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AWS Solutions Architect — Practice Questions flashcards

6 of 75 questions free to study here · 24 topics · the whole deck is built into Willys

Multiple-choice practice questions, one best answer each, on EC2, storage, load balancing, serverless, VPC networking, IAM and security, S3, databases, messaging and disaster recovery.

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Practice deck · part of AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate · written against: Exam SAA-C03 guide. Updated 2026-10-10.

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  1. A research team runs a tightly coupled simulation in which every node constantly exchanges data with the others. The requirement is the lowest possible network latency between nodes. Which design meets it?

    A) Launch the nodes in a partition placement group
    B) Launch all nodes in one cluster placement group
    C) Launch all nodes in one spread placement group
    D) Distribute the nodes evenly across three AZs
    B) Launch all nodes in one cluster placement group

    A cluster placement group packs instances close together in one Availability Zone for the lowest latency and highest throughput between them. Spreading nodes across racks or AZs improves fault isolation but adds latency, which is the opposite of what this workload needs.
    EC2 Instances
  2. A team wants to run its containerized microservices on AWS without provisioning, patching or scaling any servers. Which option has the least operational overhead?

    A) Amazon ECS tasks on the EC2 launch type
    B) Docker on EC2 in an Auto Scaling group
    C) Amazon ECS on the Fargate launch type
    D) Self-managed Kubernetes on EC2 instances
    C) Amazon ECS on the Fargate launch type

    With Fargate you declare CPU and memory per task and AWS runs the containers serverlessly, so there are no hosts to manage. The EC2 launch type still leaves the container hosts for you to patch and scale.
    Serverless & Containers
  3. The apex domain example.com must point at an Application Load Balancer whose IP addresses change over time. Which Route 53 record should be created?

    A) An alias A record that targets the load balancer
    B) An A record listing the ALB's current IP addresses
    C) A CNAME record for the apex pointing to the ALB
    D) A weighted CNAME record set for the apex domain
    A) An alias A record that targets the load balancer

    DNS does not allow a CNAME at the zone apex, so Route 53 offers alias records, which can point the apex at an ALB and follow its address changes. Hard-coding the balancer's IPs breaks as soon as they change.
    Route & CloudFront
  4. Auditors require a tamper-evident record of every management API call in all of the company's member accounts, stored centrally and with integrity that can be verified. Which design fits best?

    A) VPC Flow Logs from every VPC sent to one S3 bucket
    B) The CloudWatch agent installed on every instance
    C) An AWS Config recorder enabled in every account
    D) An organization trail with log file validation to S3
    D) An organization trail with log file validation to S3

    A CloudTrail organization trail records API calls for every member account, delivering them to a central bucket, and log file validation detects any later tampering. Flow Logs record network traffic and Config records resource configuration, not who called which API.
    Logging & Monitoring
  5. A DynamoDB table uses the current date as its partition key, so all of today's writes go to one key value and are throttled while capacity elsewhere sits idle. Which change fixes the root cause?

    A) Enable DynamoDB Streams and process the writes later
    B) Put DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) in front of the table
    C) Add a local secondary index on the date attribute
    D) Use a high-cardinality partition key such as device ID
    D) Use a high-cardinality partition key such as device ID

    Throughput is spread across partitions by key, so a single hot key value throttles; a high-cardinality key (or write sharding) spreads the load. DAX caches reads and does nothing for a write hotspot.
    DynamoDB
  6. A non-critical internal application can tolerate a recovery time of many hours and losing the last several hours of data. Management wants the cheapest disaster recovery strategy that meets these targets. Which one?

    A) Multi-site active-active
    B) Pilot light
    C) Backup and restore
    D) Warm standby
    C) Backup and restore

    With relaxed RTO and RPO, backup and restore is the cheapest strategy because nothing runs in the recovery Region until a disaster. The other strategies keep resources running and cost more as recovery time falls.
    Disaster Recovery

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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, CloudFront, VPC, Route 53, IAM, Organizations, KMS, Secrets Manager, ACM, the security services, S3, Storage Gateway, DataSync, RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, Step Functions, API Gateway, Athena, Glue and EMR (reference only; no sentences reproduced).
  • Checked against the AWS Well-Architected Framework whitepaper, including the Reliability Pillar for the disaster recovery strategies (reference only).

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