AWS SAA-C03 - Practice Test #4

Question 1

A financial company must store database backups in Amazon S3 to comply with government regulations. The data size is several Petabytes. Historically, these backups are never accessed unless a forensic audit occurs, which gives at least 48 hours notice. The company seeks to retain this data for 7 years. Which configuration MINIMIZES long-term storage costs?

Accepted Answer

Configure a Lifecycle Policy to move the objects directly to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive.

Answer

Store the objects in the Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) storage class.

Answer

Configure a Lifecycle Policy to immediately move the data to Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval.

Answer

Enable the Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class to automatically move data based on usage patterns.

Question 2

An IoT platform collects telemetry data from devices via Amazon API Gateway and sends it to an Amazon Kinesis Data Stream. Historically, traffic is low, but during TV ad campaigns, traffic multiplies by 100 within seconds, generating 'ProvisionedThroughputExceededException' errors. How can unpredictable traffic spikes be handled most efficiently?

Accepted Answer

Change the capacity mode of the Amazon Kinesis stream to On-Demand capacity mode.

Answer

Develop an AWS Lambda function that monitors CloudWatch metrics and executes the 'UpdateShardCount' API to scale shards dynamically.

Answer

Increase the number of provisioned shards in the Kinesis stream to match the expected peak traffic from TV spikes.

Answer

Migrate the ingestion architecture to Amazon SQS FIFO (First-In-First-Out) queues to absorb the spike without losing strict order.

Question 3

An enterprise application residing on Amazon EC2 instances within private subnets needs to store session states in an Amazon DynamoDB table. Security policies dictate that the database must not be accessible from the public internet, and application network traffic to DynamoDB must remain isolated on the internal network. Which solution guarantees that data NEVER traverses the public internet?

Accepted Answer

Create a Gateway VPC Endpoint for DynamoDB and associate it with the private subnet's route table.

Answer

Deploy a NAT Gateway in a public subnet and route DynamoDB traffic through it.

Answer

Create an Interface VPC Endpoint powered by AWS PrivateLink for DynamoDB.

Answer

Establish a VPC Peering connection between the application VPC and the global AWS-managed VPC where DynamoDB resides.

Question 4

A banking entity uses an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database in the eu-west-1 region. Due to new compliance regulations, the primary database must be able to failover to a secondary region (eu-central-1) in case the primary region goes down completely. An RPO (Recovery Point Objective) of up to 15 minutes is accepted, but recovery must be as fast as possible without requiring migration to a different database engine. Which architecture is the MOST RESILIENT against a Region-level disaster?

Accepted Answer

Create a Cross-Region Read Replica in eu-central-1 using the native RDS mechanism.

Answer

Configure a Global Database deployment (Aurora Global Database) and replace the standard PostgreSQL database.

Answer

Enable Automated Backups on RDS and use AWS Backup to copy snapshots to eu-central-1 every 15 minutes.

Answer

Deploy a Multi-AZ RDS cluster and locate the standby instance in an Availability Zone in the eu-central-1 region.

Question 5

A large retail company needs to evacuate its on-premises data center in less than 2 months. They run a critical monolith hosted on dozens of Linux virtual machines (VMs) that process orders, connected to a MySQL database cluster. The source code is a decade old, and the original team is gone, so refactoring is not an acceptable option. Downtime during migration must be minimal. Choose TWO AWS services that, combined, execute this massive 'Lift-and-Shift' migration. What is the FASTEST way to implement this solution?

Accepted Answer

Answer

Use the AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) to replicate the block volumes of the virtual machines to Amazon EC2.

Answer

Deploy AWS DataSync to transfer the source code to Amazon S3 and rebuild the servers using AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

Answer

Use the AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) to replicate the MySQL cluster to Amazon RDS with continuous synchronization.

Answer

Create OVA images of the servers and use the AWS VM Import/Export tool to convert them into Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).

Answer

Set up local Docker containers and use AWS App Runner to orchestrate the new cloud architecture.

Question 6

A meteorology institute processes climate models using a High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster comprised of 50 Amazon EC2 Linux instances running in a Cluster Placement Group. These instances need shared access to a temporary dataset requiring read/write throughput of 200 GB/s and consistent sub-millisecond (microsecond) latencies. Which storage mechanism offers the fastest access to frequent data?

Accepted Answer

Implement a fully managed file system using Amazon FSx for Lustre.

Answer

Create an Amazon EFS file system and enable the Max I/O performance mode.

Answer

Attach multiple Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2 Block Express) volumes using Multi-Attach.

Answer

Deploy an in-memory database cluster using Amazon ElastiCache for Redis.

Question 7

A startup trains AI models by storing millions of images in Amazon S3. For the first 6 months, data scientists access the images completely unpredictably (massive scan spikes some days, nothing other days). After 6 months, the training data must be kept inactive for 5 years for compliance without ever being read again. What is the MOST COST-EFFECTIVE solution for this scenario?

Accepted Answer

Enable the S3 Intelligent-Tiering class and opt-in to the Deep Archive Access tier.

Answer

Store the data in S3 Standard-IA, as it has a low baseline storage cost and is ideal for unpredictable access.

Answer

Store the data in S3 Standard and use S3 Lifecycle Rules to transition them to S3 Glacier Deep Archive on day 180.

Answer

Configure a bucket in S3 One Zone-IA and move the data to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval using lifecycle policies after 6 months.

Question 8

A company ('Production Account') hosts highly confidential financial reports in an Amazon S3 bucket, encrypted with a Customer Managed AWS KMS key (CMK). The company hires an external auditing firm that uses its own AWS account ('Audit Account'). The auditing firm's EC2 application needs to download these reports from S3. Which configuration strictly complies with the PRINCIPLE OF LEAST PRIVILEGE to allow this cross-account access?

Accepted Answer

Create an IAM Role in the 'Production Account' with permissions on S3 and KMS. Configure the role's Trust Policy to allow the EC2 role of the 'Audit Account' to assume it (sts:AssumeRole).

Answer

Update the S3 Bucket Policy in the 'Production Account' to grant permissions to the 'Audit Account'. Share the Production Account admin's static Access Key with the firm.

Answer

Create a VPC Peering between both accounts and configure Security Groups to allow EC2 instance traffic to flow into the production VPC.

Answer

Modify the S3 and KMS policies in the 'Production Account' allowing access to '*' and restrict the source IP using an 'aws:SourceIp' condition.

Question 9

An architect is designing a new microservices-oriented online banking platform on Amazon EC2. Customer traffic will be balanced via an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Technical leadership demands that if an entire physical data center suffers a power outage, the system must not experience a total service drop, and compute capacity must regenerate automatically. Which design guarantees HIGH AVAILABILITY against the failure of an Availability Zone (AZ)?

Accepted Answer

Deploy the ALB spanning at least two public subnets in two different Availability Zones, and associate it with an Auto Scaling Group that spreads EC2 instances across those same Availability Zones.

Answer

Implement the ALB in a public subnet and place the EC2 instances in a Spread Placement Group within a single Availability Zone.

Answer

Deploy two independent ALBs in different regions and use Amazon Route 53 with a Latency Routing Policy.

Answer

Provision a cluster of giant EC2 instances in one Availability Zone and use periodic Amazon EBS Snapshots to back up state.

Question 10

An application receives orders via synchronous API calls. API Gateway directly triggers an AWS Lambda function to process the payment and confirm the order. The process takes about 10 seconds per order. During Black Friday campaigns, the burst of traffic causes Lambda to hit its concurrency limit and API Gateway starts dropping orders with HTTP 504 (Timeout) and 429 (Too Many Requests) errors. The company requires retaining and processing every order no matter what. Which approach is the easiest to maintain long-term to solve this design flaw?

Accepted Answer

Insert an Amazon SQS queue between Amazon API Gateway and the AWS Lambda function to decouple ingestion from processing.

Answer

Replace AWS Lambda with Docker containers on Amazon ECS and configure aggressive CPU-based auto-scaling.

Answer

Increase the Amazon API Gateway timeout limit to the maximum allowed of 29 seconds.

Answer

Enable Amazon API Gateway caching to absorb repetitive requests and reduce pressure on Lambda.

AWS SAA-C03 - Practice Test #4

Explanation

Storage Cost Optimization

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