SAA-C03: Design High-Performing Architectures
Design High-Performing Architectures is one of the skill areas tested on the Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) exam. Below are free SAA-C03 practice questions with worked answers and a concept diagram — each with a plain-language explanation. Practice the first 10 questions of SAA-C03 free, no signup.
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2 free SAA-C03 Design High-Performing Architectures questions
A seismology institute runs monitoring stations on five continents. Each station produces about 800 GB of sensor readings per day and sits on a fast fiber connection. The institute needs every station's readings to land in one Amazon S3 bucket in us-east-1 as quickly as possible, with as little infrastructure to operate as possible. What should the solutions architect recommend?
- Have each station write to an S3 bucket in the Region nearest to it, then use S3 Cross-Region Replication to copy every object into the central bucket.
- Schedule daily AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized jobs to move each station's readings into the nearest Region, then replicate the objects into the central bucket.
- ✓ Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on the central bucket and have each station upload directly to that bucket using multipart uploads.
- Upload each station's readings to an Amazon EC2 instance in the nearest Region, hold them on an Amazon EBS volume, and copy the volume contents to the central bucket on a schedule.
S3 Transfer Acceleration routes each upload into the closest AWS edge location and carries it to the bucket's Region over the AWS backbone, while multipart upload splits a large file so its parts travel in parallel — one setting on the bucket, no servers to run. Writing to regional buckets and leaning on Cross-Region Replication stores every object twice and introduces replication lag, so the central bucket is never immediately complete. Snowball Edge exists for sites without usable bandwidth; shipping physical devices every day would be far slower than these fiber links and adds real logistics work. Relaying through EC2 instances and EBS volumes inserts servers, capacity planning, and an extra hop between the station and the bucket for no speed benefit.
A gaming analytics firm refreshes its staging environment from production several times a week. Production data sits on Amazon EBS volumes attached to Amazon EC2 instances, and the staging copy lives in the same AWS Region. Testers write heavily to the copy and those writes must never reach production, and the analytics engine needs full disk throughput as soon as staging comes up. How should a solutions architect create the copy in the shortest time?
- Snapshot the production EBS volumes and restore each snapshot onto instance store volumes attached to the staging EC2 instances.
- ✓ Snapshot the production EBS volumes, enable EBS fast snapshot restore on those snapshots, and create the staging volumes from them.
- Snapshot the production EBS volumes, create new EBS volumes from the snapshots, and read every block on each volume to initialize it before testing starts.
- Enable EBS Multi-Attach on the production volumes and attach them to the staging EC2 instances so both environments work from the same data.
A volume created from a snapshot normally pulls blocks from Amazon S3 the first time they are touched, so early reads are slow; fast snapshot restore removes that penalty and the new volume delivers its full provisioned performance immediately, while remaining a separate copy that production never sees. Instance store is not a valid restore target for a snapshot and its contents vanish when the instance stops, so it cannot hold a durable clone. Restoring normally and then reading every block does warm the volume, but that pre-warming pass is precisely the delay the team is trying to eliminate. Multi-Attach shares one live volume between instances rather than copying it, so staging writes would corrupt production data.
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