SAA-C03 · AWS · Design High-Performing Architectures · Bank updated 2026-11-04
SAA-C03 practice questions: Design High-Performing Architectures
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These 5 questions come from the Design High-Performing Architectures section of our SAA-C03 bank (45 questions on this area, which carries 24% of the real exam). Every question is original, with the correct answer explained and linked to the source it is drawn from.
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1/5 · Design High-Performing Architectures · easy
A multiplayer game runs server fleets behind Network Load Balancers in three AWS Regions and communicates with players over UDP. The installed clients connect to IP addresses rather than to a host name, so the studio needs a small pair of entry-point addresses that stay the same for the life of a client build. The studio also needs players routed to a healthy Region and an unhealthy regional endpoint taken out of service quickly. Which solution will meet these requirements?
ACreate an AWS Global Accelerator standard accelerator with the load balancers as endpoints and give the clients its static IP addresses.
BCreate an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the three Network Load Balancers as origins and give the clients the distribution's domain name.
CCreate latency-based Amazon Route 53 records for the three Network Load Balancers and configure the clients to resolve that record before they connect.
DPlace a single Network Load Balancer in front of the server fleets in the three Regions and register the fleets as IP address targets.
Answer: A. Task Statement 3.4 covers edge networking services with appropriate use cases. The Global Accelerator documentation states that it 'provides you with static IP addresses that you associate with your accelerator. The static IP addresses are anycast from the AWS edge network' and that it 'uses the AWS global network to route traffic to the optimal regional endpoint based on health, client location, and policies'. The FAQ confirms support for 'both TCP and UDP protocols' and detection of an unhealthy endpoint in under a minute.
Source: AWS SAA-C03 Exam Guide - Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures
2/5 · Design High-Performing Architectures
Clickstream events arrive continuously as JSON and must land in an Amazon S3 data lake within a few minutes, stored in Apache Parquet so that Amazon Athena queries run efficiently. No other system needs to read the raw event stream, and the team has no capacity to build, deploy, or scale a consumer application. Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?
ASend the events to an Amazon Kinesis data stream and run a Kinesis Client Library consumer on Amazon EC2 that writes Parquet files to Amazon S3.
BSend the events to an Amazon SQS queue, have an AWS Lambda function write them to Amazon S3 as JSON, and run a nightly AWS Glue job to convert them to Parquet.
CSend the events to an Amazon Data Firehose delivery stream that delivers to Amazon S3 with record format conversion from JSON to Parquet for Athena.
DPublish the events to an Amazon MSK cluster and configure a sink connector that writes Parquet files into the Amazon S3 bucket for Athena queries.
Answer: C. Task Statement 3.5 covers streaming data services, data ingestion patterns, and transforming data between formats. The Amazon Data Firehose documentation states that it is 'a fully managed service for delivering real-time streaming data to destinations such as Amazon Simple Storage Service', that 'you don't need to write applications or manage resources', that it buffers data 'to a certain size or for a certain period of time', and that it 'can convert the format of your input data from JSON to Apache Parquet or Apache ORC' using a schema created in the AWS Glue Data Catalog.
Source: AWS SAA-C03 Exam Guide - Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures
3/5 · Design High-Performing Architectures
Instances in an Auto Scaling group spend about 14 minutes after launch writing a large index onto local disk before they can serve a request. Traffic can double within three minutes, and by the time new instances are ready the surge has passed and customers have already seen errors. The team does not want to keep peak capacity running all day. Which change should the team make?
AAdd a warm pool to the Auto Scaling group with its instances kept stopped
BLower the target value on the group's target tracking scaling policy
CShorten the group's default instance warmup and health check grace period
DAdd a scheduled scaling action that raises desired capacity each morning
Answer: A. Task Statement 3.2 covers scalability capabilities with appropriate use cases. The Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling User Guide topic on warm pools states that 'a warm pool gives you the ability to decrease latency for your applications that have exceptionally long boot times, for example, because instances need to write massive amounts of data to disk' and that 'with warm pools, you no longer have to over-provision your Auto Scaling groups to manage latency'. Instances in a warm pool can be kept in the Stopped state, which is what keeps the standby cost to storage rather than instance hours. The same page cautions that 'creating a warm pool when it's not required can lead to unnecessary costs' - here the 14-minute first boot is the justification.
Source: AWS SAA-C03 Exam Guide - Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures
4/5 · Design High-Performing Architectures
A rendering studio stores shared assets on Amazon EFS. Monitoring shows that average throughput is about 3% of the peak the file system reaches during short, sudden render waves, and nobody can forecast when the waves occur. Which throughput configuration fits this pattern best?
AProvisioned throughput set to the observed peak
BElastic throughput, left to scale with the workload
CBursting throughput with extra data stored to raise the baseline
DProvisioned throughput set to the observed average
Answer: B. Elastic throughput scales automatically for spiky or unpredictable workloads and for applications whose average-to-peak ratio is 5% or less. Provisioned throughput is for known requirements or ratios of 5% or more, and Bursting ties throughput to the amount stored.
Source: Amazon Web Services documentation (docs.aws.amazon.com), Choosing the correct throughput mode for a file system, p. 1
Source: AWS SAA-C03 Exam Guide - Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures
5/5 · Design High-Performing Architectures
A team wants to turn on Transfer Acceleration for an existing general purpose bucket named raw.footage.eu in the Europe (Ireland) Region. The feature cannot be enabled as the bucket stands. Which obstacle explains this?
Athe bucket name is built from dot-separated labels
Bthe Region of the bucket is not among those supported
Cthe feature requires path-style requests from clients
Dthe bucket type is general purpose, not directory
Answer: A. Requirements include virtual-hosted style requests, a DNS-compliant bucket name without periods, and enabling the feature on the bucket. Europe (Ireland) is a supported Region and the feature targets general purpose buckets, so the periods in the name are the obstacle.
Source: Amazon Web Services documentation (docs.aws.amazon.com), CC BY-SA 4.0, Requirements for using Transfer Acceleration, p. 1
Source: AWS SAA-C03 Exam Guide - Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures
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