SAA-C03 Practice Exam: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
The AWS cert everyone hires for. Design workloads that are secure, resilient, fast, and cheap — pick the right service and defend the choice.
What you'll be tested on
- Design Secure Architectures
- Design Resilient Architectures
- Design High-Performing Architectures
- Design Cost-Optimized Architectures
Sample SAA-C03 questions
A company collects data for temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure in cities across multiple continents. The average volume of data that the company collects from each site daily is 500 GB. Each site has a high-speed Internet connection. The company wants to aggregate the data from all these global sites as quickly as possible in a single Amazon S3 bucket. The solution must minimize operational complexity. Which solution meets these requirements?
- Turn on S3 Transfer Acceleration on the destination S3 bucket. Use multipart uploads to directly upload site data to the destination S3 bucket.
- Upload the data from each site to an S3 bucket in the closest Region. Use S3 Cross-Region Replication to copy objects to the destination S3 bucket. Then remove the data from the origin S3 bucket.
- Schedule AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized device jobs daily to transfer data from each site to the closest Region. Use S3 Cross-Region Replication to copy objects to the destination S3 bucket.
- Upload the data from each site to an Amazon EC2 instance in the closest Region. Store the data in an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume. At regular intervals, take an EBS snapshot and copy it to the Region that contains the destination S3 bucket. Restore the EBS volume in that Region.
Show answer
A — Turn on S3 Transfer Acceleration on the destination S3 bucket. Use multipart uploads to directly upload site data to the destination S3 bucket.S3 Transfer Acceleration uses CloudFront edge locations and optimized network paths to speed up uploads to S3 over the public internet, which is ideal for globally distributed sites with fast connections. Combined with multipart upload for large daily volumes, it aggregates data into one bucket quickly with minimal operational work. Cross-Region Replication (B) adds buckets and replication complexity. Snowball Edge (C) is for sites with limited bandwidth, not daily 500 GB over high-speed links. The EC2/EBS snapshot approach (D) is slow, manual, and operationally heavy.
A company needs the ability to analyze the log files of its proprietary application. The logs are stored in JSON format in an Amazon S3 bucket. Queries will be simple and will run on-demand. A solutions architect needs to perform the analysis with minimal changes to the existing architecture. What should the solutions architect do to meet these requirements with the LEAST amount of operational overhead?
- Use Amazon Redshift to load all the content into one place and run the SQL queries as needed.
- Use Amazon CloudWatch Logs to store the logs. Run SQL queries as needed from the Amazon CloudWatch console.
- Use Amazon Athena directly with Amazon S3 to run the queries as needed.
- Use AWS Glue to catalog the logs. Use a transient Apache Spark cluster on Amazon EMR to run the SQL queries as needed.
Show answer
C — Use Amazon Athena directly with Amazon S3 to run the queries as needed.Amazon Athena is a serverless, interactive query service that runs SQL directly against data stored in S3, including JSON files, with no infrastructure to manage and no data loading required. That matches simple, on-demand queries with the least operational overhead and minimal changes. Redshift (A) requires provisioning and loading a cluster. CloudWatch Logs (B) is a log ingestion service and would require moving the data out of S3; its query language is not full SQL. Glue plus EMR Spark (D) involves significant cluster setup and management overhead.
A company uses AWS Organizations to manage multiple AWS accounts for different departments. The management account has an Amazon S3 bucket that contains project reports. The company wants to limit access to this S3 bucket to only users of accounts within the organization in AWS Organizations. Which solution meets these requirements with the LEAST amount of operational overhead?
- Add the aws PrincipalOrgID global condition key with a reference to the organization ID to the S3 bucket policy.
- Create an organizational unit (OU) for each department. Add the aws:PrincipalOrgPaths global condition key to the S3 bucket policy.
- Use AWS CloudTrail to monitor the CreateAccount, InviteAccountToOrganization, LeaveOrganization, and RemoveAccountFromOrganization events. Update the S3 bucket policy accordingly.
- Tag each user that needs access to the S3 bucket. Add the aws:PrincipalTag global condition key to the S3 bucket policy.
Show answer
A — Add the aws PrincipalOrgID global condition key with a reference to the organization ID to the S3 bucket policy.The aws:PrincipalOrgID condition key in an S3 bucket policy restricts access to principals belonging to a specific AWS Organizations organization ID, covering all accounts automatically with a single condition and no ongoing maintenance. aws:PrincipalOrgPaths (B) requires creating and maintaining OUs and is unnecessary when the whole organization should have access. CloudTrail event monitoring (C) is a reactive, operationally heavy workaround. Tagging every user (D) does not scale and fails when users change, since IAM users in other accounts cannot be tagged centrally.
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FAQ
How many practice questions are in this SAA-C03 bank?
1019 questions covering the current SAA-C03 AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate syllabus, every one with the correct answer and an explanation.How long is the real SAA-C03 exam?
The official SAA-C03 exam gives you 130 minutes. Our timed exam mode uses the same limit so the pace feels familiar.What does SAA-C03 access cost?
Plans start at $3.99 for 3 months. One payment, no subscription — and far cheaper than retaking the real exam.