SAA-C03 · AWS · Design Resilient Architectures · Bank updated 2026-09-20
SAA-C03 practice questions: Design Resilient Architectures
5 free questions from 19 on this area · answer and explanation for each · no sign-up
These 5 questions come from the Design Resilient Architectures section of our SAA-C03 bank (19 questions on this area, which carries 26% of the real exam). Every question is original, with the correct answer explained and linked to the source it is drawn from.
1/5 · Design Resilient Architectures · easy
A payroll application stores its data in a Single-AZ Amazon RDS for MySQL instance. Last quarter an Availability Zone event left the application unavailable for four hours while the team restored the database from a snapshot in another zone. The business now requires that the database recover in another Availability Zone automatically and without losing committed transactions, and the application code cannot be changed. Which solution will meet these requirements?
ACreate a cross-Region read replica of the DB instance and fail over to the replica.
BModify the DB instance to a Multi-AZ deployment inside the same AWS Region.
CRaise the automated backup retention period to 35 days and add an hourly manual snapshot.
DReplicate into a second DB instance in another Availability Zone with AWS DMS.
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B is correct. Task Statement 2.2 covers implementing designs to mitigate single points of failure and selecting services for high availability across Availability Zones. The Amazon RDS User Guide states that in a Multi-AZ deployment 'Amazon RDS automatically provisions and maintains a synchronous standby replica in a different Availability Zone', which protects 'against DB instance failure and Availability Zone disruption'. Synchronous replication is what makes a failover free of committed-transaction loss.
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2/5 · Design Resilient Architectures
Every order placed must reach three internal subsystems: billing and analytics need every order, and fraud screening needs only orders that carry a high-value flag. Today the order service calls each subsystem's API in turn, so a single slow subsystem delays the others and an outage in one blocks the checkout path. Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?
AWrite each order to a single Amazon SQS queue and have the three subsystems poll that queue, each discarding the messages that are not relevant to it.
BPublish each order once to an Amazon SNS topic, subscribe one Amazon SQS queue per subsystem, and put a filter policy on the fraud subscription.
CPublish each order to an Amazon Kinesis data stream and have each subsystem run its own consumer application that reads the stream and filters the records it needs.
DKeep the direct API calls but wrap them in an AWS Step Functions state machine that invokes each subsystem in parallel with retry and catch handlers.
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B is correct. Task Statement 2.1 covers publish/subscribe messaging and designing event-driven architectures. Amazon SNS pushes a published message to every subscriber, and subscribing SQS queues gives each consumer a durable copy it can process at its own rate. The SNS Developer Guide states that by default a subscriber receives every message and that 'to receive only a subset of the messages, a subscriber must assign a filter policy to the topic subscription'.
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3/5 · Design Resilient Architectures
A news site serves article pages and large images from an Application Load Balancer in a single AWS Region. Readers in Asia and Europe report page loads of several seconds, and the web fleet scales out during busy news cycles mostly because the same images are requested over and over from the origin. Which solution will most improve load times for distant readers and reduce load on the origin?
ACreate an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the load balancer as the origin and serve the images and other static assets through the distribution.
BPut AWS Global Accelerator in front of the Application Load Balancer and register the load balancer as the endpoint for the accelerator.
CCreate cross-Region read replicas of the site's database in Asia and Europe and render each page from the local replica.
DCreate latency-based Amazon Route 53 records that point readers to additional Application Load Balancers and web fleets deployed in Asia and Europe.
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A is correct. Task Statement 2.1 asks how to use edge accelerators appropriately. The CloudFront Developer Guide describes a service that 'speeds up distribution of your static and dynamic web content' through 'a worldwide network of data centers called edge locations' where copies of the files are cached. AWS draws the contrast in the Global Accelerator FAQ: 'CloudFront improves performance for both cacheable content (such as images and videos) and dynamic content', while 'Global Accelerator improves performance for a wide range of applications over TCP or UDP by proxying packets at the edge to applications running in one or more AWS Regions'. Proxying is not caching, which is why only one of them removes the repeat origin fetches.
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4/5 · Design Resilient Architectures
A company must show an auditor one retention schedule that covers Amazon EBS volumes, Amazon RDS databases, Amazon DynamoDB tables, and Amazon EFS file systems across 12 accounts: daily copies kept for 35 days and month-end copies kept for a year. Today each team writes its own snapshot scripts, and nobody can produce a single report of what is protected. Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?
AWrite an AWS Lambda function per service in each account, invoke the functions from Amazon EventBridge schedules, and have each function create and expire its own snapshots.
BCreate AWS Backup plans with a daily rule and a monthly rule, assign resources to them by tag, and copy the recovery points into a backup vault in a central account.
CCreate Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager policies in each account that create and expire snapshots on the required daily and monthly schedules.
DDeploy AWS Config rules across the organization that report a resource as noncompliant when it has no recent snapshot, and review the compliance dashboard monthly.
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B is correct. Task Statement 2.2 covers implementing strategies to ensure the durability and availability of data. The AWS Backup Developer Guide describes it as 'a fully-managed service that makes it easy to centralize and automate data protection across AWS services, in the cloud, and on premises', states that 'you can create backup policies known as backup plans', and that backups can be copied 'to multiple different AWS accounts inside your AWS Organizations management structure'.
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5/5 · Design Resilient Architectures · hard
A public API is built on Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda, with the function writing to an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database. During traffic spikes the function scales out far faster than the database can accept new connections, the database exhausts its connection limit, and unrelated functions in the same account then fail to get concurrency. The team must bound the load reaching the database and protect the rest of the account. Which solution will meet these requirements?
AMove the database to a larger instance class with Provisioned IOPS storage and raise its maximum connections parameter to match the peak number of function instances.
BSet reserved concurrency on the function at a fixed number of concurrent executions, and route its database connections through Amazon RDS Proxy.
CConfigure provisioned concurrency on the function for the number of execution environments the spike needs.
DEnable API Gateway caching on the stage with a time-to-live long enough to cover a whole spike.
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B is correct. Task Statement 2.1 covers scaling strategies and database connections and proxies. The Lambda Developer Guide states that reserved concurrency 'sets both the maximum and minimum number of concurrent instances allocated to your function' and 'acts as both a lower and upper bound', while provisioned concurrency is about pre-initialized environments and cold starts. The RDS User Guide states that with RDS Proxy 'you can allow your applications to pool and share database connections to improve their ability to scale'.
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