2022 – 2023 AWS Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 Practice Exam

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EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD provides sustained performance for mission-critical low-latency workloads. EBS General Purpose SSD can provide bursts of performance up to 3,000 IOPS and have a maximum baseline performance of 10,000 IOPS for volume sizes greater than 3.3 TB. The 2 HDD options are lower cost, high throughput volumes.

Reference: Amazon EBS Performance Tips

Reference: AWS Session management

VPC endpoints for Amazon S3 provide secure connections to S3 buckets that do not require a gateway or NAT instances. NAT Gateways and Internet Gateways still route traffic over the Internet to the public endpoint for Amazon S3. There is no way to connect to Amazon S3 via VPN.

Reference: S3 VPC Endpoints

Reference: AWS Security best practice

Reference: Eliminating Single Points of Failures on AWS Cloud

Reference: Replication with Amazon Aurora

FIFO queues will solve problems that occur when messages are processed out of order. FIFO queues will not improve performance during sudden volume increases. Additionally, you cannot convert SQS queues after you create them.
Reference: FIFO Queues

When the word durability pops out, the first service that should come to your mind is Amazon S3. Since this service is not available in the answer options, we can look at the other data store available which is Amazon DynamoDB. DynamoDB is durable, scalable, and highly available data store which can be used for real-time tabulation. You can also use AppSync with DynamoDB to make it easy for you to build collaborative apps that keep shared data updated in real time. You just specify the data for your app with simple code statements and AWS AppSync manages everything needed to keep the app data updated in real time. This will allow your app to access data in Amazon DynamoDB, trigger AWS Lambda functions, or run Amazon Elasticsearch queries and combine data from these services to provide the exact data you need for your app.

Reference: https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/faqs/

With dynamic host port mapping, multiple tasks from the same service are allowed for each container instance. You can use weighted routing policies to route traffic to instances at proportions that you specify. You cannot use weighted routing policies to manage multiple tasks on a single container.
Notes: With dynamic host port mapping, multiple tasks from the same service are allowed for each container instance. You can use weighted routing policies to route traffic to instances at proportions that you specify. You cannot use weighted routing policies to manage multiple tasks on a single container.
Reference: Choosing a routing policy

AWS DataSync allows you to copy large datasets with millions of files, without having to build custom solutions with open source tools, or license and manage expensive commercial network acceleration software. You can use DataSync to migrate active data to AWS, transfer data to the cloud for analysis and processing, archive data to free up on-premises storage capacity, or replicate data to AWS for business continuity. AWS DataSync enables you to migrate your on-premises data to Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, and Amazon FSx for Windows File Server. You can configure DataSync to make an initial copy of your entire dataset, and schedule subsequent incremental transfers of changing data towards Amazon S3. Enabling S3 Object Lock prevents your existing and future records from being deleted or overwritten. AWS DataSync is primarily used to migrate existing data to Amazon S3. On the other hand, AWS Storage Gateway is more suitable if you still want to retain access to the migrated data and for ongoing updates from your on-premises file-based applications.
ReferenceText: AWS DataSync
ReferenceUrl: https://aws.amazon.com/datasync/faqs/

Expedited retrievals allow you to quickly access your data when occasional urgent requests for a subset of archives are required. For all but the largest archives (250 MB+), data accessed using Expedited retrievals are typically made available within 1–5 minutes. Provisioned Capacity ensures that retrieval capacity for Expedited retrievals is available when you need it. To make an Expedited, Standard, or Bulk retrieval, set the Tier parameter in the Initiate Job (POST jobs) REST API request to the option you want, or the equivalent in the AWS CLI or AWS SDKs. If you have purchased provisioned capacity, then all expedited retrievals are automatically served through your provisioned capacity. Provisioned capacity ensures that your retrieval capacity for expedited retrievals is available when you need it. Each unit of capacity provides that at least three expedited retrievals can be performed every five minutes and provides up to 150 MB/s of retrieval throughput. You should purchase provisioned retrieval capacity if your workload requires highly reliable and predictable access to a subset of your data in minutes. Without provisioned capacity Expedited retrievals are accepted, except for rare situations of unusually high demand. However, if you require access to Expedited retrievals under all circumstances, you must purchase provisioned retrieval capacity.
Reference: Amazon Glacier

Amazon Aurora (Aurora) is a fully managed relational database engine that’s compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. You already know how MySQL and PostgreSQL combine the speed and reliability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases. The code, tools, and applications you use today with your existing MySQL and PostgreSQL databases can be used with Aurora. With some workloads, Aurora can deliver up to five times the throughput of MySQL and up to three times the throughput of PostgreSQL without requiring changes to most of your existing applications. Aurora includes a high-performance storage subsystem. Its MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible database engines are customized to take advantage of that fast distributed storage. The underlying storage grows automatically as needed, up to 64 tebibytes (TiB). Aurora also automates and standardizes database clustering and replication, which are typically among the most challenging aspects of database configuration and administration.
Reference: Aurora

Amazon ECS lets you run batch workloads with managed or custom schedulers on Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, or Spot Instances. You can launch a combination of EC2 instances to set up a cost-effective architecture depending on your workload. You can launch Reserved EC2 instances to process the mission-critical data and Spot EC2 instances for processing non-essential batch jobs. There are two different charge models for Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS): Fargate Launch Type Model and EC2 Launch Type Model. With Fargate, you pay for the amount of vCPU and memory resources that your containerized application requests while for EC2 launch type model, there is no additional charge. You pay for AWS resources (e.g. EC2 instances or EBS volumes) you create to store and run your application. You only pay for what you use, as you use it; there are no minimum fees and no upfront commitments. In this scenario, the most cost-effective solution is to use ECS as the container management service then set up a combination of Reserved and Spot EC2 Instances for processing mission-critical and non-essential batch jobs respectively. You can use Scheduled Reserved Instances (Scheduled Instances) which enables you to purchase capacity reservations that recur on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, with a specified start time and duration, for a one-year term. This will ensure that you have an uninterrupted compute capacity to process your mission-critical batch jobs.
Reference: Emazon ECS

Using an Elastic Load Balancer is an ideal solution for adding elasticity to your application. Alternatively, you can also create a policy in Route 53, such as a Weighted routing policy, to evenly distribute the traffic to 2 or more EC2 instances. Hence, setting up two EC2 instances and then put them behind an Elastic Load balancer (ELB) and setting up two EC2 instances and using Route 53 to route traffic based on a Weighted Routing Policy are the correct answers.
Reference: Elastic Load Balancing

You can configure Amazon Redshift to copy snapshots for a cluster to another region. To configure cross-region snapshot copy, you need to enable this copy feature for each cluster and configure where to copy snapshots and how long to keep copied automated snapshots in the destination region. When cross-region copy is enabled for a cluster, all new manual and automatic snapshots are copied to the specified region.
Reference: Redshift Snapshots

Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments provide enhanced availability and durability for Database (DB) Instances, making them a natural fit for production database workloads. When you provision a Multi-AZ DB Instance, Amazon RDS automatically creates a primary DB Instance and synchronously replicates the data to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone (AZ). Each AZ runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure, and is engineered to be highly reliable.
Reference: RDS Multi AZ

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides fully managed, highly reliable, and scalable file storage that is accessible over the industry-standard Service Message Block (SMB) protocol. It is built on Windows Server, delivering a wide range of administrative features such as user quotas, end-user file restore, and Microsoft Active Directory (AD) integration. Amazon FSx is accessible from Windows, Linux, and MacOS compute instances and devices. Thousands of compute instances and devices can access a file system concurrently.
ReferenceText: FSx

Aurora Replicas provide a way to offload read traffic. Aurora Replicas share the same underlying storage as the main database, so lag time is generally very low. Aurora Replicas have their own endpoints, so the application will need to be configured to direct read traffic to the new endpoints.
Reference: Aurora Replicas

The current configuration puts new EC2 instances into service before they are able to respond to transactions. This could also cause the instances to overscale. With a step scaling policy, you can specify the number of seconds that it takes for a newly launched instance to warm up. Until its specified warm-up time has expired, an EC2 instance is not counted toward the aggregated metrics of the Auto Scaling group. While scaling out, the Auto Scaling logic does not consider EC2 instances that are warming up as part of the current capacity of the Auto Scaling group. Therefore, multiple alarm breaches that fall in the range of the same step adjustment result in a single scaling activity. This ensures that you do not add more instances than you need.

Reference: Step scaling policy

Create new subnets in a new Availability Zone (AZ) to provide a redundant network. Create an Auto Scaling group with instances in two AZs behind the load balancer to ensure high availability of the web application and redistribution of web traffic between the two public AZs. Create an RDS DB instance in the two private subnets to make the database tier highly available too.

Reference: Auto Scaling group with instances in two AZs behind the load balancer

Decouple the ingestion of votes from the database to allow the voting system to continue processing votes without waiting for the database writes. Add dedicated workers to read from the SQS queue to allow votes to be entered into the database at a controllable rate. The votes will be added to the database as fast as the database can process them, but no votes will be lost.

Reference: Decouple

While Spot Instances would be the least costly option, they are not suitable for jobs that cannot be interrupted or must complete within a certain time period. On-Demand Instances would be billed for the number of seconds they are running.

Reference: Spot Instances –  On-Demand instances

Server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C) enables Amazon S3 to encrypt objects on the server side using an encryption key provided in the PUT request. The same key must be provided in the GET requests for Amazon S3 to decrypt the object. Customers also have the option to encrypt data on the client side before uploading it to Amazon S3, and then they can decrypt the data after downloading it. AWS software development kits (SDKs) provide an S3 encryption client that streamlines the process.

Reference: Server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C) –

Web browsers will block running a script that originates from a server with a domain name that is different from the webpage. Amazon S3 can be configured with CORS to send HTTP headers that allow the script to run

Reference: Amazon S3 can be configured with CORS

A secondary elastic network interface can be added to an EC2 instance. While primary network interfaces cannot be detached from an instance, secondary network interfaces can be detached and attached to a different EC2 instance.

Reference: A secondary elastic network interface

A NAT gateway forwards traffic from the EC2 instances in the private subnet to the internet or other AWS services, and then sends the response back to the instances. After a NAT gateway is created, the route tables for private subnets must be updated to point internet traffic to the NAT gateway.

Reference: NAT Gateway –

Reference: Apache EMR – https://aws.amazon.com/emr/

Reference: Glue and Athena are correct –

Kinesis Data Streams offers real-time data streaming
Reference: Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

The elements included in a policy document that make up the “EAR” are effect, action, and resource.
Reference:  Policies and Permissions in IAM 

When Amazon EC2 is going to interrupt your Spot Instance, it emits an event two minutes prior to the actual interruption (except for hibernation, which gets the interruption notice, but not two minutes in advance because hibernation begins immediately).

In rare situations, Spot blocks may be interrupted due to Amazon EC2 capacity needs. In these cases, AWS provides a two-minute warning before the instance is terminated, and customers are not charged for the terminated instances even if they have used them.

It is possible that your Spot Instance is terminated before the warning can be made available.
Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ec2

he best answers are to allow versioning on the bucket and to protect the objects by configuring MFA-protected API access.
Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/s3

S3 Standard-IA is for data that is accessed less frequently, but requires rapid access when needed. S3 Standard-IA offers the high durability, high throughput, and low latency of S3 Standard, with a low-per-GB storage price and per GB retrieval fee. This combination of low cost and high performance make S3 Standard-IA ideal for long-term storage, backups, and as a data store for disaster recovery files. S3 Storage Classes can be configured at the object level and a single bucket can contain objects stored across S3 Standard, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Standard-IA, and S3 One Zone-IA. You can also use S3 Lifecycle policies to automatically transition objects between storage classes without any application changes.

Reference: S3 Standard-IA

Rules are evaluated starting with the lowest numbered rule. As soon as a rule matches traffic, it’s applied immediately regardless of any higher-numbered rule that may contradict it. The following are the basic things that you need to know about network ACLs: Your VPC automatically comes with a modifiable default network ACL. By default, it allows all inbound and outbound IPv4 traffic and, if applicable, IPv6 traffic. You can create a custom network ACL and associate it with a subnet. By default, each custom network ACL denies all inbound and outbound traffic until you add rules. Each subnet in your VPC must be associated with a network ACL. If you don’t explicitly associate a subnet with a network ACL, the subnet is automatically associated with the default network ACL. You can associate a network ACL with multiple subnets. However, a subnet can be associated with only one network ACL at a time. When you associate a network ACL with a subnet, the previous association is removed. A network ACL contains a numbered list of rules. We evaluate the rules in order, starting with the lowest-numbered rule, to determine whether traffic is allowed in or out of any subnet associated with the network ACL. The highest number that you can use for a rule is 32766. We recommend that you start by creating rules in increments (for example, increments of 10 or 100) so that you can insert new rules where you need to later on. A network ACL has separate inbound and outbound rules, and each rule can either allow or deny traffic. Network ACLs are stateless, which means that responses to allowed inbound traffic are subject to the rules for outbound traffic (and vice versa).

References: network ACL

A file gateway supports a file interface into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and combines a service and a virtual software appliance. By using this combination, you can store and retrieve objects in Amazon S3 using industry-standard file protocols such as Network File System (NFS) and Server Message Block (SMB). The software appliance, or gateway, is deployed into your on-premises environment as a virtual machine (VM) running on VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, or Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. The gateway provides access to objects in S3 as files or file share mount points. You can manage your S3 data using lifecycle policies, cross-region replication, and versioning. You can think of a file gateway as a file system mount on S3.
Reference: What is AWS Storage Gateway? .

With a multi-AZ configuration, an additional reliability point is scored as the entire Availability Zone itself is ruled out as a single point of failure. This ensures high availability. Wherever possible, use simple solutions such as spreading the load out rather than expensive high tech solutions.
References: AZ

Scheduled scaling allows you to set your own scaling schedule. For example, let’s say that every week the traffic to your web application starts to increase on Wednesday, remains high on Thursday, and starts to decrease on Friday. You can plan your scaling actions based on the predictable traffic patterns of your web application. Scaling actions are performed automatically as a function of time and date.
Reference: Scheduled scaling for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling. 

Messages can be retained in queues for up to 14 days.
References: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sqs

References: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc

Create an IAM user for the auditor and explain that the firewall functionality is implemented as stateful Security Groups, and stateless subnet NACLs. AWS has removed the Firewall appliance from the hub of the network and implemented the firewall functionality as stateful Security Groups, and stateless subnet NACLs. This is not a new concept in networking, but rarely implemented at this scale.
References: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/iam

Amazon SWF (not Amazon SQS) keeps track of all tasks and events in an application. Amazon SQS requires you to implement your own application-level tracking, especially if your application uses multiple queues. Amazon SWF FAQs.
References:
References: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sqs

References: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/iam

Poor timing of SQS processes can significantly impact the cost effectiveness of the solution. To prevent other consumers from processing the message again, Amazon SQS sets a visibility timeout, a period of time during which Amazon SQS prevents other consumers from receiving and processing the message. The default visibility timeout for a message is 30 seconds. The minimum is 0 seconds. The maximum is 12 hours.
References: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sqs

The correct answers are Enterprise, Business, Developer.
References: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/

Elasticache and DynamoDB both can be used to store session data.

Enhanced networking has two mechanisms: Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) and Intel 82599Virtual Function (VF) interface. For ENA, users can enable it with –ena-support. References can be found here

Placement groups have the placement strategies of Cluster, Partition and Spread. With the Partition placement strategy, instances in one partition do not share the underlying hardware with other partitions. This strategy is suitable for distributed and replicated workloads such as Cassandra. Details please refer to Placement Groups Limitation partition.

 In this question, a Windows file server is required in AWS and the application should continue to work unchanged. Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is the correct answer as it is backed by a fully native Windows file system.

This online game application has global users and needs low latency. Both CloudFront and Global Accelerator can speed up the distribution of contents over the AWS global network. AWS Global Accelerator works at the network layer and is able to direct traffic to optimal endpoints. Check what is global-accelerator for reference.  CloudFront delivers content through edge locations and users are routed to the edge location that has the lowest time delay.

Reference: AWS Well architected Framework

Reference: AWS Horizontal Scaling

Reference: Tiered Application

Reference: Public and Private Subnets

Reference: Placement Groups