AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Practice Test (SAA-C03)

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances offer the most cost-effective approach to utilizing a significant amount of compute power for tasks that can be interrupted and have flexible start and end times, such as batch processing jobs or background tasks. Given that the company's workload is periodic and occurs at well-defined times, with an ability to handle interruptions (resumption of simulations), Spot Instances provide the required compute capacity at lower costs than On-Demand or Reserved Instances. EC2 Dedicated Hosts are more targeted towards licensing requirements and consistent performance, and T3 instances, while providing burstable performance, may not offer consistent high performance throughout the simulation period, making both of these options less aligned with the company's combination of a high-compute, cost-effective, and periodic processing routine.

The statement is accurate because a database proxy sits between the application and the database, managing connections by multiplexing and pooling them. This reduces the number of direct connections to the database, which in turn minimizes the overhead caused by a high number of idle connections. Proxies can handle the creation, reuse, and termination of connections more efficiently than if each application instance handled connections itself, thus improving overall performance and scaling of the database service.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is the most appropriate storage service for serving large media files globally with low latency. As an object storage service, it is designed to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. S3 is well-suited for the write-once-read-many access model, which matches the requirement of updating files infrequently and serving them frequently. Moreover, when combined with Amazon CloudFront for content distribution, it can deliver media files with low latency to users worldwide due to CloudFront's edge locations.

Deploying database instances across multiple regions with a mechanism in place for data replication caters to both the RTO and RPO objectives. The chosen configuration ensures that data is replicated with minimal lag, and it allows for quick failover should the need arise, which is crucial for meeting a 4-hour operational recovery and 15-minute data recovery criteria. A strategy restricted to the same region does not protect against regional disruptions. Periodic backups without continuous replication are likely to exceed the 15-minute data recovery requirement, especially if backups are not frequent enough. A basic disaster recovery setup like the pilot light does not provide the necessary continuous replication or quick enough failover to meet the stringent objectives outlined.

Within the shared responsibility model for cloud services, the provider is in charge of securing the infrastructure that runs all of the services offered in the cloud. On the other hand, the customer is responsible for securing the information they put into cloud services. This includes encryption of data, configuration of access controls, and identity management practices such as ensuring credentials are securely managed and implementing appropriate access policies.

The correct service for analyzing and debugging production, distributed applications is AWS X-Ray. It provides developers with data to analyze and debug bottlenecks, latency, and other issues in microservices architectures. Amazon CloudWatch primarily focuses on monitoring and observability, not in-depth debugging. Amazon Inspector is a security assessment service to help improve the security and compliance of applications. AWS Step Functions is a serverless function orchestrator which makes it easy to sequence Lambda functions and multiple AWS services.

Amazon S3 is designed to provide scalability, high availability, and low latency at commodity costs. S3 can store an unlimited number of objects and scale automatically as you add more objects to the bucket, making it the perfect choice for a storage solution that needs to handle growing data without manual scaling actions. Amazon EBS provides block storage for use with EC2 instances and does not automatically scale in the same way as S3. Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service optimized for high-performance, scalable applications but is not primarily a storage service for objects. Amazon EC2 provides computing capacity in the cloud but is not primarily used for object storage.

Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive is designed for data that is accessed very infrequently but needs to be retained for a long-term period. It is the most cost-effective solution for archival storage, meeting compliance requirements and ensuring that records are preserved with minimum cost. Other options like Amazon S3 Standard or Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access are not optimized for long-term archival storage and would result in higher costs due to higher storage prices and the lack of infrequent access.

By default, a newly created security group in a VPC denies all inbound traffic until you create inbound traffic rules allowing it. This security measure ensures that no unintended services are exposed unless explicitly allowed by the architect or administrator. The 'deny all' default helps in maintaining a secure network posture aligning with the principle of least privilege.

Amazon S3 supports automated storage tiering through features such as lifecycle policies and Intelligent-Tiering. These features allow data to be automatically transitioned between storage classes based on specified rules or access patterns. This automation eliminates the need for manual intervention and helps reduce storage costs effectively.

The correct answer is true. An Application Load Balancer can route traffic based on the domain name specified in the Host header, a feature known as host-based routing. This allows for a multi-tenant architecture where different domains are served by different backend systems, all through a single Application Load Balancer. Incorrect answers may confuse the capabilities of an Application Load Balancer with those of a Simple or Classic Load Balancer, or may underestimate the advanced routing features provided by an ALB.

Given the requirements for millisecond latency, capability to handle burstable read and write workloads, and auto-scaling features, Amazon DynamoDB is the appropriate choice because it is a NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. It is designed to handle large-scale, high-velocity data, which is what a mobile gaming application would generate. Unlike Amazon RDS or Amazon Aurora, which are relational databases better suited for structured data and consistent workloads, Amazon DynamoDB can scale automatically to adjust for varying workloads which is typical of mobile gaming applications. DynamoDB also provides built-in support for the handling of large-scale, distributed datasets which suits the expected data size and the requirement for low latency data access.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is the service that allows the automated adjustment of the number of compute instances in the application's fleet based on demand, ensuring that the correct number of instances is available to handle the application's load. This leads to optimized resource allocation, which aids in maintaining consistent application performance. Amazon RDS is primarily a database service and does not deal with the scaling of compute resources. Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service that can initiate scaling actions but does not itself scale the number of compute instances. Amazon S3 is an object storage service and does not deal directly with scaling compute resources.

Cost Explorer with the implementation of categorization tags provides the capability to analyze and attribute expenses to specific resources and operational groups. By assigning relevant categorization tags to the resources used by each department, the Architect can filter and disassemble the expense data based on the organizational structure. These tags must be activated for cost allocation in the billing console before they can be used for granular visibility into expenditure associated with designated departments or teams.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1/io2) volumes are designed to meet the needs of I/O-intensive workloads that are sensitive to storage performance and consistency. They offer high throughput and low latency, which are critical for applications that require fast and reliable access to data. Amazon S3 is not suitable as it is object storage and does not offer the low latency or fine-tuned IOPS required by online games. Amazon EFS would offer shared file access which is not required in this scenario, and Amazon EBS Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) is optimized for large block, throughput-intensive workloads and not low latency.