The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) certification is a highly sought-after credential, validating your ability to design and deploy well-architected solutions on AWS. To confidently approach this challenging exam, integrating SAA-C03 mock tests into your study plan is not just beneficial—it’s essential. These practice exams are specifically tailored to the SAA-C03 exam objectives, covering crucial domains like designing resilient architectures, high-performing architectures, secure applications and architectures, and cost-optimized architectures.
Using AWS Solutions Architect Associate practice exams allows you to familiarize yourself with the question style, complexity, and time pressure of the actual test. You’ll encounter scenario-based questions that require you to apply AWS best practices to solve real-world architectural problems. This hands-on simulation helps identify areas where your understanding might be weak, enabling you to focus your revision on specific AWS services and concepts like VPC, EC2, S3, RDS, IAM, and Route 53. Regularly taking SAA-C03 practice questions builds your problem-solving speed and accuracy, ensuring you can navigate the exam efficiently.
Understanding the AWS Cloud is a valuable asset in today’s tech landscape. For detailed information about the certification, you can always refer to the official AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) page.
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This is a timed quiz. You will be given 7800 seconds to answer all questions. Are you ready?
Which AWS tool allows you to set custom cost and usage budgets and receive alerts when thresholds are breached?
AWS Budgets gives you the ability to set custom budgets that alert you when your costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budgeted amount.
A company wants to improve the performance of its global application by routing users to the AWS region that provides the lowest network latency. Which Amazon Route 53 routing policy should be used?
Latency routing policy routes traffic to the AWS region that provides the best latency for the user. This is achieved by routing requests to the AWS endpoint that has the lowest network latency from the user's location.
Which AWS database service is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, offering the performance and availability of commercial databases at a lower cost?
Amazon Aurora is a relational database service that combines the performance and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases. It is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Which AWS Trusted Advisor check category specifically helps identify opportunities to reduce AWS spending?
Trusted Advisor provides recommendations in five categories. The 'Cost Optimization' category specifically focuses on identifying idle resources, underutilized resources, and opportunities for Reserved Instance or Savings Plan purchases.
For an application that requires a shared file system accessible by multiple EC2 Linux instances simultaneously, which AWS storage service is the most appropriate choice?
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) provides simple, scalable, elastic file storage for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. It's designed to provide shared access to file storage for Linux-based workloads.
Which AWS service can be used to filter malicious web traffic, such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting, before it reaches your web application?
AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) helps protect your web applications or APIs against common web exploits that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources.
A company wants to estimate the cost of a new application they plan to deploy on AWS. Which AWS tool should they use for this purpose?
The AWS Pricing Calculator lets you explore AWS services, and create an estimate for the cost of your use cases on AWS. You can model your solutions before building them, explore the price points and calculations behind your estimate, and find the available instance types and contract terms that meet your needs.
Which Amazon EBS volume type is recommended for the boot volume of most EC2 instances and for workloads that require consistent, low-latency performance?
General Purpose SSD (gp2 and gp3) volumes balance price and performance for a wide variety of transactional workloads. They are recommended as the default boot volume type for most EC2 instances.
Which S3 storage class automatically moves objects between two access tiers (frequent and infrequent) based on changing access patterns to optimize costs?
S3 Intelligent-Tiering is designed to optimize storage costs automatically when data access patterns change, without performance impact or operational overhead. It moves data between a frequent access tier and an infrequent access tier.
Which AWS service can be used to create a managed relational database that automatically scales capacity up or down based on application demand, without manual intervention?
Amazon Aurora Serverless is an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration for Amazon Aurora. It automatically starts up, shuts down, and scales capacity up or down based on your application's needs.
What is the main purpose of using tags for AWS resources in the context of cost management?
Tags are key-value pairs that can be assigned to AWS resources. They are crucial for cost allocation, allowing you to track and categorize spending by project, department, or other criteria.
A company wants to archive large amounts of data that are infrequently accessed but must be retained for compliance reasons. Which S3 storage class offers the lowest storage cost?
Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive is Amazon S3’s lowest-cost storage class and supports long-term retention and digital preservation for data that may be accessed once or twice in a year. Retrieval times can be several hours.
A solutions architect is designing a disaster recovery strategy with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 1 hour. Which DR strategy is most likely to meet these requirements?
A Warm Standby strategy involves having a scaled-down but fully functional copy of your production environment in another region. This allows for a quick failover (low RTO) and data can be replicated frequently (low RPO). Pilot Light is typically slower RTO, Backup/Restore is even slower.
A company needs to securely store and rotate database credentials, API keys, and other secrets. Which AWS service is most suitable for this task?
AWS Secrets Manager helps you protect secrets needed to access your applications, services, and IT resources. The service enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle.
A company needs to discover and protect personally identifiable information (PII) stored in its Amazon S3 buckets. Which AWS service can help automate this process?
Amazon Macie is a data security and data privacy service that uses machine learning and pattern matching to discover and protect your sensitive data in AWS, including PII in S3.
Which AWS service provides a fully managed, highly scalable, and durable NoSQL database service designed for internet-scale applications that require consistent, single-digit millisecond latency?
Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. It's fully managed and designed for applications needing high performance and scalability.
A company needs to run a containerized application that requires orchestration for deployment, scaling, and management. Which AWS service is NOT a container orchestration service?
AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that works with both ECS and EKS. EC2 is a virtual server service, not an orchestrator itself, though ECS/EKS can run on EC2.
What is a primary benefit of using AWS Lambda for cost optimization?
With AWS Lambda, you pay only for the compute time you consume – there is no charge when your code is not running. This pay-per-use model can be very cost-effective for event-driven or intermittent workloads.
Which AWS service can be used to establish a private, dedicated connection between an on-premises data center and AWS, bypassing the public internet?
AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS. This can reduce network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than internet-based connections.
What is the primary difference between a Security Group and a Network ACL (NACL)?
Security Groups are stateful (return traffic is automatically allowed) and operate at the instance level. NACLs are stateless (return traffic must be explicitly allowed) and operate at the subnet level.
What is the primary purpose of Amazon Route 53 health checks when used with routing policies?
Route 53 health checks monitor the health and performance of your application, web servers, and other resources. When a health check determines that an endpoint is unhealthy, Route 53 can route traffic away from it to healthy endpoints.
A company needs to serve static and dynamic content for its global website with the lowest possible latency to users. Which AWS service combination is most appropriate?
Amazon CloudFront is a CDN that caches content at edge locations closer to users. It can serve static content directly and route dynamic content requests to origin servers like EC2 instances or ALBs.
To design a resilient architecture for an RDS database, what is a recommended AWS feature?
Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments provide enhanced availability and durability for RDS DB instances, making them a natural fit for production database workloads. RDS synchronously replicates the data to a standby instance in a different AZ.
A stateless web application experiences fluctuating traffic. Which AWS service should be used to automatically adjust the number of EC2 instances based on demand?
AWS Auto Scaling monitors your applications and automatically adjusts capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost. For EC2, it can add or remove instances based on metrics like CPU utilization.
Which data security control ensures that data is unreadable to unauthorized parties, both when it is stored and when it is being transmitted?
Encryption renders data unreadable without the correct decryption key. It should be applied to data at rest (stored) and data in transit (being transmitted).
A company needs to ensure that its AWS resources cannot be accidentally deleted by junior administrators. Which IAM feature should be primarily used to achieve this?
IAM policies define permissions. A deny statement in an IAM policy explicitly overrides any allow statements and can be used to prevent actions like deletion, even if other policies grant broader permissions. MFA Delete for S3 is specific to S3 object deletion.
A solutions architect needs to ensure that all API calls made to AWS services within an account are logged for auditing purposes. Which service should be used?
AWS CloudTrail records AWS API calls for your account and delivers log files to an Amazon S3 bucket. This enables security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing.
Which AWS service is used to create and control encryption keys to protect your data?
AWS Key Management Service (KMS) makes it easy for you to create and manage cryptographic keys and control their use across a wide range of AWS services and in your applications.
Which AWS service allows you to manage infrastructure as code using templates written in JSON or YAML?
AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for you to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment. CloudFormation allows you to use a simple text file to model and provision, in an automated and secure manner, all the resources needed for your applications across all regions and accounts.
What is the primary benefit of using an Application Load Balancer (ALB) over a Classic Load Balancer for modern HTTP/HTTPS applications?
ALBs operate at Layer 7 and support advanced routing features like path-based routing, host-based routing, and routing based on HTTP headers, which are not available with Classic Load Balancers.
A company needs to decouple components of an application. Messages between components need to be processed in order and exactly once. Which AWS service is most suitable?
Amazon SQS FIFO (First-In-First-Out) queues are designed to enhance messaging between applications when the order of operations and events is critical, or where duplicates can't be tolerated. They provide exactly-once processing and preserve message order.
A solutions architect is designing a VPC that requires communication between instances in different subnets within the same VPC. How is this communication enabled by default?
By default, all subnets within a VPC can route traffic to each other using the main route table, which contains a local route for the VPC CIDR block.
A company has multiple AWS accounts and wants to centrally manage billing and apply service control policies (SCPs). Which AWS service should they use?
AWS Organizations helps you centrally govern your environment as you grow and scale your workloads on AWS. You can consolidate billing, manage accounts, and apply policies like SCPs across accounts.
To secure data in transit to an S3 bucket, what protocol should be used for uploads and downloads?
HTTPS (HTTP Secure) encrypts data in transit between the client and Amazon S3, protecting it from eavesdropping and tampering.
What is the primary benefit of using AWS Global Accelerator?
AWS Global Accelerator improves the availability and performance of your applications with local or global users. It directs traffic to optimal endpoints over the AWS global network, using static IP addresses.
Which AWS service provides a managed, scalable, and durable message broker service that supports multiple protocols like MQTT, AMQP, STOMP, and OpenWire?
Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ that makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers in the cloud. It supports industry-standard messaging protocols.
What is the primary purpose of a Network Access Control List (NACL) in an Amazon VPC?
NACLs act as a firewall for controlling traffic in and out of one or more subnets. They are stateless, meaning return traffic must be explicitly allowed.
What is the best way to provide applications running on Amazon EC2 instances with secure access to other AWS services without embedding credentials in the code?
IAM roles for EC2 instances provide temporary security credentials that applications can use to make programmatic calls to other AWS services. This avoids the need to embed long-term credentials.
Which Amazon S3 storage class is designed for durable, immediately accessible, and frequently accessed data?
Amazon S3 Standard is designed for frequently accessed data and offers high durability, availability, and performance object storage for a wide range of use cases.
What is 'right-sizing' in the context of AWS cost optimization?
Right-sizing involves analyzing the performance and capacity requirements of your AWS resources (like EC2 instances or RDS databases) and selecting the instance type or configuration that best fits those needs without overprovisioning, thereby reducing costs.
Which AWS service allows you to centrally manage and automate security checks for compliance against your policies across all your AWS accounts and resources?
AWS Security Hub gives you a comprehensive view of your security alerts and security posture across your AWS accounts. It collects security data from across AWS accounts, services, and supported third-party partner products and helps you analyze your security trends and identify the highest priority security issues.
A solutions architect needs to design a system that can automatically recover from an EC2 instance failure by launching a replacement instance. Which combination of AWS services is best suited for this?
AWS Auto Scaling can be configured with health checks (often integrated with ELB health checks or EC2 status checks) to detect unhealthy instances and automatically terminate them and launch new ones to maintain the desired capacity.
A solutions architect needs to select an EC2 instance purchasing option that provides the largest discount but can tolerate interruptions if AWS needs the capacity back. Which option is most suitable?
Spot Instances offer the largest discounts (up to 90% off On-Demand prices) by allowing you to bid on spare EC2 computing capacity. However, Spot Instances can be interrupted by AWS with a two-minute notification if AWS needs the capacity back.
Which Amazon Route 53 routing policy would you use to route traffic to multiple resources in proportions that you specify (e.g., 80% to one resource, 20% to another)?
Weighted routing lets you associate multiple resources with a single domain name (example.com) or subdomain name (acme.example.com) and choose how much traffic is routed to each resource.
When designing a secure VPC, what is the recommended practice for subnets that host internet-facing applications?
Internet-facing applications should be placed in public subnets, which have a route to an Internet Gateway. Backend systems and databases should be in private subnets without direct internet access.
Which AWS service helps protect against DDoS attacks by providing always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations?
AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service. AWS Shield Standard provides protection for all AWS customers at no additional cost. AWS Shield Advanced provides additional protections.
A company has unpredictable workloads that can run at any time but can also be interrupted. They want the lowest possible compute cost. Which EC2 purchasing option is most suitable?
Spot Instances allow you to bid on spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity for up to 90% off the On-Demand price. They are suitable for fault-tolerant and flexible applications that can handle interruptions.
A web application requires low-latency access to frequently read data. Which AWS service can be used to cache this data in memory?
Amazon ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud. It improves the performance of web applications by allowing you to retrieve information from fast, managed, in-memory caches, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases.
Which EC2 instance type family is best suited for compute-intensive workloads like high-performance computing (HPC), batch processing, and scientific modeling?
Compute Optimized instances (e.g., C-family) are designed for compute-bound applications that benefit from high-performance processors. They are ideal for workloads like HPC, batch processing, and scientific modeling.
A solutions architect wants to ensure that EC2 instances in a private subnet can access the internet for software updates, but incoming traffic from the internet should not be allowed to reach these instances. Which VPC component is needed?
A NAT Gateway (or NAT Instance) enables instances in a private subnet to connect to the internet or other AWS services, but prevents the internet from initiating a connection with those instances.
Which AWS networking service enables you to connect VPCs and on-premises networks through a central hub, simplifying network management?
AWS Transit Gateway acts as a network transit hub, allowing you to connect your Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and your on-premises networks through a central gateway. This simplifies your network and puts an end to complex peering relationships.
Which feature of Amazon S3 helps prevent accidental data loss by keeping multiple versions of an object in the same bucket?
S3 Versioning keeps multiple variants of an object in the same bucket. You can use versioning to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object stored in your S3 bucket.
A company wants to replicate its S3 bucket data to another AWS Region for disaster recovery. Which S3 feature should be used?
S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) automatically replicates data from a source S3 bucket to a destination bucket in a different AWS Region.
A database workload requires extremely high I/O performance with very low latency. Which Amazon EBS volume type is best suited for this?
Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1/io2/io2 Block Express) volumes are designed for I/O-intensive workloads, particularly databases, that require consistent and low-latency performance. They allow you to specify the IOPS rate.
A solutions architect needs to ensure that data stored in Amazon S3 is encrypted at rest. Which S3 encryption option involves AWS managing the encryption keys?
Server-Side Encryption with Amazon S3-Managed Keys (SSE-S3) is a data encryption option where Amazon S3 manages the encryption keys. AWS handles key management and key protection using multiple layers of security.
To reduce data transfer costs for an application that serves large files to users globally, which AWS service should be primarily leveraged?
Amazon CloudFront, a CDN, caches content at edge locations around the world. This reduces the amount of data transferred out from your origin (e.g., S3 or EC2) and can significantly lower data transfer costs, especially for globally distributed users.
What is the primary benefit of using Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration?
Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration enables fast, easy, and secure transfers of files over long distances between your client and an S3 bucket. Transfer Acceleration takes advantage of Amazon CloudFront’s globally distributed edge locations.
A company wants to deploy a critical application across multiple Availability Zones within an AWS Region to ensure high availability. What is the primary benefit of this approach?
Deploying an application across multiple AZs ensures that if one AZ fails, the application can continue to operate from the other AZs, thus providing high availability and fault tolerance.
Which AWS service can automatically distribute incoming application traffic across multiple EC2 instances in different Availability Zones?
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, in one or more Availability Zones.
A company wants to provide temporary, limited-privilege credentials to an EC2 instance to allow it to access an S3 bucket. Which IAM feature should be used?
IAM roles are ideal for granting permissions to AWS services like EC2 instances. The instance assumes the role to obtain temporary credentials for accessing other AWS services.
Which AWS service can provide recommendations for optimizing your AWS environment across cost, performance, security, fault tolerance, and service limits?
AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that provides you real time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices across these five categories.
A company needs to ensure that its application can handle sudden spikes in traffic without performance degradation or over-provisioning resources. This requirement relates to which cloud concept?
Elasticity is the ability to acquire resources as you need them and release resources when you no longer need them. In the cloud, you want to do this automatically to handle spikes and dips in traffic.
Which Amazon EC2 pricing option is most cost-effective for an application with predictable, long-term usage that requires reserved capacity?
Reserved Instances (RIs) provide a significant discount compared to On-Demand pricing in exchange for a 1-year or 3-year commitment. Savings Plans also offer discounts for commitment.
To design a loosely coupled architecture, which of the following patterns is most effective for asynchronous communication between microservices?
Message queues, like those provided by Amazon SQS, allow microservices to communicate asynchronously. The sender places a message on the queue, and the receiver processes it when ready, decoupling the services.
A company is using several On-Demand EC2 instances for a steady-state workload that runs 24/7. To optimize costs, which purchasing option should they consider?
For steady-state workloads, Reserved Instances or Savings Plans offer significant discounts over On-Demand prices in exchange for a commitment to a certain level of usage.
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