Design High-Performing Architectures

SAA-C03 · 72 questions

• A GIS team needs a home directory that many EC2 analysis instances can mount concurrently with POSIX semantics. Which storage service should the architect choose?
• A city engineering CAD database on EC2 needs consistent low-latency IOPS for its data disks. Which EBS guidance is most appropriate?
• A county open-data program will publish multi-terabyte media datasets that many researchers read in parallel. Which storage platform best fits that scale?
• Public-works engineers still open hot CAD drawings from on-premises file shares, but leadership wants those files backed by durable cloud object storage. Which hybrid approach fits?
• A transit agency archives large sequential video files on an EC2-attached volume where throughput matters more than tiny random IOPS. Which EBS type is appropriate?
• A permitting database EC2 host needs a simple, cost-effective boot disk plus a separately tuned data disk. What volume layout should the architect use?
• A city finance department needs a high-performance SMB file share integrated with Active Directory for Windows desktops. Which managed service best fits?
• A county emergency-management office runs a burst HPC-style flood model on AWS that needs extremely high-throughput parallel file access for scratch and working datasets. Which storage service best fits this high-performance compute pattern?
• A regional evidence unit must upload multi-gigabyte case media from distant field offices into Amazon S3 when WAN latency is high. Which approach best improves large remote ingest performance?
• A city GIS team shares home directories on Amazon EFS. Analysts open thousands of small map tiles and config files, not a few large sequential streams. Which EFS configuration choice best matches that access pattern?
• A municipal media desk runs a video transcode fleet on EC2 and needs extremely fast local scratch during each job, but finished masters must remain durable evidence. Where should the scratch workspace live?
• An elections office expects election-night media spikes and wants storage that can absorb unpredictable growth without mid-event volume resizing. Which design best scales ahead of that spike?
• A township must place three workloads: a relational permitting database, a CMS that needs a shared POSIX file tree for web nodes, and long-term backups plus media archives. Which storage-type mapping is correct?
• A county plans to migrate multi-terabyte on-premises file shares into Amazon EFS, FSx, or S3 with scheduling, bandwidth control, and integrity validation. Which service best accelerates that large-scale transfer?
• A city tax portal sees seasonal filing spikes and runs a stateless EC2 web fleet behind a load balancer. How should compute scale to meet request demand?
• A county assessor runs nightly parcel GIS batch jobs that need managed provisioning of compute for containerized or AMI-based workers. Which service best fits this large-scale batch pattern?
• A city’s open-data program needs distributed Apache Spark jobs to transform large civic datasets before publishing. Which AWS service is the appropriate managed big-data processing cluster choice?
• A parks department runs event-driven image moderation on AWS Lambda and must meet a latency SLO. CPU for Lambda scales with memory. What should the architect do?
• A municipal permitting platform decomposes into container microservices and the team wants elastic compute without managing EC2 capacity for the nodes. Which compute option best removes EC2 node operations?
• A public-works team needs containerized model inference that requires GPU instance types. Managed Rekognition does not cover their custom model. Which compute placement meets the special-hardware need?
• A city records portal accepts citizen uploads on an API tier and must virus-scan files with a separate worker fleet. How should the architect enable each tier to scale independently under load?
• A county security office runs CPU-bound encryption jobs and a separate in-memory analytics workload. Which instance-family guidance is appropriate?
• A 311 application stack includes an EC2 Auto Scaling group and a DynamoDB table. The architect must define when capacity grows. What is the sound approach?
• Field inspectors use a mobile app that must execute light logic with ultra-low latency near users, not only from a distant Region. Which associate-level design awareness is most appropriate?
• A utility AMI platform emits one meter event that must trigger analytics, alerting, and archival compute paths without blocking the producer. Which messaging pattern best enables elastic fan-out?
• Municipal Kubernetes services on Amazon EKS must add pods when CPU or custom metrics rise. Which scaling approach fits container orchestration performance needs?
• A bursty 311 webhook invokes AWS Lambda and occasionally throttles during storm-related spikes. What should the architect do to meet burst concurrency needs?
• A health-department Java API needs a load-balanced, elastic web environment without the team wiring a custom Auto Scaling group and load balancer from scratch. Which service fits?
• A library consortium needs common computer-vision checks on uploaded photos and wants strong performance with minimal GPU fleet operations. What should the architect prefer?
• A utility writes high-scale meter readings to DynamoDB. Hot partitions are causing throttling on a few keys. Which access-pattern design best improves performance?
• A county property-search site is read-heavy against Amazon RDS and frequently repeats the same queries. How should the architect improve database read performance?
• A finance office runs OLTP on Aurora MySQL and also runs heavy reporting queries. How should traffic be separated for high-performing database access?
• A city permitting database on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL sees sudden IOPS spikes when inspectors sync field photos and plan reviews after lunch. Storage grows unpredictably as new permit years open. Which design best meets the spiky I/O and growing footprint without constant manual resize tickets?
• A serverless city permit API uses many concurrent AWS Lambda functions that open short-lived connections to Amazon RDS. During renewal season the database hits maxconnections and new Lambdas fail. What should the solutions architect introduce to stabilize connection churn?
• A municipality is choosing databases for two workloads: (1) millions of meter-ID lookups with simple key access, and (2) a permitting app that needs multi-table joins and transactional integrity. Which pairing best matches access patterns?
• A county fraud team needs to explore how vendors, subcontractors, purchase orders, and shared addresses connect across years of procurement data. Lookups are relationship-heavy, not simple primary-key gets. Which AWS database service fits this graph-style investigation?
• A city’s parks work-order app already runs on MongoDB-compatible document APIs on premises. Architects want a managed AWS service that preserves that document model with minimal application rewrite. Which service should they select?
• A regional 911 analytics team needs a managed wide-column store that speaks Cassandra Query Language (CQL) for existing telemetry tables. Which AWS service matches that requirement?
• A county clerk must move an on-premises Oracle licensing database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with schema conversion and ongoing replication until cutover. Which AWS approach fits this heterogeneous migration?
• During a city game-day festival app, citizen sessions and a live scavenger-hunt leaderboard need sub-millisecond reads and writes far hotter than the primary database should absorb. Which service should front those patterns?
• A regional building-department portal must keep database latency low for local staff while surviving an Availability Zone outage, and later may serve a second metro Region for DR locality. How should the architect place the database tier for performance and HA?
• Utility telemetry arrives as a write-heavy stream (Amazon Kinesis into Amazon DynamoDB), while an open-data catalog is read-heavy with relatively few writes. What capacity and key-design mindset should the architect apply?
• A seasonal tax-appeal departmental app needs full relational SQL compatibility but sits nearly idle most months and spikes for a few weeks. Which database option best fits variable load without oversized always-on capacity?
• Finance analysts need columnar scans across years of utility usage for ad-hoc reports. Cashiers still need single-row transactional updates on active accounts. Which design keeps each engine in its lane?
• A city publishes a global static open-data portal (HTML, JS, CSV, GeoJSON) and needs low time-to-first-byte for citizens worldwide. Which AWS design best improves performance?
• Field inspectors run a custom TCP client against a municipal API. They sit on varied ISPs, need stable anycast entry IPs, and want fast regional failover that is not limited to HTTP caching. Which service should front the dual-Region endpoints?
• Architects are laying out a three-tier VPC for a municipal web app: internet-facing load balancers, private application instances, and private databases. Which subnet and routing approach supports scale and correct exposure?
• A county wants one hostname for citizens but must route /permits, /payments, and /inspections to different microservice target groups. Which load balancer capability fits?
• Several county VPCs must consume a shared partner case-management API privately without building a full VPC peering mesh to the partner network. Which approach scales private connectivity cleanly?
• A records center still on premises must move multi-terabyte nightly batches into AWS with consistent high bandwidth. Leadership also wants a resilient backup path if the primary link fails. Which hybrid design fits?
• A county organization has many VPCs (parks, courts, utilities, shared services) that need scalable transitive connectivity without a brittle peering mesh. Which hub service should they use?
• During VPC design for a growing municipality, the network team proposes /28 subnets for every application tier to “save” addresses. What IP planning guidance should the solutions architect give for future scale?
• A latency-sensitive GIS app tier chats constantly with Redis and a database. Architects also require Multi-AZ resilience for the overall stack. How should they place resources?
• A TCP-based GIS streaming service must handle extreme concurrent connection counts from sensors and thick clients with ultra-low latency at layer 4. Which load balancer is the better fit?
• Remote municipal IT admins need encrypted user-level access from laptops into VPC private resources for after-hours support. Site-to-Site VPN already links headquarters, but individual teleworkers are not on that office network. What should the architect provide?
• A citizen API is deployed in us-east-1 and us-west-2. The architect wants DNS to send each user to the Region that currently offers the lower latency. Which Route 53 policy fits?
• Security wants to insert scalable inline network appliances (IDS/firewall) into VPC traffic flows without hand-building fragile per-instance routes for every new appliance. Which load balancing pattern supports that insertion model?
• A county records office runs analytics jobs in private VPC subnets that read large case-file objects from Amazon S3 and meter metadata from Amazon DynamoDB. Staff want higher, more predictable throughput and to keep that traffic on the AWS network instead of hairpinning through the internet or a NAT gateway. Which design best meets those goals?
• A municipal water department needs to ingest high-frequency hydrant pressure telemetry from thousands of field sensors so downstream services can react within seconds. Which AWS service is the most appropriate high-throughput streaming ingest layer for this architecture?
• A city’s 311 analytics team wants a managed path that continuously batches streaming complaint events into an Amazon S3 data lake and optionally into Amazon OpenSearch Service for near-real-time dashboards, without operating custom consumer fleets. Which service best fits?
• A finance office drops nightly CSV budget extracts into Amazon S3. Analysts complain Athena queries scan too much data and run slowly. Which approach best improves analytic performance for those ad-hoc SQL workloads?
• City council staff need occasional interactive SQL against open-data files already landing in Amazon S3, but the IT board refuses to stand up and pay for a always-on data warehouse cluster. Which service best enables that ad-hoc querying pattern?
• Multiple city departments share one Amazon S3 data lake, but police, parks, and finance each need different column- and table-level permissions for sensitive datasets. Which AWS capability is best suited to govern that fine-grained lake access?
• Department heads need interactive visual dashboards of curated budget-spend datasets already prepared in the analytics environment. Which AWS service best provides that business-intelligence visualization layer?
• A public-works GIS team keeps nightly-updated project files on an on-premises NFS share and wants an efficient, scheduled replication into Amazon S3 for analytics without rewriting applications as custom rsync fleets. Which service best fits?
• A city’s legacy backup application still speaks tape or block volume protocols, but leadership wants those backups to land in durable AWS storage as a controlled hybrid ingest path. Which service best bridges that legacy path?
• An elections office must process multi-terabyte historical ballot and precinct datasets with Apache Spark transformations before loading analytic tables. Which AWS service best provides managed big-data compute for that heavy processing?
• Regional partner agencies must upload telemetry into the city’s analytics platform, but security policy forbids exposing raw Amazon S3 buckets publicly on the internet. Which approach best provides private, authenticated ingest access points?
• A smart-city architecture office must choose ingest patterns: streetlight controllers emit sub-second voltage samples, while the finance system exports ledger files once each night. How should the team match ingest frequency to those needs?
• Several city technology partners already operate Kafka clients and require Kafka-compatible tooling for an event pipeline into municipal systems. Which AWS service best provides a managed Kafka-compatible streaming option?
• During a holiday parade, citizen phone apps will spike location and crowd-density telemetry far above normal weekday rates. What should architects do when planning Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and Amazon Data Firehose capacity for that day?
• After ingest pipelines land municipal ordinances, meeting minutes, and permit PDFs into the analytics platform, clerks need full-text search across those documents. Which service best supports that search and log-analytics style access pattern?