SAA-C03 Exam Dumps - AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03)

AWS Storage Gateway file gateway presents a file interface backed by Amazon S3 and supports NFS. This allows local applications to access data via NFS while also enabling cloud applications to use the data stored in S3 for analytics and processing, fulfilling both hybrid and cloud-native requirements.

Reference Extract:

" AWS Storage Gateway file gateway offers NFS and SMB access to data stored in Amazon S3, supporting hybrid workloads for local and cloud access. "

Source: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Official Study Guide, Hybrid and Storage Gateway section.

Amazon Neptune is a fully managed graph database service optimized for storing and navigating complex many-to-many relationships like social graphs or network topologies.

It supports Gremlin and openCypher queries that allow efficient traversal of connections even multiple levels deep. SQL JOINs (Athena or RDS) are inefficient for deep relationship queries due to exponential complexity.

QuickSight is used for data visualization, not graph traversal.

The correct answer is B because the company wants to view both Amazon EKS clusters and on-premises Kubernetes clusters from a central location with the least operational overhead . Amazon EKS Connector is designed for this purpose. It allows externally managed Kubernetes clusters, including on-premises clusters, to be registered to AWS so they can be viewed in the Amazon EKS console alongside native EKS clusters. This creates a centralized management experience without requiring the company to migrate or rebuild the existing on-premises clusters.

EKS Connector is a low-overhead solution because it extends visibility into Kubernetes environments that are not running directly on Amazon EKS. It provides centralized cluster registration and observability at the AWS management layer while preserving the existing cluster deployments. This is especially useful for hybrid Kubernetes environments where organizations want a single control point for inventory and visibility.

Option A is incorrect because Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights is primarily for metrics, logs, and performance monitoring. Although it provides observability, it is not the primary service for centrally registering and viewing clusters themselves in a unified cluster-management context. Option C is incorrect because AWS Systems Manager is not the main service for centralized Kubernetes cluster management. Option D is incorrect because Amazon EKS Anywhere is used to run Kubernetes on-premises, but it is not the simplest way to centrally view existing clusters with the least operational effort.

AWS guidance for hybrid Kubernetes visibility recommends Amazon EKS Connector for connecting external Kubernetes clusters to AWS. Therefore, it is the most appropriate solution.

Amazon DocumentDB global clusters support managed cross-region failover, allowing you to promote a secondary region to become the new primary with minimal downtime. This ensures business continuity during maintenance or regional disruptions.

Reference Extract:

" Amazon DocumentDB global clusters support managed cross-Region failover, allowing you to recover quickly from regional disruptions with minimal downtime. "

Source: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Official Study Guide, DocumentDB and Resiliency section.

This solution is the most cost-effective and meets the RPO and RTO requirements of 24 hours.

Automatic Snapshots: Amazon RDS automatically creates snapshots of your DB instance at regular intervals. By copying these snapshots to another AWS Region every 24 hours, you ensure that you have a backup available in a different geographic location, providing disaster recovery capability.

RPO and RTO: Since the company’s RPO and RTO are both 24 hours, copying snapshots daily to another Region is sufficient. In the event of a disaster, you can restore the DB instance from the most recent snapshot in the target Region.

Why Not Other Options?:

Option A (Cross-Region Read Replica): This could provide a faster recovery time but is more costly due to the ongoing replication and resource usage in another Region.

Option B (DMS Cross-Region Replication): While effective for continuous replication, it introduces complexity and cost that isn’t necessary given the 24-hour RPO/RTO.

Option C (Cross-Region Native Backup Copy): This involves more manual steps and doesn’t offer as straightforward a solution as automated snapshot copying.

AWS References:

Amazon RDS Automated Backups and Snapshots- Details on automated backups and snapshots in RDS.

Copying an Amazon RDS DB Snapshot- How to copy DB snapshots to another Region.

Comprehensive and Detailed 250 to 300 words of Explanation (AWS documentation-based, no links):

The key constraint is no application code changes, while the observed failure mode during spikes is heavy write load on the database that makes the site unresponsive. Scaling the web tier alone (Option B) may not help if the database is the bottleneck; in fact, adding more EC2 instances can increase concurrent write pressure and worsen the database overload. Caching (Option A) would require modifying the application to use Redis for query caching, which violates the no-code-change requirement. Option C is not a fit: CloudFront caching is effective for cacheable content, but authenticated, personalized pages are typically not cacheable without application changes, and “write throttle” is not a standard CloudFront feature to protect the database.

Migrating from RDS for MySQL to Amazon Aurora Serverless is a managed approach designed to automatically adjust database capacity to match workload demand, which is well suited to “low baseline traffic with occasional sudden spikes.” By setting an appropriate maximum capacity, Aurora Serverless can scale to handle bursts more gracefully than a fixed-size RDS instance, improving availability during unpredictable demand. This reduces operational overhead because capacity management is largely handled by the service rather than by manual instance resizing or complex scaling scripts.

The final step—configuring EC2 instances to connect to the new Aurora endpoint—is an infrastructure configuration change, not an application code rewrite. The application continues to speak the same MySQL-compatible protocol (Aurora MySQL-compatible), preserving compatibility while improving resilience to spikes.

Therefore, D best meets the requirement to improve availability during sudden traffic increases driven by heavy database writes, with minimal operational effort and no application code changes.

Amazon Athena provides a cost-effective, serverless way to query data without affecting the performance of DynamoDB. By using the Athena DynamoDB connector, the company can perform the necessary SQL queries without consuming read capacity on the DynamoDB table, which is essential for minimizing impact on provisioned throughput.

Key benefits:

Minimal Impact on Provisioned Capacity: Athena queries do not directly impact DynamoDB’s read capacity, making it ideal for running analytics without affecting the customer-facing workloads.

Cost-Effective: Athena is a serverless solution, meaning you pay only for the queries you run, making it highly cost-effective compared to running a dedicated cluster like Amazon EMR or Redshift.

AWS Documentation: The use of Athena to query DynamoDB through its connector aligns with AWS ' s best practices for performance efficiency and cost optimization​​.

The correct answer is C because the company needs a secure cross-account access solution that uses temporary credentials , follows least privilege , and avoids long-term access keys . The best practice for this design is to allow an IAM role in Account A to access the Amazon S3 bucket in Account B through a resource-based bucket policy . Analysts or applications in Account A can assume the IAM role and receive temporary credentials through AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS), which satisfies the requirement to avoid permanent access keys.

This approach is secure because permissions can be scoped precisely to the required bucket and prefixes, supporting least-privilege access. It also avoids creating separate IAM users in Account B and eliminates the operational and security risks of sharing static credentials across accounts. Cross-account access through IAM roles and S3 bucket policies is the standard AWS pattern for securely granting one account access to resources in another account.

Option A is incorrect because creating IAM users and sharing access keys introduces long-term credentials, which the company explicitly wants to avoid. Option B is incorrect because making the S3 bucket public violates security requirements and does not enforce least privilege. Option D is incorrect because using a bastion host adds unnecessary infrastructure and operational overhead and is not the recommended approach for S3 access.

AWS security best practices favor role-based access with temporary credentials and resource policies for cross-account resource sharing. Therefore, configuring the S3 bucket policy in Account B to allow access from an IAM role in Account A is the most secure and appropriate solution.