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AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) practice questions

100 questions in 10 tests. Open one to answer it on its own, or take a whole test.

Test 1

Take Test 1 ›
  1. A partner organization needs read access to the objects in one S3 bucket that your AWS account owns. The partner's developers work exclusively from their own AWS account, and… · Identity & Access Management
  2. A reporting application on EC2 reads its Amazon RDS for MySQL username and password from a plaintext file baked into the AMI. An audit requires that the database password be… · Data Protection & Secrets
  3. EC2 instances in the private subnets of a VPC write roughly 8 TB of logs per month to an S3 bucket in the same Region. That traffic currently exits through a NAT gateway, and the… · Network Security
  4. A retail application uses a single Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance in one Availability Zone. A recent AZ-level event took the database offline for four hours. The team… · Database Resiliency
  5. An order-processing worker reads messages from a standard Amazon SQS queue, calls an external payment API, and then deletes the message. Customers have started reporting that… · Application Decoupling
  6. A trading platform runs an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL cluster in eu-west-1. Regulators now require that the workload survive the loss of the entire eu-west-1 Region with a recovery… · Disaster Recovery
  7. Researchers in Australia, Japan, and Brazil each upload instrument files of 5 GB to 20 GB several times a day to a single S3 bucket in us-east-1. Uploads routinely take hours and… · Data Transfer Performance
  8. A content management application currently runs on a single Amazon EC2 Linux instance and stores uploaded documents on an attached io2 EBS volume mounted at /var/www/uploads. The… · Storage Architecture
  9. A data science team keeps about 40 TB of intermediate datasets in S3 Standard. Some objects are read many times a week for a month and then go quiet; others are never read again… · Storage Cost Optimization
  10. Finance has flagged a rising compute bill. The account runs three distinct workloads: a steady around-the-clock baseline of roughly 200 vCPUs of EC2 spread across two Regions and… · Compute Cost Optimization

Test 2

Take Test 2 ›
  1. During a product launch, a web application behind an Application Load Balancer slows to a crawl. The access logs show an HTTP request flood coming from a few thousand constantly… · Network Security
  2. A company runs 40 member accounts in AWS Organizations. A new data residency mandate says that nobody in those accounts may create or use resources outside eu-central-1 and… · Identity & Access Management
  3. A security engineer replaces the default network ACL on a public subnet with a custom one that contains only two rules besides the default deny: inbound TCP 443 from 0.0.0.0/0… · Network Security
  4. An Auto Scaling group runs six EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Occasionally the application process on an instance deadlocks. The operating system keeps… · High Availability
  5. An order service emits an event for every order it accepts. Three independent systems (inventory, billing, and analytics) must each receive every order event and process it at… · Application Decoupling
  6. A travel booking site runs behind an Application Load Balancer in us-east-1. A scaled-down standby copy of the stack runs behind its own ALB in us-west-2 and should receive no… · Disaster Recovery
  7. A real-time bidding platform stores advertiser profiles in an Amazon DynamoDB table. The workload is overwhelmingly reads, and a small set of popular profiles is read thousands… · Database Performance
  8. An API built on Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda reads and writes to an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. During flash sales, Lambda scales to several thousand concurrent… · Database Performance
  9. An insurance company scans signed contracts into PDFs of a few megabytes each and stores them in S3 Standard. Regulations require keeping every contract for 10 years. After the… · Storage Cost Optimization
  10. An Amazon DynamoDB table in on-demand capacity mode backs a telemetry ingestion service. For the past year its traffic has been nearly flat around the clock, at about 4,000 reads… · Database Cost Optimization

Test 3

Take Test 3 ›
  1. A marketing team serves images and scripts for its website from an S3 bucket through an Amazon CloudFront distribution. The bucket has S3 Block Public Access turned on, and every… · Network Security
  2. A photo-sharing mobile app already signs users in with an Amazon Cognito user pool. To cut backend costs, the app must now upload each user's photos directly to an S3 bucket… · Identity & Access Management
  3. A brokerage must keep trade confirmations in write-once-read-many (WORM) storage for seven years. Its regulator requires that no one can delete or overwrite a record, or shorten… · Data Protection & Secrets
  4. A company runs its workload in us-east-1 on EC2 instances with EBS volumes, an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance, and an Amazon EFS file system. For disaster recovery… · Disaster Recovery
  5. An online store runs on an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Each instance keeps logged-in sessions and shopping carts in its own memory… · High Availability
  6. A fleet-telematics company ingests GPS and engine readings from 50,000 trucks. Three independent applications consume the same readings: a live dashboard, an anomaly detector… · Application Decoupling
  7. A log-analytics job on a single EC2 instance reads a 14 TiB data set from start to finish several times a day. The reads are large and sequential, and the job needs roughly 450… · Storage Architecture
  8. A game studio runs multiplayer game servers on EC2 behind Network Load Balancers in us-east-1 and eu-west-1. Game traffic is UDP. The consoles' network firmware connects only to… · Network Performance
  9. A QA team uses an Aurora MySQL cluster with one provisioned db.r6g.large instance as a test database. It runs around the clock, but testers use it irregularly: a few hours on… · Database Cost Optimization
  10. An internal claims-processing application runs on a fixed Auto Scaling group of 20 On-Demand EC2 instances, 24 hours a day. Monitoring over the past year shows a very regular… · Compute Cost Optimization

Test 4

Take Test 4 ›
  1. An application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group reads objects from an S3 bucket. The deployment script writes an IAM user's access key ID and secret access key into a… · Identity & Access Management
  2. Administrators reach EC2 instances in private subnets by SSH through a bastion host in a public subnet. Security wants to remove the bastion, close inbound port 22 on every… · Network Security
  3. A compliance standard requires that objects in an S3 bucket can only be read or written over an encrypted connection. An auditor has found that some legacy clients still call the… · Data Protection & Secrets
  4. Worker EC2 instances poll an SQS queue and process order messages. A small number of malformed messages cause the worker to throw an exception before deleting the message. Each… · Application Decoupling
  5. A web tier runs six EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. The group is configured with a single subnet in one Availability Zone. During a… · High Availability
  6. At 14:10 an engineer runs a faulty migration against a production Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance, corrupting a table. The problem is noticed at 15:30. Automated backups are… · Disaster Recovery
  7. An Amazon Aurora MySQL cluster with a single writer instance backs a reporting portal. Analytical queries have grown until they saturate the writer's CPU, slowing the… · Database Performance
  8. A tightly coupled HPC simulation runs across 20 EC2 instances that exchange messages continuously. Profiling shows the job is bound by node-to-node network latency rather than by… · Network Performance
  9. A data processing tier of EC2 instances runs across three Availability Zones for resilience. The instances read roughly 200 TB a month from a self-managed caching cluster that… · Network Cost Optimization
  10. A finance team reports that EC2 spend has grown faster than traffic. A sample of instances shows sustained CPU utilisation in the single digits and memory well below provisioned… · Compute Cost Optimization

Test 5

Take Test 5 ›
  1. Account A stores objects in an S3 bucket encrypted with a customer managed AWS KMS key in Account A. A data science role in Account B has been granted s3:GetObject on the bucket… · Data Protection & Secrets
  2. A platform team wants application developers to create IAM roles for their own Lambda functions so they stop filing tickets. The developers must not be able to create a role with… · Identity & Access Management
  3. A public web application runs on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. A new standard requires that traffic is encrypted from the viewer all the way to the… · Network Security
  4. A regulator requires that a bucket's objects exist in a second AWS Region, that new objects appear there automatically within minutes of being written, and that a deletion in the… · Disaster Recovery
  5. A payments service will run active-active on a DynamoDB global table, serving writes from us-east-1 and eu-west-1. All replicas live in one AWS account. The requirement is… · Database Resiliency
  6. A genomics pipeline runs on a fleet of EC2 instances that must read a multi-terabyte dataset held in Amazon S3. The compute nodes need a POSIX file system with sub-millisecond… · Storage Architecture
  7. A CloudFront distribution fronts an ALB serving a product catalogue. Origin load is far higher than expected and CloudFront reports a low cache hit ratio. Investigation shows the… · Network Performance
  8. A customer-facing API backed by AWS Lambda behind API Gateway must meet a p99 latency target. The function is written in Java and takes about two seconds to initialise. Traffic… · Application Performance
  9. A stateless Java web tier runs on x86 EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The team wants to cut compute cost without reducing capacity or accepting interruptions, and without… · Compute Cost Optimization
  10. A company runs two Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instances that have been the same size for two years and run continuously. Finance has approved a one-year commitment in exchange for… · Database Cost Optimization

Test 6

Take Test 6 ›
  1. A SaaS provider runs its application on EC2 instances in a VPC and sells it to several hundred customers, each of whom runs their own AWS account and VPC. Customers must reach… · Network Security
  2. A security team wants to be told when an EC2 instance starts communicating with a known cryptomining pool, or when API calls are made with an IAM role's credentials from an IP… · Threat Detection
  3. A company runs 60 AWS accounts in a single AWS Organizations organization and already operates a SAML 2.0 corporate identity provider that holds every employee and group… · Identity & Access Management
  4. A payments platform runs in one Region on an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer, backed by an Aurora cluster. After an audit, the business… · Disaster Recovery
  5. A VPC has private subnets in three Availability Zones. All three subnets route 0.0.0.0/0 to a single NAT gateway that lives in a public subnet in the first Availability Zone… · High Availability
  6. An order pipeline is implemented as seven Lambda functions, each of which invokes the next one directly when it finishes. When a function in the middle of the chain fails, the… · Application Decoupling
  7. A telemetry service writes about 4,000 items per second, each roughly 1 KB, into a DynamoDB table whose partition key is the current date (2026-09-17) and whose sort key is a… · Database Performance
  8. Application Load Balancer access logs accumulate in an S3 bucket at a few hundred gigabytes a month. Two analysts want to run ad hoc SQL queries against them perhaps three or… · Analytics
  9. An Aurora PostgreSQL cluster serves a write-heavy analytics ingest workload. Cost Explorer shows that charges for I/O operations are about 40% of everything the company spends on… · Database Cost Optimization
  10. A regulated business must keep one EBS snapshot per volume per month for seven years. Auditors request a restore at most once a year, and they accept that a restore may take up… · Storage Cost Optimization

Test 7

Take Test 7 ›
  1. A healthcare provider has accumulated several thousand S3 buckets across a decade of projects. Ahead of a compliance audit it must produce a report of which buckets hold patient… · Data Protection & Secrets
  2. A three-tier application has a separate security group for the load balancer, the application instances and the database instances. The database security group allows the… · Network Security
  3. Instances in a VPC's private subnets reach the internet through a NAT gateway. A new policy states that these instances may open outbound HTTPS connections only to an approved… · Network Security
  4. A logistics company is moving a Java application to AWS on a tight schedule. The application talks to a self-managed Apache ActiveMQ broker over JMS and relies on topics with… · Application Decoupling
  5. An image-processing fleet of EC2 instances pulls jobs from an SQS queue. Its Auto Scaling group uses a target tracking policy on average CPU utilization with a target of 70%… · High Availability
  6. A manufacturer is moving its telemetry ingestion service into a VPC. Several hundred thousand already-deployed field devices connect to it over plain TCP on port 9443, wrap their… · Network Performance
  7. A streaming service holds distribution rights for its catalogue in twelve countries only. Viewers in each of those countries must be sent to the endpoint that serves their… · Network Performance
  8. An editing studio uploads 40 GB video masters from its suites to S3 with a tool that issues a single PutObject call per file. The link is fast but drops briefly every few hours… · Data Transfer Performance
  9. A research institute publishes a 500 TB climate dataset in S3 and lets any AWS customer download it. The institute is happy to keep paying to store the data, but the request and… · Storage Cost Optimization
  10. Eight product teams share three AWS accounts. Finance needs a monthly breakdown of spend per team, and each team lead should be emailed automatically once their team passes 80%… · Cost Governance

Test 8

Take Test 8 ›
  1. An application instance in a private subnet cannot reach an internal API on another instance, and the two teams disagree about whether a security group, a network ACL or the… · Network Security
  2. A Java service running on EC2 instances connects to an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database using a username and password held in a configuration file on each instance. Security… · Identity & Access Management
  3. An auditor requires that API activity for every account in a company's AWS Organizations organization be collected in one place, that account administrators be unable to turn… · Governance & Audit
  4. Partners drop CSV files into an S3 bucket at unpredictable times, a few hundred a day. A fleet of EC2 instances currently runs a ListObjectsV2 call every 30 seconds to find new… · Application Decoupling
  5. A public REST API fronted by Amazon API Gateway is backed by a fixed-size database that starts timing out above roughly 600 requests per second. Most partners send modest… · Application Decoupling
  6. A bank receives nightly settlement files from 90 counterparties over SFTP. The files land on a pair of self-managed SFTP servers in a data centre, and a script then copies them… · Hybrid Integration
  7. A team has containerised a microservice and wants to run it on Amazon ECS. Traffic is bursty and hard to forecast, the team has no Linux administrators, and nobody wants to… · Compute Architecture
  8. A CloudFront distribution serves 2 million requests per second at peak. On every viewer request the team wants to normalise the URL path and strip tracking query strings so that… · Network Performance
  9. A data lake bucket holds billions of small objects encrypted with SSE-KMS under a customer managed key. A nightly Spark job reads hundreds of millions of them. The bill shows AWS… · Storage Cost Optimization
  10. A photo service stores every uploaded original in S3 Standard and also stores four generated thumbnail sizes per photo alongside them. Thumbnails are requested constantly in the… · Storage Cost Optimization

Test 9

Take Test 9 ›
  1. A claims portal lets policyholders upload a supporting document straight from their browser to an S3 bucket. The bucket must stay private, the policyholders have no AWS accounts… · Identity & Access Management
  2. A ticketing company runs its site behind CloudFront and an Application Load Balancer. It is repeatedly targeted by large distributed denial-of-service attacks around high-profile… · Network Security
  3. A trading application runs active-active in two Regions. It encrypts message payloads client-side with the AWS Encryption SDK before writing them to a DynamoDB global table, and… · Data Protection & Secrets
  4. A batch of EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group writes diagnostic files to a local directory and ships them to S3 every ten minutes. Whenever the group scales in, the most… · High Availability
  5. An engineer runs a DELETE without a WHERE clause against an Aurora MySQL cluster and removes several million rows. The cluster was created with the Backtrack feature enabled and… · Disaster Recovery
  6. A retailer wants clickstream events from its web tier landed in an S3 data lake in Parquet-friendly batches within about a minute of arrival, with a small transformation applied… · Analytics
  7. A video transcoding fleet writes very large intermediate files while processing each job. The scratch directory needs the highest possible local IOPS and throughput at the lowest… · Storage Architecture
  8. A retailer's analysts run dashboards that join five years of sales, inventory and customer tables, about 40 TB in total, with heavy aggregations, all day, from a business… · Analytics
  9. An S3 bucket's cost keeps climbing. ListObjectsV2 over the whole bucket accounts for about 40 TB, but the storage metric in the AWS Billing console and in S3 Storage Lens reports… · Storage Cost Optimization
  10. A fleet of 400 EC2 instances each has a 500 GiB gp2 root and data volume. Monitoring shows the volumes rarely exceed 2,000 IOPS or 120 MiB/s. Finance has asked for a reduction in… · Storage Cost Optimization

Test 10

Take Test 10 ›
  1. A security team manages an AWS Organization with 40 accounts. An auditor asks for a continuously updated list of S3 buckets, IAM roles and KMS keys whose resource policies grant… · Governance & Audit
  2. A compliance review finds that a production EC2 instance has an unencrypted 1 TiB EBS data volume. Policy now requires all data volumes to be encrypted with a customer managed… · Data Protection & Secrets
  3. A company runs analytics workloads on EC2 instances in private subnets that have no internet access. The instances reach S3 through a gateway VPC endpoint. A security requirement… · Network Security
  4. An e-commerce platform publishes order events (created, paid, shipped, cancelled) to a queue. The events for any single customer must be processed in the exact order they were… · Application Decoupling
  5. A company runs a critical application on physical servers in its own data center. The business requires a recovery point objective (RPO) of seconds and a recovery time objective… · Disaster Recovery
  6. A web application runs in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. Users uploading large files, which take up to 90 seconds, report failed uploads whenever the… · High Availability
  7. A REST API on Amazon API Gateway backs a mobile app. The GET /products method invokes a Lambda function that reads a product catalog from DynamoDB. The catalog changes a few… · Network Performance
  8. A media team stores 200 GiB of working files on an Amazon EFS file system that uses Bursting throughput mode. Several times a day, a batch of jobs reads and writes at high speed… · Storage Architecture
  9. A DynamoDB table stores user session records that are useless after 30 days. A scheduled job currently scans the table each night and deletes the old items, and it consumes a… · Database Cost Optimization
  10. A company runs development and test environments made up of standalone EC2 instances and RDS DB instances. Developers use them only from 08:00 to 18:00 on weekdays, but the… · Compute Cost Optimization