Amazon Web Services SAA-C03 Actual Questions

Amazon Route 53 supports failover routing policies, which use health checks to route DNS queries to a secondary Region only if the primary endpoint fails. This design ensures only one Region is active for traffic at any given time. This is the recommended architecture for active-passive, multi-Region DR strategies.

AWS Documentation Extract:

“Failover routing lets you route traffic to a primary resource, such as a web server in one Region, and a secondary resource in another Region. If the primary fails, Route 53 can route traffic to the secondary resource automatically.”

(Source: Amazon Route 53 documentation, Routing Policy Types)

A, D: These options do not configure DNS failover for external users.

C: Geolocation routing is for regional distribution, not DR failover.

For the relational database tier, Amazon RDS Multi-AZ provides high availability with minimal manual intervention. In Multi-AZ mode, RDS maintains a synchronous standby in a different Availability Zone and provides automatic failover during certain failure scenarios. This reduces operational burden because the service handles replication, health monitoring, and failover orchestration.

For the container-based application tier, Amazon ECS with the Fargate launch type minimizes operational overhead because it removes the need to provision, patch, and scale the underlying EC2 instances that host containers. With Fargate, AWS manages the compute infrastructure, and the team focuses on task definitions, scaling policies, and application configuration. This supports a highly available, load-balanced architecture because ECS services can run tasks across multiple Availability Zones behind an Application Load Balancer, and scaling is managed via ECS Service Auto Scaling.

Option B describes read replicas, which are primarily used for scaling reads and, depending on configuration, may not provide the same automated failover characteristics as Multi-AZ for high availability. Read replicas are not a direct substitute for Multi-AZ HA. Option C (self-managed Docker cluster on EC2) is operationally heavy: you must manage node capacity, patching, cluster lifecycle, and scheduling. Option E (ECS on EC2) is a valid container platform but still requires managing EC2 instances, AMIs, and scaling/patching, which increases manual intervention compared to Fargate.

Therefore, combining RDS Multi-AZ (A) for database resilience and ECS Fargate (D) for serverless container operations meets the HA requirement with the least manual effort.

Amazon SQS FIFO queuesensure that orders are processed in the exact order received and maintain message deduplication.

AWS Lambdascales automatically, handling bursts and maintaining high availability in a cost-effective manner.

Option A and D:Amazon SNS does not guarantee ordered processing.

Option C:Standard SQS queues do not guarantee order.

AWS Documentation References:

Amazon SQS FIFO Queues

AWS recommends using cost allocation tags to associate costs with owners (e.g., department, project) and AWS Budgets to create cost or usage budgets with alerts at defined thresholds (e.g., 60%). Budgets can send notifications via email or Amazon SNS when “Actual or forecasted” spend exceeds the threshold. Cost Explorer forecasts help visualize trends but do not provide budget alerting or ownership attribution by themselves. Trusted Advisor does not generate budget threshold alerts. Therefore, tagging resources for accountability and setting a budget with a 60% alert provides governance and proactive notifications aligned with cost control best practices for experimentation.