AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate — All Questions

All Design Secure Architectures Design Resilient Architectures Design High-Performing Architectures Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

5 questions

Design High-Performing Architectures

A read-heavy application repeatedly runs the same expensive database queries, causing high latency. Which addition most improves read performance with minimal application change?

a.Increase the RDS instance storage size
b.Add Amazon ElastiCache to cache frequent query results in memory✓
c.Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration
d.Move the database to a larger EBS magnetic volume

ElastiCache (Redis or Memcached) stores frequently accessed query results in memory, serving repeated reads with sub-millisecond latency and offloading the database. Growing storage or using magnetic EBS does not reduce query latency for hot data. S3 Transfer Acceleration speeds S3 uploads and is unrelated to database queries.

Design High-Performing Architectures

A media company serves large video files to a global audience and wants to reduce latency and origin load by caching content near users. Which service should be used?

a.A larger EC2 instance in one Region
b.Amazon EFS
c.An internet gateway
d.Amazon CloudFront✓

CloudFront is a content delivery network that caches content at edge locations worldwide, lowering latency for global viewers and offloading requests from the origin. A single larger instance still serves from one Region with no edge caching. EFS is regional file storage and an internet gateway only provides connectivity, neither of which delivers a global CDN.

Design High-Performing Architectures

An application needs a fully managed NoSQL database delivering single-digit millisecond latency at any scale, with the option of microsecond reads via an in-memory cache. Which combination fits?

a.Amazon DynamoDB with DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)✓
b.Amazon RDS with a read replica
c.Amazon Redshift with concurrency scaling
d.Amazon Aurora Serverless

DynamoDB provides consistent single-digit millisecond latency at scale, and DAX is a purpose-built in-memory cache that reduces read latency to microseconds for eventually consistent reads. RDS and Aurora are relational engines, not NoSQL. Redshift is an analytics data warehouse, not a low-latency operational key-value store.

Design High-Performing Architectures

A company ingests a high-throughput, continuous stream of clickstream data that must be processed in near real time by multiple consumers. Which service is designed for this?

a.Amazon SQS standard queue
b.Amazon S3 event notifications
c.Amazon Kinesis Data Streams✓
d.Amazon Athena

Kinesis Data Streams is built for high-throughput, ordered, real-time streaming data that multiple consumers can read concurrently while retaining records for replay. SQS is a decoupling queue where a message is typically processed once, not a multi-consumer stream. Athena queries data at rest in S3 and does not ingest live streams.

Design High-Performing Architectures

A latency-sensitive TCP-based application needs to route users over the AWS global network to the nearest healthy Regional endpoint using static anycast IP addresses. Which service provides this?

a.Amazon CloudFront
b.AWS Global Accelerator✓
c.Amazon Route 53 weighted routing
d.AWS Direct Connect

AWS Global Accelerator provides static anycast IP addresses and routes traffic over the AWS backbone to the closest healthy endpoint, improving performance for TCP/UDP applications. CloudFront is optimized for cacheable HTTP content, not arbitrary TCP endpoints. Direct Connect is a private on-premises link, and weighted DNS does not use the AWS global network for transport.