Practice Free SAA-C03 Exam Online Questions
A company hosts a public application on AWS. The company uses an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to distribute application traffic to multiple Amazon EC2 instances that are hosted in private subnets. The company wants to authenticate all the requests by using an on-premises Active Directory Federation Service (AD FS). The company uses AWS Direct Connect to connect its on-premises data center to AWS.
Which solution will meet this requirement?
- A . Configure an Amazon Cognito user pool. Integrate the user pool with the ALB for AD FS authentication.
- B . Configure an AWS Directory Service directory. Integrate the directory with the ALB for AD FS authentication.
- C . Replace the ALB with a Network Load Balancer (NLB). Use Amazon Connect Agent Workspace to integrate an agent workspace with the NLB.
- D . Configure an AWS Directory Service AD Connector. Integrate the AD Connector with the ALB for AD FS authentication.
D
Explanation:
Comprehensive and Detailed
To authenticate users using an on-premises Active Directory Federation Service (AD FS), AWS provides the AWS Directory Service AD Connector. AD Connector is a proxy that connects AWS applications to your on-premises Microsoft Active Directory without requiring complex directory synchronization or the need to set up a separate directory in the cloud.
By integrating AD Connector with the Application Load Balancer (ALB), you can authenticate and authorize users using your existing on-premises credentials. This setup allows the ALB to leverage the authentication capabilities of your on-premises AD FS, providing a seamless and secure user experience.
Reference: How to connect your on-premises Active Directory to AWS using AD Connector AWS Directory Service AD Connector
A company is migrating some workloads to AWS. However, many workloads will remain on premises. The on-premises workloads require secure and reliable connectivity to AWS with consistent, low-latency performance.
The company has deployed the AWS workloads across multiple AWS accounts and multiple VPCs.
The company plans to scale to hundreds of VPCs within the next year.
The company must establish connectivity between each of the VPCs and from the on-premises environment to each VPC.
Which solution will meet these requirements?
- A . Use an AWS Direct Connect connection to connect the on-premises environment to AWS.
Configure VPC peering to establish connectivity between VPCs. - B . Use multiple AWS Site-to-Site VPN connections to connect the on-premises environment to AWS. Create a transit gateway to establish connectivity between VPCs.
- C . Use an AWS Direct Connect connection with a Direct Connect gateway to connect the on-premises environment to AWS. Create a transit gateway to establish connectivity between VPCs. Associate the transit gateway with the Direct Connect gateway.
- D . Use an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection to connect the on-premises environment to AWS. Configure VPC peering to establish connectivity between VPCs.
C
Explanation:
The optimal solution for scalable and resilient hybrid networking is to use AWS Direct Connect with a Direct Connect gateway for secure, low-latency access to AWS, and an AWS Transit Gateway to manage connectivity among hundreds of VPCs.
By associating the Transit Gateway with the Direct Connect gateway, you enable transitive routing between on-premises and all VPCs, while minimizing network complexity and maintaining high performance.
VPC peering does not scale well, and VPNs don’t offer the same performance or consistency.
A company recently launched a new product that is highly available in one AWS Region. The product consists of an application that runs on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a public Application Load Balancer (ALB), and an Amazon DynamoDB table. The company wants a solution that will make the application highly available across Regions.
Which combination of steps will meet these requirements? (Select THREE.)
- A . In a different Region, deploy the application to a new ECS cluster that is accessible through a new ALB.
- B . Create an Amazon Route 53 failover record.
- C . Modify the DynamoDB table to create a DynamoDB global table.
- D . In the same Region, deploy the application to an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) cluster that is accessible through a new ALB.
- E . Modify the DynamoDB table to create global secondary indexes (GSIs).
- F . Create an AWS PrivateLink endpoint for the application.
A, B, C
Explanation:
To make the application highly available across regions:
Deploy the application in a different region using a new ECS cluster and ALB to ensure regional redundancy.
Use Route 53 failover routing to automatically direct traffic to the healthy region in case of failure. Use DynamoDB Global Tables to ensure the database is replicated and available across multiple regions, supporting read and write operations in each region.
Option D (EKS cluster in the same region): This does not provide regional redundancy.
Option E (Global Secondary Indexes): GSIs improve query performance but do not provide multi-region availability.
Option F (PrivateLink): PrivateLink is for secure communication, not for cross-region high availability.
AWS
Reference: DynamoDB Global Tables
Amazon ECS with ALB
An international company needs to share data from an Amazon S3 bucket to employees who are located around the world. The company needs a secure solution to provide employees with access to the S3 bucket. The employees are already enrolled in AWS IAM Identity Center.
Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?
- A . Create a help desk application to generate an Amazon S3 presigned URL for each employee. Configure the presigned URLs to have short expirations. Instruct employees to contact the company help desk to receive a presigned URL to access the S3 bucket.
- B . Create a group for Amazon S3 access in IAM Identity Center. Add the employees who require access to the S3 bucket to the group. Create an IAM policy to allow Amazon S3 access from the group. Instruct employees to use the AWS access portal to access the AWS Management Console and navigate to the S3 bucket.
- C . Create an Amazon S3 File Gateway. Create one share for data uploads and a second share for data downloads. Set up an SFTP service on an Amazon EC2 instance. Mount the shares to the EC2 instance. Instruct employees to use the SFTP server.
- D . Configure AWS Transfer Family SFTP endpoints. Select the custom identity provider option. Use AWS Secrets Manager to manage the user credentials. Instruct employees to use Transfer Family SFTP.
A company runs a production database on Amazon RDS for MySQL. The company wants to upgrade the database version for security compliance reasons. Because the database contains critical data, the company wants a quick solution to upgrade and test functionality without losing any data.
Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?
- A . Create an RDS manual snapshot. Upgrade to the new version of Amazon RDS for MySQL.
- B . Use native backup and restore. Restore the data to the upgraded new version of Amazon RDS for MySQL.
- C . Use AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) to replicate the data to the upgraded new version of Amazon RDS for MySQL.
- D . Use Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments to deploy and test production changes.
D
Explanation:
Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments is the ideal solution for upgrading the database version with minimal operational overhead and no data loss. Blue/Green Deployments allows you to create a separate, fully managed "green" environment with the upgraded database version. You can test the new version in the green environment while the "blue" environment continues serving production traffic. Once testing is complete, you can seamlessly switch traffic to the green environment without downtime.
This solution provides:
Fast, non-disruptive upgrade: Traffic is only switched to the new environment after testing, ensuring zero data loss.
Minimal operational overhead: AWS handles the infrastructure management, reducing manual intervention.
Option A (Manual snapshot): This requires manual intervention and involves more operational overhead.
Option B (Native backup/restore): This approach is more labor-intensive and slower than Blue/Green Deployments.
Option C (DMS): AWS DMS adds unnecessary complexity for a simple version upgrade when Blue/Green Deployments can handle the task more efficiently. AWS
Reference: Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments
A weather forecasting company collects temperature readings from various sensors on a continuous basis. An existing data ingestion process collects the readings and aggregates the readings into larger Apache Parquet files. Then the process encrypts the files by using client-side encryption with KMS
managed keys (CSE-KMS). Finally, the process writes the files to an Amazon S3 bucket with separate prefixes for each calendar day.
The company wants to run occasional SQL queries on the data to take sample moving averages for a specific calendar day.
Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?
- A . Configure Amazon Athena to read the encrypted files. Run SQL queries on the data directly in Amazon S3.
- B . Use Amazon S3 Select to run SQL queries on the data directly in Amazon S3.
- C . Configure Amazon Redshift to read the encrypted files Use Redshift Spectrum and Redshift query editor v2 to run SQL queries on the data directly in Amazon S3.
- D . Configure Amazon EMR Serverless to read the encrypted files. Use Apache SparkSQL to run SQL queries on the data directly in Amazon S3.
A
Explanation:
Amazon Athenais a serverless query service that allows you to run SQL queries directly on data stored in Amazon S3 without the need for a data warehouse. It is cost-effective because you only pay for the queries you run, and it can handle Apache Parquetfiles efficiently. Additionally, Athena integrates with KMS, making it suitable for querying encrypted data.
Key AWS features:
Cost-Effective: Athena charges only for the data scanned by the queries, making it a more cost-effective solution compared to Redshift or EMR for occasional queries.
Direct S3 Querying: Athena supports querying data directly in S3, including Parquet files, without needing to move the data.
AWS Documentation: Athena’s compatibility with encrypted Parquet files in S3 makes it the ideal choice for this scenario, reducing both cost and complexity.
A solutions architect is configuring a VPC that has public subnets and private subnets. The VPC and subnets use IPv4 CIDR blocks. There is one public subnet and one private subnet in each of three Availability Zones (AZs). An internet gateway is attached to the VPC.
The private subnets require access to the internet to allow Amazon EC2 instances to download software updates.
Which solution will meet this requirement?
- A . Create a NAT gateway in one of the public subnets. Update the route tables that are attached to the private subnets to forward non-VPC traffic to the NAT gateway.
- B . Create three NAT instances in each private subnet. Create a private route table for each Availability Zone that forwards non-VPC traffic to the NAT instances.
- C . Attach an egress-only internet gateway in the VPC. Update the route tables of the private subnets to forward non-VPC traffic to the egress-only internet gateway.
- D . Create a NAT gateway in one of the private subnets. Update the route tables that are attached to the private subnets to forward non-VPC traffic to the NAT gateway.
A
Explanation:
Private subnets require outbound internet access to download updates, but they must not have public IPs or direct inbound access.
The recommended AWS solution is to create a NAT gateway in a public subnet. Private subnet route tables are updated to route internet-bound traffic (0.0.0.0/0) to the NAT gateway. The NAT gateway then uses the internet gateway attached to the VPC to communicate with the internet.
Option B (NAT instances) is an older approach and less scalable/maintainable than NAT gateways.
Option C (egress-only internet gateway) is for IPv6 outbound-only traffic, not IPv4.
Option D is invalid because NAT gateways must be deployed in public subnets.
Reference: AWS Well-Architected Framework ― Reliability Pillar
(https: //d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS_Well-Architected_Framework.pdf)
NAT Gateways (https: //docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/vpc-nat-gateway.html)
VPC Internet Gateways and Subnet Routing
(https: //docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/VPC_Internet_Gateway.html)
A company needs to design a hybrid network architecture. The company’s workloads are currently stored in the AWS Cloud and in on-premises data centers. The workloads require single-digit latencies to communicate. The company uses an AWS Transit Gateway transit gateway to connect multiple VPCs
Which combination of steps will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively? (Select TWO.)
- A . Establish an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection to each VPC.
- B . Associate an AWS Direct Connect gateway with the transit gateway that is attached to the VPCs.
- C . Establish an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection to an AWS Direct Connect gateway.
- D . Establish an AWS Direct Connect connection. Create a transit virtual interface (VIF) to a Direct Connect gateway.
- E . Associate AWS Site-to-Site VPN connections with the transit gateway that is attached to the VPCs
B, D
Explanation:
AWS Direct Connect: Provides a dedicated network connection from your on-premises data center to AWS, ensuring low latency and consistent network performance.
Direct Connect Gateway Association:
Direct Connect Gateway: Acts as a global network transit hub to connect VPCs across different AWS regions.
Association with Transit Gateway: Enables communication between on-premises data centers and multiple VPCs connected to the transit gateway.
Transit Virtual Interface (VIF):
Create Transit VIF: To connect Direct Connect with a transit gateway.
Setup Steps:
Establish a Direct Connect connection.
Create a transit VIF to the Direct Connect gateway.
Associate the Direct Connect gateway with the transit gateway attached to the VPCs.
Cost Efficiency: This combination avoids the recurring costs and potential performance variability of VPN connections, providing a robust, low-latency hybrid network solution.
Reference: AWS Direct Connect
Transit Gateway and Direct Connect Gateway
A company has an ecommerce application that users access through multiple mobile apps and web applications. The company needs a solution that will receive requests from the mobile apps and web applications through an API.
Request traffic volume varies significantly throughout each day. Traffic spikes during sales events. The solution must be loosely coupled and ensure that no requests are lost.
- A . Create an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Create an AWS Elastic Beanstalk endpoint to process the requests. Add the Elastic Beanstalk endpoint to the target group of the ALB.
- B . Set up an Amazon API Gateway REST API with an integration to an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue. Configure a dead-letter queue. Create an AWS Lambda function to poll the
queue to process the requests. - C . Create an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Create an AWS Lambda function to process the requests. Add the Lambda function as a target of the ALB.
- D . Set up an Amazon API Gateway HTTP API with an integration to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. Create an AWS Lambda function to process the requests. Subscribe the function to the SNS topic to process the requests.
B
Explanation:
Why Option B is Correct:
Amazon SQS: Ensures no requests are lost, even during traffic spikes.
API Gateway: Handles dynamic traffic patterns efficiently, integrating with SQS for asynchronous processing.
Lambda: Polls the queue and processes requests in a serverless and scalable manner.
Dead-Letter Queue (DLQ): Ensures failed messages are retried or logged for debugging.
Why Other Options Are Not Ideal:
Option A: Elastic Beanstalk cannot handle queue-based decoupling, making it unsuitable for spiky traffic.
Option C: ALB to Lambda does not provide buffering for traffic spikes, risking request loss.
Option D: SNS is better suited for notifications, not reliable for ensuring message durability.
AWS
Reference: Amazon SQS: AWS Documentation – SQS
A company wants to enhance its ecommerce order-processing application that is deployed on AWS. The application must process each order exactly once without affecting the customer experience during unpredictable traffic surges.
Which solution will meet these requirements?
- A . Create an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) FIFO queue. Put all the orders in the SQS queue. Configure an AWS Lambda function as the target to process the orders.
- B . Create an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) standard topic. Publish all the orders to the SNS standard topic. Configure the application as a notification target.
- C . Create a flow by using Amazon AppFlow. Send the orders to the flow. Configure an AWS Lambda function as the target to process the orders.
- D . Configure AWS X-Ray in the application to track the order requests. Configure the application to process the orders by pulling the orders from Amazon CloudWatch.
A
Explanation:
Amazon SQS FIFO queues guarantee the order of message delivery and ensure that each message is delivered exactly once. Paired with AWS Lambda, this creates a scalable, fault-tolerant architecture that processes each order in order and prevents duplicates, which is critical for ecommerce workflows.
Reference: AWS Documentation C Amazon SQS FIFO Queues and Exactly-Once Processing