AWS Solutions Architect — Compute & Core Services flashcards
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Scenario questions on Regions and AZs, the shared responsibility model, Well-Architected pillars, EC2 families and purchasing options, placement groups, EBS, EFS and FSx, load balancer types, Auto Scaling policies, Lambda, ECS, EKS, Fargate, Beanstalk and CloudFront versus Global Accelerator.
Learn deck · part of AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate · written against: Exam SAA-C03 guide. Updated 2026-10-10.
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What is the relationship between an AWS Region and an Availability Zone?A Region is a geographic area made up of several isolated Availability Zones; each AZ is one or more datacenters with independent power and networking, linked by low-latency connections so a workload can run across AZs for high availability.Cloud Fundamentals
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An application must survive the loss of an entire datacenter yet keep millisecond latency between its tiers. Multi-AZ or multi-Region?Multi-AZ — zones are physically separate but close enough for synchronous replication and low-latency traffic.Cloud Fundamentals
Compare: multi-Region is for surviving a regional outage or serving distant users, at the cost of higher latency and asynchronous replication. -
Which EC2 instance family suits a balanced web server, and which suits an in-memory database?General purpose (M and T families) for balanced CPU and memory; memory optimized (R and X families) for in-memory databases and caches.EC2 Instances
Compare: C is compute optimized, I and D are storage optimized, P and G carry GPUs. -
A small, cheap instance performs well at first but slows dramatically under sustained load. Which family is it, and why?A burstable (T family) instance — it earns CPU credits while idle and spends them under load; once the credits run out it is throttled to its baseline unless it runs in unlimited mode, which can bill for surplus credits and is the default for T3 and T4g (T2 defaults to standard mode).EC2 Instances
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A batch job can be stopped and restarted at any time. Which purchasing option is cheapest, and what is the catch?Spot Instances — spare capacity at a steep discount, but AWS can reclaim them with a two-minute warning whenever it needs the capacity. Fit for fault-tolerant, flexible workloads only.EC2 Purchasing Options
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What happens to data on an instance store volume when the instance stops or its host fails?It is lost — instance store is ephemeral storage physically attached to the host. Use it for caches, scratch space and buffers; anything that must persist belongs on EBS, EFS or S3.Block & File Storage
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Which load balancer routes HTTP requests to different target groups based on URL path or host header?The Application Load Balancer — layer 7, with path, host, header and query-string routing, plus WebSocket, HTTP/2 and gRPC. Targets can be instances, IP addresses, containers or Lambda functions.Load Balancing
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An Auto Scaling group should hold average CPU utilization across the fleet near 50 percent. Which scaling policy type?Target tracking — you choose the metric and target value and Auto Scaling creates the CloudWatch alarms and adds or removes capacity to stay near it. It is the simplest and usually recommended policy.Auto Scaling
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A nightly job processes images for about 45 minutes. Can it run as a single Lambda function?No, not on standard Lambda — an invocation there is capped at 15 minutes. Run it as an ECS or Fargate task or AWS Batch job, or split it into smaller pieces orchestrated by Step Functions.Serverless & Containers
Watch out: on Lambda Managed Instances, asynchronous and most event-source-mapping invocations can run up to 90 minutes; 15 minutes is the standard limit and the answer the exam expects. -
Static assets and video must reach users worldwide with low latency, and the S3 origin must not be reachable directly. Which service and setting?Amazon CloudFront with Origin Access Control — the CDN caches content at edge locations and the bucket policy allows reads only from that CloudFront distribution.Edge & Global
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About these cards
Review status: Second-reader reviewed, with corrections applied.
Checked against:
- Checked against the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) exam guide (topic list only; no text copied).
- Checked against the AWS public documentation for EC2, EBS, EFS, FSx, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Lambda, ECS and CloudFront (reference only; no sentences reproduced).
- Checked against the AWS Well-Architected Framework whitepaper for the six pillars (reference only).
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