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AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) practice questions

211 free questions with answers and explanations.

Practice test
  1. 101.A financial analytics company processes large datasets daily using AWS Batch jobs. These jobs are fault-tolerant and can tolerate interruptions. The company wants to minimize compute costs for these batch processing workloads. Which EC2 purchasing option should they primarily use?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  2. 102.A startup is building a new application that will store highly sensitive customer data in an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL database. Regulatory compliance requires that all data at rest must be encrypted using customer-managed keys, and the encryption solution must be cost-effective. Which encryption approach should be used?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  3. 103.A startup is deploying a new web application on AWS that uses a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application experiences predictable daily traffic spikes between 9 AM and 5 PM, but very low traffic outside these hours. They want to ensure sufficient capacity during peak times and scale down to minimize costs during off-peak hours, without manual intervention. Which AWS Auto Scaling feature should be used?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  4. 104.A media streaming company serves video content to millions of users globally. They use Amazon S3 as the origin for their video files and Amazon CloudFront for content delivery. To minimize egress data transfer costs from S3, which are a major component of their AWS bill, which CloudFront configuration should they prioritize?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  5. 105.A research institution uses a large number of Amazon EC2 instances for scientific simulations. These simulations are computationally intensive and run continuously for several months. The institution has a limited budget and wants to achieve the lowest possible cost for their compute resources. Which EC2 purchasing option should they choose?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  6. 106.A company is running a batch processing workload on EC2 instances that takes approximately 10 hours to complete daily. The workload is predictable and runs at the same time every day. They want to achieve significant cost savings compared to On-Demand pricing. Which EC2 purchasing option offers the best balance of cost savings and commitment for this predictable, long-running workload?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  7. 107.A global company uses AWS Organizations to manage multiple AWS accounts. They have several development teams that frequently spin up and tear down EC2 instances, sometimes leaving them running unnecessarily overnight or on weekends. The company wants to implement a cost-optimization strategy to automatically identify and stop/terminate idle EC2 instances across all accounts. Which AWS service or feature combination is the most cost-effective and scalable for this task?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  8. 108.A software development company is using AWS CodeBuild for its continuous integration pipeline. They have several build projects that run frequently throughout the day. To optimize costs, they want to ensure that CodeBuild environments are not idle for longer than necessary after a build completes. Which CodeBuild feature helps achieve this cost optimization?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  9. 109.A large enterprise is migrating its legacy on-premises applications to AWS. Some of these applications require dedicated physical servers for licensing compliance and regulatory reasons. The enterprise wants to minimize operational costs while meeting these requirements. Which EC2 purchasing option should they use?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  10. 110.A financial services company is migrating its on-premises data archiving solution to AWS. They have petabytes of infrequently accessed data that must be retained for seven years due to regulatory compliance. Data retrieval times can be flexible, ranging from several hours to a day. The company wants to minimize storage costs while meeting compliance requirements. Which AWS storage solution is the most cost-effective for this scenario?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  11. 111.A data analytics company processes large datasets daily using Amazon EMR clusters. The input data is stored in Amazon S3, and the processed output is also written back to S3. The company wants to optimize the data transfer costs associated with moving data between S3 and EMR. What is the most cost-effective architectural consideration?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  12. 112.A global media company uses AWS S3 to store petabytes of video footage. This footage is accessed frequently for the first 30 days after upload, then accessed infrequently for the next 60 days, and finally, rarely accessed after 90 days, but must be retained for 7 years for compliance. The company wants to implement a cost-effective storage strategy that automatically moves data to lower-cost tiers without manual intervention. Which S3 storage class and lifecycle policy combination should be recommended?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  13. 113.A global e-commerce platform uses Amazon Aurora for its main transactional database. During peak sales events, the read replicas are often overwhelmed, leading to slow query performance for reporting and analytics. The company wants to offload these read-heavy, analytical queries to a more cost-effective solution without impacting the primary Aurora database's performance. Which AWS service should they use?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  14. 114.A global software company is migrating its on-premises data warehouse to AWS. The data warehouse contains petabytes of historical data that is rarely accessed but must be retained for compliance purposes for seven years. New data is added daily and needs to be queryable immediately for up to 90 days. After 90 days, the data access frequency drops significantly. The company wants to minimize storage costs while meeting all access and retention requirements. Which storage strategy is the most cost-optimized?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  15. 115.A financial services company is developing a new application that will process high volumes of financial transactions. The application requires a database that can handle millions of requests per second, with consistent single-digit millisecond latency. Data must be highly available and durable, and the solution needs to be cost-optimized for both provisioned capacity and on-demand scaling. Which AWS database service is the most cost-effective solution for these requirements?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  16. 116.A global software company provides a SaaS application hosted on AWS. They are launching a new feature that uses a data processing pipeline running on EC2 instances. This pipeline can tolerate occasional interruptions and has flexible start and end times, but needs to process large amounts of data as cost-effectively as possible. Which EC2 purchasing option offers the greatest cost savings for this workload?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  17. 117.A media company uses AWS for video processing. They have a fleet of EC2 instances that perform non-time-critical batch processing tasks, such as transcoding and content analysis. These tasks can tolerate interruptions and can be restarted without significant loss of progress. The company wants to significantly reduce its compute costs. Which EC2 purchasing option should they choose?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  18. 118.A global e-commerce company uses an AWS Transit Gateway to connect its numerous VPCs across multiple AWS Regions. They notice that data transfer costs between VPCs in different regions, routed through the Transit Gateway, are becoming significant. The company wants to optimize these costs while maintaining connectivity. Which networking solution should they consider?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  19. 119.A global e-commerce company uses Amazon RDS for MySQL as its primary database. During peak shopping seasons, the read traffic to the database significantly increases, causing performance bottlenecks. The company wants to improve read performance and offload read traffic from the primary instance without modifying the application code extensively, and also minimize costs. Which solution meets these requirements MOST cost-effectively?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  20. 120.A media company is storing large video archives on Amazon S3 Standard-IA. These archives are accessed infrequently, typically once every few months, but require immediate retrieval when requested. The company wants to reduce storage costs while maintaining high availability and rapid access. Which S3 storage class is the most cost-effective solution for this requirement?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  21. 121.A startup is deploying a new web application on AWS that uses Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application experiences predictable traffic spikes during business hours and very low traffic overnight. The company wants to ensure high availability and responsiveness during peak times while minimizing costs during off-peak hours. Which EC2 Auto Scaling configuration would be most cost-effective?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  22. 122.A global e-commerce company uses Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL as its primary database. During peak sales events, the read traffic significantly increases, causing performance bottlenecks. The company needs a cost-effective solution to handle the increased read load without modifying the application code or significantly increasing the primary instance size. What is the most appropriate solution?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  23. 123.A data engineering team processes petabytes of streaming data using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and then stores the raw data in Amazon S3 for long-term retention and future analysis. The data in S3 is accessed very infrequently after the initial processing, but must be available for audit purposes for 10 years. What is the most cost-optimized storage solution for this raw data in S3?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  24. 124.A company has a legacy application that relies on a single relational database instance. This database is experiencing performance bottlenecks due to high read traffic, especially during peak business hours. The company wants to improve read performance and introduce high availability without re-architecting the application significantly. They also need a cost-effective solution. Which AWS database strategy should they employ?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  25. 125.A data analytics company processes large datasets daily using Amazon EMR clusters. The input data is stored in Amazon S3, and the processed output is also written back to S3. The company wants to minimize data transfer costs between the EMR clusters and S3. Which architectural decision would be most cost-effective?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  26. 126.A data analytics startup processes large volumes of IoT sensor data continuously. The data is initially stored in Amazon S3 and then processed by an AWS Lambda function. The Lambda function needs to retrieve small objects (less than 1 MB) from S3 frequently, often multiple times per second. The company wants to optimize the data transfer costs between S3 and Lambda. What is the most cost-effective architectural pattern to achieve this?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  27. 127.A startup is building a new microservices application using AWS Lambda functions. Each Lambda function is invoked frequently, processing small amounts of data. The company wants to minimize the operational overhead and cost associated with managing compute resources. Which compute strategy is inherently most cost-optimized for this scenario?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  28. 128.A startup is building a new machine learning inference service that needs to process requests in real-time. The service experiences highly variable traffic patterns, with peak usage during business hours and very low usage overnight. The architects want to minimize operational overhead and pay only for the compute resources consumed during actual inference requests. Which EC2 purchasing option should they choose?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  29. 129.A data engineering team is building a new batch processing system that runs once a day for 4 hours. The system uses Amazon EMR clusters, which are configured with EC2 instances. The team wants to minimize compute costs for these predictable, short-duration workloads. Which EC2 purchasing option should they primarily leverage?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  30. 130.A growing SaaS company uses Amazon RDS for MySQL as its primary database. The database is experiencing high CPU utilization during peak hours due to a large number of read queries from its analytics and reporting dashboards. The company wants to offload these read queries to reduce the load on the primary database and improve performance, while also ensuring a cost-optimized solution. Which action should the company take?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  31. 131.A company is hosting a public-facing web application on AWS that serves users globally. They want to ensure low latency for all users and protect against DDoS attacks. The application's static content (images, CSS, JavaScript) accounts for 80% of the data transfer. They also want to minimize data transfer costs. Which combination of AWS services should they use?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  32. 132.A startup is designing a new microservices architecture on AWS. Each microservice is implemented as an AWS Lambda function. The architects are concerned about the cost of cold starts and want to optimize the total cost of ownership. The Lambda functions typically process requests within 500ms and are invoked frequently throughout the day. Which Lambda feature should they utilize to reduce cost impacts from cold starts?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  33. 133.A startup is developing a new mobile application that requires a serverless backend. The application will experience highly variable traffic, with unpredictable spikes and periods of low activity. The company wants to minimize operational overhead and only pay for the compute resources consumed. Which AWS compute service best meets these requirements?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  34. 134.A global company uses AWS Organizations to manage multiple AWS accounts. They have several development teams that frequently provision and de-provision EC2 instances, RDS databases, and S3 buckets. The company wants to implement a cost governance strategy that allows them to track and allocate costs accurately to each development team while maintaining flexibility. Which AWS service is best suited for this purpose?Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
  35. 135.A global company uses AWS Organizations to manage multiple AWS accounts. They need to enforce a security policy that prevents any AWS account within their organization from creating Amazon S3 buckets that are publicly accessible. This policy must be applied centrally and automatically to all current and future accounts. Which AWS service and feature should be used to achieve this?Design Secure Architectures
  36. 136.A financial services company is migrating a critical, multi-tier application to AWS. The application consists of EC2 instances running web servers, application servers, and a database server. Due to strict compliance regulations, all communication between the application tiers must be encrypted in transit, and the network traffic between the EC2 instances must be isolated from the public internet. Furthermore, access to the database tier should only be permitted from the application servers. Which architecture best meets these security requirements?Design Secure Architectures
  37. 137.A financial institution requires that all data stored in Amazon S3 must be encrypted at rest using a key that they provide and manage themselves outside of AWS. They need to ensure that Amazon S3 only accepts objects that are encrypted with these specific customer-provided keys. The solution must also minimize operational overhead for key management within AWS. Which S3 encryption option should they choose?Design Secure Architectures
  38. 138.A global enterprise needs to securely share data with external partners. The data is stored in Amazon S3 buckets. The security team insists that data in transit must be encrypted at all times when partners access it. Additionally, access to the S3 buckets must be restricted to specific IP ranges belonging to the partners, and each partner should only be able to access their designated prefixes within the bucket. Which combination of S3 features and security mechanisms should be used?Design Secure Architectures
  39. 139.A media company is building a serverless application using AWS Lambda functions and Amazon S3. The Lambda functions need to access specific objects in an S3 bucket. The company wants to implement the principle of least privilege. How should the Solutions Architect grant the Lambda function access to the S3 bucket?Design Secure Architectures
  40. 140.A highly regulated organization is building a new application on AWS that processes protected health information (PHI). The data will be stored in an Amazon DynamoDB table. Due to strict compliance requirements, all data must be encrypted at rest using a customer-managed key (CMK) from AWS KMS, and the organization needs to have full control over the key's lifecycle, including rotation and access policies. Which DynamoDB encryption option should be chosen?Design Secure Architectures
  41. 141.A global media company uses Amazon S3 to store large volumes of video and image assets. Due to regulatory requirements, all data must be encrypted at rest, and the encryption keys must be managed by AWS KMS. The company also needs to ensure that access to these keys is auditable. Which S3 encryption option should they choose?Design Secure Architectures
  42. 142.A company is developing a new serverless application using AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB. The application needs to securely store API keys for third-party services. These keys must be encrypted and rotated periodically without requiring code changes or redeployments. Which AWS service should be used to manage these API keys?Design Secure Architectures
  43. 143.A security auditor needs to regularly review all API calls made to an AWS account, including who made the call, when, from where, and what actions were taken. This data must be stored securely and be immutable for compliance purposes. Which AWS service should be configured?Design Secure Architectures
  44. 144.A company is deploying a new web application on AWS that will store sensitive customer data. The application needs to ensure that data at rest is encrypted and that access to the underlying storage is restricted only to authorized application components. Which AWS service and configuration would best meet these requirements?Design Secure Architectures
  45. 145.A global enterprise needs to securely share large datasets stored in an Amazon S3 bucket with external partners. The partners do not have AWS accounts, and the company wants to avoid giving them direct IAM user access. The solution must ensure that partners can only access specific prefixes within the S3 bucket and that access is granted for a limited time. Which is the MOST secure and efficient method to achieve this?Design Secure Architectures
  46. 146.A global e-commerce company needs to secure its web application that uses Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The company must protect against common web exploits like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) and also needs to restrict access based on IP address blacklists. Which AWS service should be implemented in front of the ALB?Design Secure Architectures
  47. 147.A global e-commerce company uses Amazon CloudFront to deliver its web application content. They have recently observed a significant increase in requests originating from known malicious IP addresses and botnets, leading to service degradation and potential security vulnerabilities. The company needs to implement a solution to filter these malicious requests at the edge, before they reach the origin servers, and protect against common web exploits. Which AWS service should they integrate with CloudFront?Design Secure Architectures
  48. 148.A company is hosting a public-facing web application on AWS using Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The EC2 instances store sensitive customer data, and the security team mandates that these instances must not be directly accessible from the internet. They should only receive traffic from the ALB. Which network design principle, combined with security groups, would best achieve this requirement?Design Secure Architectures
  49. 149.A global media company uses AWS Organizations to manage over 100 AWS accounts. They need to ensure that all AWS accounts consistently log all API activity to a central S3 bucket in a dedicated logging account. This must be a mandatory control that cannot be disabled or altered by individual account administrators. Which design approach should be used?Design Secure Architectures
  50. 150.A startup is building a multi-tenant SaaS application on AWS. Each tenant's data must be logically isolated and accessible only by that tenant. The application uses Amazon S3 to store tenant-specific files. How can the startup enforce strict tenant data isolation for S3 objects?Design Secure Architectures