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Prepare for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 exam with this free practice test. Randomly generated and customizable, this test allows you to choose the number of questions.
A company requires a solution to run computation-heavy tasks which are not urgent and can be interrupted without significant consequences. The key consideration is to minimize costs while maintaining the flexibility to handle unexpected increases in the workload. Which instance purchasing option should be recommended for this scenario?
Computing Savings Plans
Reserved Instances
On-Demand Instances
Spot Instances
The correct option for workloads that are flexible and can tolerate interruptions is to use the cloud provider's excess capacity at a significantly reduced cost. Spot Instances offer this advantage by allowing you to bid for this unused capacity. The costs are substantially lower compared to the standard on-demand rate, making this the most cost-effective option for the given scenario. Other purchase options like On-Demand, Reserved, or committing to a Savings Plan do not provide the level of cost savings suitable for interruptible and variable workloads.
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Using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles is more secure for EC2 instances to access AWS services than storing static IAM user credentials on the instance.
This statement is true.
This statement is false.
Using IAM roles for EC2 instances is the recommended best practice for providing AWS service access from applications running on EC2, as IAM roles provide temporary security credentials that are automatically rotated and do not require manual management. Storing static IAM user credentials on the instance is less secure because it risks exposing long-term credentials if the instance is compromised.
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Which service should be utilized for handling the provisioning, management, and deployment of public and private Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates for an application's secure communications?
Identity Center
Certificate Manager
Secrets Manager
Key Management Service
The correct service for managing SSL/TLS certificates is AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), which handles the provisioning, management, and deployment of public and private SSL/TLS certificates. AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is focused on creating and controlling keys for encryption, not on SSL/TLS certificates. AWS Secrets Manager is involved with storing, managing, and retrieving database credentials, API keys, and other secrets, and does not directly manage SSL/TLS certificates. AWS Identity Center provides identity services and single sign-on but is not related to SSL/TLS certificate management.
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A company has a workload on Amazon EC2 that exhibits variable usage patterns due to occasional marketing campaigns which lead to unpredictable bursts of traffic. Their current setup uses a fixed number of instances which often results in either over-provisioning or inability to serve peak traffic. What strategy should the Solutions Architect adopt to optimize for cost without sacrificing performance?
Increase the use of Spot Instances to benefit from cost savings during off-peak times.
Implement EC2 Auto Scaling with dynamic scaling policies to automatically adjust the number of instances in response to traffic demands.
Predominantly utilize Reserved Instances to ensure capacity and reduce costs.
Use a fixed number of On-demand Instances to simplify management.
Implementing EC2 Auto Scaling with dynamic scaling policies is the correct strategy in this scenario. Dynamic scaling adjusts the number of EC2 instances automatically in response to real-time demand, such as the unpredictable bursts of traffic caused by sporadic marketing campaigns. This action prevents over-provisioning (and thus overspending) during normal operation and also ensures performance isn't sacrificed during unexpected surges in demand.
Reserved Instances would not be cost-effective due to the unpredictable nature of the traffic, and Spot Instances might be interrupted during peak loads, leading to potential performance issues. On-demand instances alone would maintain performance but would not be cost-optimized.
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A company wants to store old project archives that are infrequently accessed and may be retrieved only in case of legal issues. Which Amazon S3 storage class is the most cost-effective solution for this use case?
Amazon S3 Glacier
Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering
Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access
Amazon S3 Standard
Amazon S3 Glacier is designed for data archiving, offering very low storage costs for long-term archiving where data is infrequently accessed. Its retrieval times can be slow (from minutes to hours), which aligns with the company's requirements for rare access and is acceptable in the case of legal issues. Amazon S3 Standard offers higher availability and faster access but at higher costs and is not suitable for archiving. Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering is designed to optimize costs by automatically moving data to the most cost-effective access tier, but has a monitoring and automation cost, making it less attractive for purely archival information. Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access provides a lower-cost option compared to Standard, but still costs more than Glacier and is most effective when you need quicker access to infrequently accessed data.
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A company needs to convert large volumes of raw data, coming in different formats such as CSV, JSON, and XML, into a homogenous form suitable for analytical query processing in their cloud-based data warehouse. The solution must be serverless to handle fluctuating workloads, scale on-demand, and eliminate the overhead of infrastructure management. Which service should the company implement to automate the data conversion process while ensuring scalability and cost-efficiency?
AWS Batch with Docker containers
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) with custom processing functions
AWS Glue
Amazon EC2 with a batch processing software
The service that fits the requirements of being serverless and capable of handling fluctuating data processing workloads is AWS Glue. It allows the automation of converting data into a consistent and query-optimized format without the need to manage the underlying infrastructure. It supports various data formats and has built-in capabilities for data cleansing and transformation, which makes it a suitable choice for preparing data for analytics in a data warehouse. Other options like AWS Data Pipeline offer managed ETL service but are not serverless, and using Amazon EC2 would require managing servers. AWS Lambda is serverless but is not primarily designed for ETL workflows and may not be as robust or straightforward when dealing with complex and large-scale data transformation as AWS Glue.
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Which service feature should you use to manage a large number of concurrent database connections that often experience unpredictable spikes in connection requests, while ensuring minimal changes to the existing applications?
Elastic Load Balancing
Amazon ElastiCache
Amazon RDS Proxy
AWS Direct Connect
Amazon RDS Proxy is designed to handle a large volume of concurrent database connections and smooth out spikes in connection requests to RDS databases. It mitigates database overload by absorbing the connections to create a connection pool and by reducing database failovers through intelligent load balancing. Using RDS Proxy decreases the need to refactor the applications that are not designed to manage such spikes, which distinguishes it from the other answer options that do not offer the same degree of functionality for this specific requirement.
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A company engaged in trading activities requires a solution to buffer a substantial number of incoming transaction orders. These transactions can be processed with minor delays and do not necessitate immediate consistency. Which service should the architect incorporate to efficiently manage the queuing of these messages?
AWS Transfer
Amazon Relational Database Service
Secrets Manager
Amazon Simple Queue Service
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) enables the queuing of messages, which helps in decoupling the components of a system. For the trading company's need to buffer transaction orders and allow for delayed processing, SQS is a fitting choice as it can handle a high volume of messages and maintain them until the consuming service is ready to process. This ensures that the architecture can scale and that the individual components are loosely coupled. On the other hand, AWS Transfer Family is used primarily for secure file transfer and does not provide queuing capabilities. The AWS Secrets Manager is tailored for managing sensitive information, which is not relevant to the message queuing requirement. Amazon RDS is a database service and does not offer message queuing functionality.
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Which service is most suitable for real-time analysis of data that is continuously generated by an application's user activity, such as clicks, navigational paths, and interactions?
AWS DataSync
AWS Glue
Amazon Kinesis
Amazon Athena
Amazon Kinesis is the correct service for this scenario as it is specifically tailored for real-time streaming and processing of large volumes of data. Kinesis allows the capture, processing, and analysis of streaming data, enabling insights almost immediately after data is produced. Other services like Amazon Athena and AWS Glue are designed for querying stored data and data transformation tasks, respectively, and do not by themselves handle the real-time streaming capabilities required by the scenario depicted in the question. While AWS DataSync is used for data transfer purposes, it does not cater to real-time data processing needs.
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An application generates log files that require immediate analysis upon creation but will be accessed infrequently after the first 30 days. After 90 days, these logs are accessed only for compliance reasons. Which Amazon S3 storage class should the logs initially be stored in to optimize costs based on the given access patterns?
Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive
Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA)
Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA)
Amazon S3 Glacier
Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) is the appropriate choice for data that is accessed less frequently, but requires rapid access when needed, making it suitable for the log files after they are initially analyzed. It provides a cost-saving over using Amazon S3 Standard and offers the required availability and performance. S3 One Zone-IA has lower storage costs compared to S3 Standard-IA, but due to its lack of redundancy across multiple Availability Zones, it is not recommended for newly created logs that might be critical. S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive have retrieval times that range from minutes to hours and are intended for long-term archiving, not suitable for logs that need to be immediately analyzed upon creation.
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You need to migrate your company's on-premises relational database to AWS to improve scalability and availability while controlling costs. The on-premises database is currently experiencing variable loads and would benefit from an AWS service that adjusts its compute capacity based on the incoming load and does not require heavy database administration overhead. Which database service should you choose to optimize for cost and manageability?
Amazon Aurora Serverless
Amazon DynamoDB with auto-scaling enabled
Amazon RDS with Reserved Instances
Amazon Redshift
AWS Aurora Serverless adjusts its compute capacity to the current workload and charges based on the actual consumed compute capacity, making it cost-effective for variable workloads and reducing the need for database administration, as the capacity management is fully handled by AWS. Other options might provide some of these features, but Aurora Serverless uniquely fulfills all the criteria specified. For example, Amazon RDS requires capacity provisioning that doesn't automatically scale and incurs costs for unused resources. DynamoDB, while having auto-scaling capabilities, is not a relational database and might involve significant schema changes. AWS Redshift is optimized for data warehousing and analytics rather than transactional workloads.
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Your company is deploying a web application on AWS. The application requires a web server in a public subnet to be accessible from the internet and a database server that should only be accessible from the web server. Which of the following strategies provides appropriate network segmentation for the database server?
Place the database server in a private subnet with a security group that only allows traffic from the web server's security group.
Place the database server in a public subnet and restrict access by only allowing traffic on the database port from the web server's Elastic IP address.
Implement a network ACL for the VPC that allows traffic from the web server to the database on the required port and denies all other inbound traffic.
Deploy the database server in the same public subnet as the web server to ensure connectivity.
Placing the database server in a private subnet with no direct access from the internet and configuring the security group associated with the database server to allow traffic only from the security group of the web server ensures that only the web server can communicate with the database. Other options, such as placing the database server in a public subnet or allowing direct internet access, would violate security best practices by potentially exposing the database to unauthorized access.
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A company developing a mobile application wishes to process image uploads by users to provide real-time feedback on image quality. The application experiences unpredictable spikes in use, typically during events and social campaigns, leading to highly variable demand on the backend image processing system. Which service should be used to handle the image processing in the most cost-effective and scalable way?
AWS Fargate to run the containerized image processing application without managing underlying servers
Amazon EC2 Autoscaling group to scale image processing servers based on demand
AWS Lambda for triggering image processing functions in response to upload events
AWS Batch to manage image processing jobs in the cloud
AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that automatically scales to match the demand of triggering events and charges on a per-request basis. This makes it ideal for handling unpredictable workloads such as the image processing required by the mobile application during spikes in activity, without incurring costs during idle times. Amazon EC2 would require manual scaling and constant running costs regardless of demand. AWS Fargate, while it provides container management, still requires capacity management and potentially suffers from cold starts. AWS Batch is meant for batch processing workloads and lacks the real-time event-driven model needed here.
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A company has deployed an application across multiple Availability Zones in a standby environment that heavily relies on Amazon DynamoDB. The application has a sudden increase in traffic and starts to experience throttling. The Solutions Architect needs to ensure that the application can handle future unexpected spikes in traffic without being throttled. What should the Solutions Architect do to prevent DynamoDB throttling and maintain the application’s performance?
Increase the provisioned read/write capacity units for the DynamoDB table to handle higher levels of traffic without throttling.
Apply an exponential backoff algorithm in the application logic to handle throttling events as they happen.
Implement a monitoring solution using Amazon CloudWatch to track the throttling events.
Request a service quota increase for DynamoDB in the AWS Management Console.
Designing for resilience includes planning for unexpected spikes in traffic and ensuring that AWS services can scale to meet demand. Increasing the provisioned read/write capacity units for the DynamoDB table is the correct action to address the issue. By provisioning more throughput, the ability to handle higher levels of traffic without throttling is ensured. Requesting a service quota increase would be relevant if the application was hitting account-level service limits, but this is less likely to be the immediate solution to throttling, which is often encountered at the table level. Similarly, monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch is useful for awareness and alarms, but it does not address the need to accommodate increased traffic. Implementing exponential backoff is a retry strategy to handle request throttling but does not by itself prevent throttling from occurring initially.
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Your application is primarily involved in web serving and content management, experiencing variable traffic throughout the day with occasional spikes. Keeping cost optimization in mind, which EC2 instance family is best suited for this workload?
General Purpose
Compute Optimized
Accelerated Computing
Memory Optimized
For applications with variable traffic and occasional spikes, a balance between compute, memory, and networking is often required. General Purpose instance families, such as the T3 or M5, are designed for such use cases, offering a good balance of resources and the ability to burst in performance, which allows them to handle occasional spikes efficiently. The Compute Optimized family is better for compute-intensive applications, and Memory Optimized instances cater to workloads that require large amounts of memory. Accelerated Computing instances are specialized for workloads that need hardware acceleration provided by GPU or FPGA.
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