 1202
Exam Question
A website runs a web application that receives a burst of traffic each day at noon. The users upload new pictures and content daily, but have been complaining of timeouts. The architecture uses Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups, and the custom application consistently takes 1 minute to initiate upon boot up before responding to user requests.
How should a solutions architect redesign the architecture to better respond to changing traffic?
A. Configure a Network Load Balancer with a slow start configuration.
B. Configure AWS ElastiCache for Redis to offload direct requests to the servers.
C. Configure an Autoscaling step scaling policy with an instance warmup condition.
D. Configure Amazon CloudFront to use an Application Load Balancer as the origin.
Correct Answer
C. Configure an Autoscaling step scaling policy with an instance warmup condition.
Explanation
To better respond to changing traffic and address the issue of timeouts, a solutions architect should:
C. Configure an Autoscaling step scaling policy with an instance warmup condition.
By configuring an Autoscaling step scaling policy with an instance warmup condition, the infrastructure can automatically scale up the number of EC2 instances in response to increased traffic. The warmup condition ensures that new instances have sufficient time to initialize and be ready to handle user requests before being added to the load balancer.
The given information states that the custom application consistently takes 1 minute to initiate upon boot up. By using the instance warmup condition, the Autoscaling group will delay adding newly launched instances to the load balancer until they have completed their warmup period. This ensures that user requests are not routed to instances that are still initializing and reduces the chances of timeouts.
The other options (A, B, D) do not directly address the issue of timeouts caused by the application’s long initialization time or the burst of traffic during noon.
Option A suggests using a Network Load Balancer with a slow start configuration. While this can help with managing traffic during ramp-up periods, it does not address the issue of the application’s initialization time.
Option B suggests using AWS ElastiCache for Redis to offload direct requests to the servers. This can improve overall performance but does not directly address the issue of timeouts caused by the application’s initialization time.
Option D suggests using Amazon CloudFront with an Application Load Balancer as the origin. While this can help improve performance and scalability, it does not specifically address the issue of timeouts caused by the application’s initialization time.
Therefore, option C is the most appropriate solution for addressing the specific problem mentioned in the scenario.
Question 1203
Exam Question
A company wants to automate the security assessment of its Amazon EC2 instances. The company needs to validate and demonstrate that security and compliance standards are being followed throughout the development process.
What should a solutions architect do to meet these requirements?
A. Use Amazon Macie to automatically discover, classify and protect the EC2 instances.
B. Use Amazon GuardDuty to publish Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notifications.
C. Use Amazon Inspector with Amazon CloudWatch to publish Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notifications
D. Use Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) to detect and react to changes in the status of AWS Trusted Advisor checks.
Correct Answer
C. Use Amazon Inspector with Amazon CloudWatch to publish Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notifications
Explanation
To automate the security assessment of Amazon EC2 instances and ensure security and compliance standards are followed throughout the development process, a solutions architect should:
C. Use Amazon Inspector with Amazon CloudWatch to publish Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notifications.
Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on EC2 instances. It assesses instances against predefined security rules and provides detailed findings and recommendations.
By using Amazon Inspector with Amazon CloudWatch, findings from the security assessments can be published as Amazon SNS notifications. Amazon SNS allows for the distribution of notifications to various endpoints, such as email, SMS, or other services, to trigger appropriate actions based on the security assessment results.
Option A suggests using Amazon Macie, which is a service focused on discovering, classifying, and protecting sensitive data. While it is useful for data protection, it does not directly address automating security assessments of EC2 instances.
Option B suggests using Amazon GuardDuty, which is a threat detection service that generates findings related to malicious activities and unauthorized behavior. While it is important for threat detection, it does not specifically address security assessment automation and compliance validation.
Option D suggests using Amazon EventBridge (formerly known as Amazon CloudWatch Events) to detect and react to changes in the status of AWS Trusted Advisor checks. While this can be helpful for monitoring compliance checks, it does not provide the security assessment automation required in this scenario.
Therefore, option C is the most appropriate solution for automating the security assessment of EC2 instances and ensuring security and compliance standards are followed throughout the development process.
Question 1204
Exam Question
A company recently released a new type of internet-connected sensor. The company is expecting to sell thousands of sensors, which are designed to stream high volumes of data each second to a central location. A solutions architect must design a solution that ingests and stores data so that engineering teams can analyze it in near-real time with millisecond responsiveness.
Which solution should the solutions architect recommend?
A. Use an Amazon SQS queue to ingest the data. Consume the data with an AWS Lambda function, which then stores the data in Amazon Redshift.
B. Use an Amazon SOS queue to ingest the data. Consume the data with an AWS Lambda function, which then stores the data in Amazon DynamoDB.
C. Use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to ingest the data. Consume the data with an AWS Lambda function, which then stores the data in Amazon Redshift.
D. Use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to ingest the data. Consume the data with an AWS Lambda function, which then stores the data in Amazon DynamoDB.
Correct Answer
D. Use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to ingest the data. Consume the data with an AWS Lambda function, which then stores the data in Amazon DynamoDB.
Explanation
To ingest and store high volumes of data from internet-connected sensors in near-real time with millisecond responsiveness, the recommended solution is:
D. Use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to ingest the data. Consume the data with an AWS Lambda function, which then stores the data in Amazon DynamoDB.
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a managed service for ingesting and processing large amounts of streaming data in real time. It can handle high volumes of data from thousands of sensors and provide near-real-time processing.
By using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, the streaming data from the sensors can be ingested and processed in real time. AWS Lambda functions can be triggered by Kinesis Data Streams to perform near-real-time analytics or transformations on the data.
In this scenario, an AWS Lambda function can be used to consume the data from Kinesis Data Streams and store it in Amazon DynamoDB. DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database that provides low-latency performance, making it suitable for storing and retrieving sensor data with millisecond responsiveness.
Option A suggests using Amazon SQS to ingest the data. However, SQS is a message queuing service and may introduce additional latency for real-time processing compared to Kinesis Data Streams.
Option B suggests using an “Amazon SOS queue,” which is not a valid AWS service. It seems to be a typo or incorrect option.
Option C suggests using Kinesis Data Streams to ingest the data, but storing the data in Amazon Redshift. While Redshift is a powerful data warehousing solution, it may not provide the millisecond responsiveness required for near-real-time analysis of high-volume streaming data.
Therefore, option D is the most appropriate solution as it leverages Amazon Kinesis Data Streams for ingestion, AWS Lambda for data processing, and Amazon DynamoDB for storing the data with millisecond responsiveness.
Question 1205
Exam Question
A company has multiple applications that use Amazon RDS for MySQL as its database. The company recently discovered that a new custom reporting application has increased the number of Queries on the database. This is slowing down performance.
How should a solutions architect resolve this issue with the LEAST amount of application changes?
A. Add a secondary DB instance using Multi-AZ.
B. Set up a road replica and Multi-AZ on Amazon RDS.
C. Set up a standby replica and Multi-AZ on Amazon RDS.
D. Use caching on Amazon RDS to improve the overall performance.
Correct Answer
D. Use caching on Amazon RDS to improve the overall performance.
Explanation
To resolve the performance issue on Amazon RDS for MySQL with the least amount of application changes, the recommended option is:
D. Use caching on Amazon RDS to improve overall performance.
Enabling caching on Amazon RDS for MySQL can help improve performance by reducing the number of queries that need to access the database. Caching allows frequently accessed data to be stored in memory, reducing the need to fetch the same data from the database repeatedly.
Amazon RDS for MySQL supports query caching, which caches the results of SELECT queries. When the same query is executed again, the cached result can be returned without accessing the database, improving response times.
By enabling query caching on Amazon RDS for MySQL, the database can serve frequently executed queries from cache, reducing the load on the database and improving overall performance. This solution requires minimal changes to the applications using the database.
Options A, B, and C suggest adding additional DB instances using Multi-AZ or setting up replicas. While these options can provide high availability and scalability, they involve more infrastructure changes and may not directly address the query performance issue caused by the custom reporting application.
Therefore, option D is the most suitable solution as it addresses the performance issue with the least amount of application changes by utilizing caching on Amazon RDS for MySQL.
Question 1206
Exam Question
A leasing company generates and emails PDF statements every month for all its customers. Each statement is about 400 KB in size. Customers can download their statements from the website for up to 30 days from when the statements were generated. At the end of their 3-year lease, the customers are emailed a ZIP file that contains all the statements.
What is the MOST cost-effective storage solution for this situation?
A. Store the statements using the Amazon S3 Standard storage class. Create a lifecycle policy to move the statements to Amazon S3 Glacier storage after 1 day.
B. Store the statements using the Amazon S3 Glacier storage class. Create a lifecycle policy to move the statements to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage after 30 days.
C. Store the statements using the Amazon S3 Standard storage class. Create a lifecycle policy to move the statements to Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA) storage after 30 days.
D. Store the statements using the Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) storage class. Create a lifecycle policy to move the statements to Amazon S3 Glacier storage after 30 days.
Correct Answer
C. Store the statements using the Amazon S3 Standard storage class. Create a lifecycle policy to move the statements to Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA) storage after 30 days.
Explanation
The most cost-effective storage solution for this situation would be:
C. Store the statements using the Amazon S3 Standard storage class. Create a lifecycle policy to move the statements to Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA) storage after 30 days.
In this scenario, the statements need to be stored for up to 30 days for customers to download them from the website. After that, the statements are included in a ZIP file and emailed to the customers.
Using the Amazon S3 Standard storage class initially provides fast and frequent access to the statements, allowing customers to download them from the website during the 30-day period.
To optimize costs, a lifecycle policy can be set up to transition the statements to a lower-cost storage class after 30 days. Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA) is a storage class that provides a lower-cost option for infrequently accessed data. It offers similar durability as the S3 Standard storage class but at a lower price.
Since the statements are only accessed for up to 30 days, moving them to S3 One Zone-IA storage after this period helps reduce storage costs without sacrificing durability or availability.
Options A, B, and D suggest using Amazon S3 Glacier or Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage classes. These options are designed for long-term archival storage and are suitable for data that is rarely accessed. However, in this scenario, the statements need to be available for download by customers for up to 30 days, which requires a storage class that provides faster access.
Therefore, option C is the most cost-effective solution as it utilizes the Amazon S3 Standard storage class initially for fast access and transitions the statements to the lower-cost S3 One Zone-IA storage class after 30 days.
Question 1207
Exam Question
A company runs its production workload on an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster that includes six Aurora Replicas. The company wants near-real-lime reporting queries from one of its departments to be automatically distributed across three of the Aurora Replicas. Those three replicas have a different compute and memory specification from the rest of the DB cluster.
Which solution meets these requirements?
A. Create and use a custom endpoint for the workload.
B. Create a three-node cluster clone and use the reader endpoint.
C. Use any of the instance endpoints for the selected three nodes.
D. Use the reader endpoint to automatically distribute the read-only workload.
Correct Answer
D. Use the reader endpoint to automatically distribute the read-only workload.
Explanation
The solution that meets the requirements is:
D. Use the reader endpoint to automatically distribute the read-only workload.
Amazon Aurora supports automatic load balancing of read traffic across the available Aurora Replicas using a reader endpoint. The reader endpoint abstracts the underlying infrastructure and automatically routes the read traffic to the available replicas. By default, the reader endpoint load balances the read traffic across all the Aurora Replicas in the cluster.
To fulfill the requirement of distributing the reporting queries from the department across three specific replicas with different compute and memory specifications, the reader endpoint can be used. The reader endpoint allows you to specify a subset of replicas to handle the read traffic.
By configuring the reader endpoint to include only the three Aurora Replicas with the desired compute and memory specifications, the reporting queries will be automatically distributed to those replicas. This ensures that the workload is evenly distributed among the specified replicas.
Options A, B, and C are not the recommended solutions in this case. Option A suggests creating and using a custom endpoint for the workload, but this does not provide automatic load balancing or the ability to specify specific replicas. Option B suggests creating a three-node cluster clone, but this would require additional resources and management overhead. Option C suggests using any of the instance endpoints for the selected three nodes, but this would require manual configuration and does not provide automatic load balancing.
Therefore, option D, using the reader endpoint to automatically distribute the read-only workload, is the appropriate solution that meets the requirements.
Question 1208
Exam Question
A company has a custom application running on an Amazon EC instance that: ”Reads a large amount of data from Amazon S3” Performs a multi-stage analysis” Writes the results to Amazon DynamoDB. The application writes a significant number of large temporary files during the multi-stage analysis. The process performance depends on the temporary storage performance.
What would be the fastest storage option for holding the temporary files?
A. Multiple Amazon S3 buckets with Transfer Acceleration for storage.
B. Multiple Amazon EBS drives with Provisioned IOPS and EBS optimization.
C. Multiple Amazon EFS volumes using the Network I lie System version 4.1 (NFSv4.1) protocol.
D. Multiple instance store volumes with software RAID 0.
Correct Answer
D. Multiple instance store volumes with software RAID 0.
Explanation
The fastest storage option for holding the temporary files in this scenario would be:
D. Multiple instance store volumes with software RAID 0.
Amazon EC2 instances provide two types of storage options: Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) and instance store volumes. In this case, since the performance of the temporary storage is crucial for the application’s performance, utilizing multiple instance store volumes with software RAID 0 would provide the fastest storage option.
Instance store volumes are physically attached to the EC2 instance hosting the application and provide high-performance, low-latency storage. They are ideal for temporary data that can be easily recreated or does not require long-term persistence.
By using multiple instance store volumes in a RAID 0 configuration, the application can benefit from increased throughput and I/O performance. RAID 0 combines the storage capacity and performance of multiple volumes, distributing the data across them in a striped manner. This allows for parallel read and write operations across the volumes, resulting in improved performance.
Options A, B, and C are not the optimal choices in this scenario. Option A suggests using multiple Amazon S3 buckets with Transfer Acceleration, but S3 is an object storage service with higher latency compared to instance store volumes. Option B suggests using multiple Amazon EBS drives with Provisioned IOPS and EBS optimization, but EBS volumes have higher latency compared to instance store volumes. Option C suggests using multiple Amazon EFS volumes using the NFSv4.1 protocol, but EFS also has higher latency compared to instance store volumes.
Therefore, option D, utilizing multiple instance store volumes with software RAID 0, would provide the fastest storage option for holding the temporary files in this situation, considering the performance requirements of the application.
Question 1209
Exam Question
A company has NFS servers in an on-premises data center that need to periodically back up small amounts of data to Amazon S3.
Which solution meets these requirements and is MOST cost-effective?
A. Set up AWS Glue to copy the data from the on-premises servers to Amazon S3.
B. Set up an AWS DataSync agent on the on-premises servers, and sync the data to Amazon S3.
C. Set up an SFTP sync using AWS Transfer for SFTP to sync data from on-premises to Amazon S3.
D. Set up an AWS Direct Connect connection between the on-premises data center and a VPC, and copy the data to Amazon S3.
Correct Answer
B. Set up an AWS DataSync agent on the on-premises servers, and sync the data to Amazon S3.
Explanation
The most cost-effective solution to periodically back up small amounts of data from on-premises NFS servers to Amazon S3 would be:
B. Set up an AWS DataSync agent on the on-premises servers and sync the data to Amazon S3.
AWS DataSync is a service designed for fast and secure data transfer between on-premises storage systems and Amazon S3 or Amazon EFS. It provides efficient data transfer and allows you to automate and schedule data transfers. In this scenario, by setting up an AWS DataSync agent on the on-premises NFS servers, you can easily and securely sync the small amounts of data to Amazon S3.
The DataSync agent is responsible for establishing a connection between the on-premises storage system and Amazon S3. It uses optimized data transfer techniques to efficiently sync only the changed or new data, resulting in cost savings as you are only transferring the necessary data.
Options A, C, and D are not the most cost-effective solutions in this scenario. Option A suggests using AWS Glue to copy the data, but AWS Glue is primarily used for extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes and data cataloging. It may not be the most suitable and cost-effective solution for simple data backup tasks. Option C suggests using AWS Transfer for SFTP, which is more suited for managing SFTP file transfers but may not be the most cost-effective solution for this specific use case. Option D suggests using AWS Direct Connect to establish a dedicated network connection, which might be more costly and complex for periodic backup of small amounts of data.
Therefore, option B, setting up an AWS DataSync agent on the on-premises servers and syncing the data to Amazon S3, is the most cost-effective solution for periodically backing up small amounts of data from on-premises NFS servers to Amazon S3.
Question 1210
Exam Question
A company collects temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure data in cities across multiple continents. The average volume of data collected per site each day is 500 GB. Each site has a high-speed internet connection. The company’s weather forecasting applications are based in a single Region and analyze the data daily.
What is the FASTEST way to aggregate data for all of these global sites?
A. Enable Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration on the destination bucket. Use multipart uploads to directly upload site data to the destination bucket.
B. Upload site data to an Amazon S3 bucket in the closest AWS Region. Use S3 cross-Region replication to copy objects to the destination bucket.
C. Schedule AWS Snowball jobs daily to transfer data to the closest AWS Region. Use S3 cross-Region replication to copy objects to the destination bucket.
D. Upload the data to an Amazon EC2 instance in the closest Region. Store the data in an Amazon EBS volume. One a day take an EBS snapshot and copy it to the centralize Region. Restore the EBS volume in the centralized Region and run an analysis on the data daily.
Correct Answer
B. Upload site data to an Amazon S3 bucket in the closest AWS Region. Use S3 cross-Region replication to copy objects to the destination bucket.
Explanation
The fastest way to aggregate data for all the global sites in this scenario would be:
B. Upload site data to an Amazon S3 bucket in the closest AWS Region. Use S3 cross-Region replication to copy objects to the destination bucket.
In this scenario, the key requirement is to aggregate data from multiple global sites and analyze it daily in a centralized location. To achieve this, you can upload the data from each site to an Amazon S3 bucket in the closest AWS Region. By selecting the closest AWS Region, you can take advantage of the high-speed internet connection at each site and minimize the data transfer latency.
Once the data is uploaded to the S3 bucket in the closest Region, you can configure S3 cross-Region replication to automatically copy the objects to the destination bucket in the centralized Region. S3 cross-Region replication enables asynchronous replication of objects across different AWS Regions, ensuring that the data is efficiently and securely transferred to the centralized location for analysis.
This approach leverages the distributed nature of AWS infrastructure and allows you to take advantage of the high-speed internet connection at each site while ensuring efficient and timely data aggregation for analysis. It eliminates the need for manual data transfers, physical transportation, or complex setup involving on-premises infrastructure.
Option A suggests using Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration, which can improve data transfer speeds but may not be the fastest option for aggregating data from multiple global sites. Option C suggests using AWS Snowball jobs to physically transfer data, which adds additional complexity and may not provide the fastest data aggregation. Option D involves uploading data to an EC2 instance, taking snapshots, and copying them to the centralized Region, which introduces additional steps and potential delays compared to the direct use of S3 cross-Region replication.
Therefore, option B, uploading site data to an Amazon S3 bucket in the closest AWS Region and using S3 cross-Region replication to copy objects to the destination bucket, is the fastest way to aggregate data for all the global sites in this scenario.
