Design Resilient Architectures

SAA-C03 · 78 questions

• A city permit API spikes when storm season opens, overwhelming workers that process applications synchronously. How should the architect loosely couple intake from processing so each tier can scale independently?
• A city outage notification system must deliver the same alert to SMS subscribers, email lists, and a Lambda function that writes an audit record. Which pattern fits?
• A business-license approval process needs multi-step orchestration with wait states and human approval callbacks before the license is issued. Which AWS service should the architect choose for that workflow?
• A recreation booking site serves a static front end, calls business logic through an API, and must avoid storing session state on servers. Which architecture best matches a serverless multi-tier pattern?
• A GIS processing fleet is packaged as containers and sees bursty CPU demand. The city wants to avoid oversized always-on EC2 fleets. Which compute approach fits?
• A municipal CRM follows a classic three-tier design: web, application, and database. How should the architect place the tiers for a scalable, loosely coupled layout on AWS?
• A city is splitting a monolith into microservices that must stay loosely coupled as new domain events appear. Which integration approach reduces point-to-point spaghetti?
• Session state for a citizen portal currently lives in memory on a single EC2 instance, blocking scale-out. What should the architect do?
• A report-download site must deliver PDFs quickly to citizens worldwide from objects stored in Amazon S3. Which service should sit in front for global edge caching?
• Read-heavy catalog queries are overwhelming the primary Amazon RDS database for a city services directory. Writes remain modest. How should the architect scale reads?
• A county clerk receives nightly partner permit files over SFTP into Amazon S3 and then kicks off processing. Which approach best replaces a self-managed bastion FTP server while keeping the transfer managed?
• A city’s permit-api fleet runs in an Auto Scaling group and must receive HTTP traffic with path-based routing and instance health checks. Which load balancer should the architect choose?
• Seasonal tax-deadline traffic spikes overwhelm a city’s web tier that today only upsizes to larger instance types. What scaling approach should the architect prefer for elasticity?
• A city property-lookup API saturates its origin database during peak citizen traffic. Which design best protects the database while improving response times?
• Municipal microservices each need database credentials, and instances must stay interchangeable as Auto Scaling replaces them. How should secrets be supplied?
• A city media desk runs containerized image-resizers that sit idle most nights and must not pay for idle capacity. Which approach best meets scale-to-zero for intermittent work?
• A city needs object storage for a public media vault, block storage for a CAD database, and a shared file system for engineering lifts. Which combination matches those access patterns?
• Partner cities must call a municipal REST API with throttling and API keys without the platform team managing custom reverse proxies. Which service should front the API?
• Several municipal microservices require Kubernetes APIs and custom controllers, while a simple batch job only needs containers without Kubernetes. How should orchestration be chosen?
• A payments notifier must publish events so billing and auditing can consume them independently without the notifier knowing every subscriber. Which pattern best fits?
• A legacy IIS permit application must become more portable and scale as discrete units before a full rewrite. What is an appropriate first architecture move?
• Legacy vendor systems must exchange messages using JMS/AMQP with a city’s cloud workloads, while new cloud-native apps prefer simpler messaging. When is Amazon MQ the right choice?
• A mobile 311 app needs clients to request flexible field shapes from municipal backends without many bespoke REST round-trips. Which managed API approach fits?
• PDF generation for permit packets must not block the citizen API. How should the architect decouple and scale the workers?
• A multi-tier permit system needs relational transactions, durable attachment storage, and fast session state for web servers. Which service mix best matches those tiers?
• Uploaded citizen documents must be virus-scanned asynchronously, with infected files moved to a quarantine bucket without blocking the upload API. Which event-driven design fits?
• A GIS desktop tool keeps long-lived local state, while a related web API should scale behind a load balancer. Which design principle should guide the web tier?
• A hybrid municipal portal serves static open-data files from S3 and dynamic pages from an ALB-backed app. How should Amazon CloudFront be composed?
• License-number assignment must process requests in order with exactly-once style handling, while citizen notification blasts can be best-effort. Which queue choice is correct?
• A Lambda function consumes Amazon SQS batches for permit enrichment, but one poison message must not block the rest of the fleet. What consumer pattern should be used?
• Nightly municipal batch jobs currently depend on cron on a single EC2 server. How should scheduling be modernized for resilience and scale?
• A small team wants to deploy a simple Java permit web app with platform-managed load balancing and scaling but without deep container orchestration. Which option fits?
• Clients submitting long-running records requests need a fast acknowledgment while work continues asynchronously. Which edge pattern best fits?
• A fleet of CMS instances behind an Auto Scaling group must read and write a common content folder. Which storage service fits that shared file access pattern?
• Operators propose promoting RDS read replicas to “decouple” write-heavy permit processing spikes. What clarification should the architect make?
• A city operations center needs Kafka-compatible streaming so several existing consumer apps can share the same topics, while a separate telemetry lane only needs an AWS-native stream. How should the architect choose?
• A city’s microservices team must ingest a brittle on-premises mainframe feed into modern permit services without letting mainframe outages stall the new apps. Which loosely coupled pattern best isolates the modern tier?
• A county ECS service behind an Application Load Balancer must add tasks when each target is overloaded with requests. Which metric-driven scaling approach fits?
• A city standardizes how partners and internal services talk to the permit platform: partners need a synchronous HTTP contract, while internal services should react asynchronously. Which design matches?
• A 911 CAD reporting database must survive an Availability Zone outage with automatic failover and minimal operator heroics. Which database HA design should the city choose?
• A city defines RPO of 1 hour and RTO of 4 hours for the building-permit system and wants the lowest ongoing DR cost that still meets those targets. Which DR strategy fits?
• A county ERP team wants a cost-aware multi-Region DR design that keeps a minimal core warm in a second Region and scales out only when disaster strikes. Which pattern is that?
• A citizen portal needs a faster RTO than pilot light and can afford a scaled-down but always-running copy in another Region. Which DR pattern matches?
• A statewide emergency bulletin site must stay available with near-zero RTO across Regions using DNS steering and replicated content. Which approach fits?
• A municipal web app has a primary ALB in one Region and a DR ALB in another. How should DNS fail users over when the primary becomes unhealthy?
• Private subnets in a city’s VPC lose all outbound internet access when the single shared NAT gateway’s Availability Zone fails. How should the architect remove that SPOF?
• A city web fleet must apply security baselines without SSH patching live instances. Which immutable infrastructure approach fits?
• A county must harden durability of land-record objects in Amazon S3 against accidental deletes and Regional loss. Which combination best fits?
• A municipal web tier must survive loss of an Availability Zone without manual redeploy. Which HA design should the architect use?
• A Lambda-heavy city API opens many short database connections and must ride through RDS failover without connection storms failing the app. Which service helps?
• A county’s DR runbook scales out EC2 and load balancers in a standby Region on failover day. What must be true beforehand so scale-out is not throttled?
• Operators need early warning that the city’s multi-AZ web tier is degrading. Which HA operations approach fits?
• A multi-service permit path is failing intermittently across API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB. How should architects gain workload visibility to find the broken dependency?
• A city wants backups that survive both Regional issues and an account-level compromise of the workload account. Which approach strengthens resilience?
• A legacy on-premises app cannot be rewritten soon, but the city must improve reliability in AWS while planning a later migration. Which approach fits Associate-level constraints?
• After AZ or Region recovery drills, rebuilt municipal environments sometimes drift from the known-good baseline. How should automation protect infrastructure integrity?
• A statewide records system needs low-RPO multi-Region reads and the ability to promote a secondary Region if the primary fails. Which database pattern fits?
• An architect proposes relying only on EBS snapshots to claim multi-AZ high availability for a running EC2 database volume. What is the correct distinction?
• Smart-meter ingest must keep accepting readings even if the downstream database is briefly unavailable. Which fault-tolerance pattern fits?
• After an AZ failure, failover targets for a city’s multi-AZ app are unreachable even though instances launched. What networking baseline should architects verify?
• A city 311 contact center wants spoken responses and text sentiment analysis without standing up DIY machine-learning servers that become single points of failure. Which approach best improves reliability for the voice and text pipeline?
• A county permit system uses active-passive databases with a manual promote during outages. Tabletop reviews show promote steps often miss the published RTO. What should the architect emphasize first?
• A municipality must archive sealed court recordings that require extreme durability across devices and facilities, not a single server disk. Which storage choice best matches that durability need?
• A city’s citizen portal Auto Scaling group currently registers targets in only one Availability Zone behind an Application Load Balancer. Leadership wants production-grade high availability. What should the architect change?
• A public-health reporting system requires an RTO measured in hours and an RPO measured in minutes. Leadership currently funds only nightly backups with restore from scratch. Which direction should the architect recommend?
• During a city payroll outage, operators argue about whether the fault is the application or an AWS Regional service event. What should HA runbooks emphasize?
• A municipality wants a resilient stack for a public website: web tier that can lose instances, a relational database that survives AZ loss, and object storage that can recover in another Region. Which composition best fits?
• Several partner cities call a shared regional API on API Gateway. One city can exhaust request quotas and starve others. What should the architect apply to protect shared resilience?
• Architects drew a multi-AZ design with Route 53 health checks and Auto Scaling for a voter-results API, but the design has never been failed over in production-like conditions. What validates that recovery actually works?
• A parks recreation site suffers outages when in-place package updates fail mid-deploy on long-lived instances. Which deploy approach best reduces change-related downtime?
• A city’s multi-Region DR plan replicates compute templates and databases, but after failover the standby Region cannot decrypt application secrets. What dependency was likely missed?
• A municipal CAD integration needs ultra-low-latency TCP load balancing with health checks across Availability Zones at Layer 4. Which load balancer fits best?
• A license portal still stores session files and uploads on a single instance’s local disk, so any instance death loses state. How should the architect redesign for distributed resilience?
• Finance questions why warm standby for the utility outage portal costs more than backup-only restore. How should the architect frame the trade-off?
• A library events API runs in an Auto Scaling group behind a load balancer. Occasionally an instance fails its health checks. What self-healing behavior should the architect rely on?
• A city CMS needs a shared POSIX file system that multiple web instances across Availability Zones can use, and content must survive loss of one AZ. Which file storage approach fits?
• A county is using AWS Application Migration Service to move a permitting app. What must the cutover target architecture include for resilience?
• A metro government runs a complex multi-Region citizen portal and wants Associate-level readiness checks that confirm Regional stacks can take traffic before a planned failover. Which capability class should architects be aware of?