AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate SAA-C03 Practice Test 58
Question 570
A nonprofit needs disaster recovery for an application with a four-hour RTO and limited monthly budget. It can afford a small always-running database and minimal core services in a secondary Region, scaling the full web tier only after a disaster. Which DR pattern is appropriate?
- Use a pilot-light design with core replicated services and tested capacity scale-up during activation.
- Keep no secondary data or infrastructure configuration, and assume a blank account can meet four-hour recovery automatically.
- Use only DNS failover to a Region containing no database, application images or compute capacity plan.
- Run an equal full-scale active-active stack in both Regions, despite the stated need to minimize recurring cost.
Explanation
Correct Answer
A:Pilot light keeps a minimal secondary foundation active, trading longer recovery activation for lower steady-state compute cost than warm full stacks.
Incorrect Answers
B:Without core data and tested deployment automation, restoring a functional service may exceed the permitted recovery window.
C:DNS routing cannot supply the absent core dependencies needed to serve customers after failover.
D:Full active-active capacity is generally costlier and provides stronger availability than the budget-constrained scenario requires.
Question 571
A pilot-light DR site has a standby database that has not been replicated for six months, and infrastructure templates still reference deleted AMIs. The team claims the design is disaster-ready because a secondary account exists. What maintenance is required?
- Change backup ZIP filenames every month without verifying their contents or restoring them.
- Preserve only application source code and assume it recreates current customer records and regional service permissions.
- Keep data replication, deployment artifacts and infrastructure templates current and exercise recovery dependencies.
- Delete the standby database because an empty environment is easier to scale after a disaster.
Explanation
Correct Answer
C:Pilot light depends on a usable minimal core and reproducible expansion; stale data and broken images prevent restoration within RPO/RTO.
Incorrect Answers
A:Renaming artifacts does not demonstrate their completeness, currency or production recovery viability.
B:Source code does not include live state, secrets, networking and deployable runtime artifacts by default.
D:Removing critical replicated data defeats the purpose of maintaining a live recovery foundation.
Question 572
A pilot-light architecture has only a small core running in the secondary Region. The SLA requires recovery within forty minutes, but nobody has measured how long it takes to provision compute, warm caches and change endpoints. Which validation is essential?
- Assume snapshots convert instantly into a running production fleet with no boot or application warmup time.
- Increase only the source Region's EC2 maximum size to prove the secondary Region can scale during a disaster.
- Review an architecture diagram and treat it as conclusive measured proof of the recovery-time objective.
- Execute timed pilot-light scale-up exercises and compare observed end-to-end recovery against the forty-minute RTO.
Explanation
Correct Answer
D:The pattern's label does not establish how quickly infrastructure, credentials, warmup and clients become usable after activation.
Incorrect Answers
A:Snapshot availability does not bypass resource provisioning, data restore and application readiness delays.
B:Primary-region capacity settings are not evidence of achievable activation time in the standby Region.
C:A drawing cannot measure actual provisioning, dependency restoration or cutover duration.
Question 573
A customer-facing payment service has an RTO of five minutes. A pilot-light DR test takes forty minutes to scale servers and make the secondary region reachable. Which alternative deployment posture better addresses the short window?
- Move all backups to Glacier Deep Archive and assume the archive retrieval makes regional startup instantaneous.
- Disable secondary service health checks because alarms add thirty-five minutes to startup time automatically.
- Keep pilot light unchanged and claim the service label mathematically guarantees the five-minute RTO.
- Consider warm standby or a suitably prepared active deployment with already running secondary capacity.
Explanation
Correct Answer
D:A functional reduced-scale standby can accept traffic faster than rebuilding the application fleet from minimal pilot-light infrastructure.
Incorrect Answers
A:Longer archival retrieval can slow restoration and does not provide an already functional secondary application.
B:Suppressing availability signals does not supply the missing ready-to-serve compute and data paths.
C:An observed forty-minute activation violates the tested objective regardless of recovery-pattern terminology.
Question 574
A warm-standby recovery stack in another Region is ready to serve HTTP traffic, but its database is updated only by a weekly export. The business recovery point objective is fifteen minutes. What must the data design provide?
- Use sufficiently frequent or continuous supported replication so the standby meets the fifteen-minute RPO.
- Increase only secondary-region EC2 count because additional web servers reconstruct missing database commits.
- Continue weekly exports and claim warm standby guarantees every write reaches the second Region immediately.
- Reduce Route 53 TTL to one second and assume data replication lag becomes zero.
Explanation
Correct Answer
A:Ready compute capacity alone does not make customer data current. Replication freshness must be measured separately from service recovery time.
Incorrect Answers
B:More application instances cannot invent transaction data that was never replicated to the standby.
C:A warm application stack does not change the update frequency of a separate weekly database export.
D:DNS caching affects endpoint selection, not persistence of business transactions in another Region.
Question 575
A reduced-capacity warm standby can handle 10% of normal users. During a primary Region outage, the secondary Region must accept 100% of traffic. No one has automated scaling or DNS changes. What should be operationalized?
- Disable secondary health probes because they can make cutover dashboards display unavailable endpoints.
- Automate secondary capacity expansion and controlled traffic cutover with verified health conditions.
- Keep every user's DNS cache pinned to the failed primary endpoint while standby servers remain idle.
- Leave secondary capacity at 10% forever and direct all users there regardless of overload and failed requests.
Explanation
Correct Answer
B:Warm standby becomes production only after capacity and routing are raised. Tested automation reduces manual delay and avoids saturated survivors.
Incorrect Answers
A:Suppressing readiness evidence does not increase capacity or make applications ready.
C:Without changing ingress routing, a working standby may never receive the traffic it was intended to protect.
D:Insufficient compute and data throughput can cause a second outage after successful traffic redirection.
Question 576
An architecture review compares warm standby and active-active across two Regions. A manager calls warm standby free because the secondary environment receives almost no production traffic. What cost correction is needed?
- Ignore data transfer charges because replicated writes are never a cost consideration in a multi-Region standby.
- Assume any idle AWS resource has zero cost, including databases and EC2 instances that remain provisioned.
- Include ongoing standby compute, database replication, network and operational costs; compare them with the higher active-active footprint.
- Treat active-active as automatically cheaper because all instances remain fully utilized throughout the year.
Explanation
Correct Answer
C:Warm standby runs a smaller live recovery environment and normally incurs charges even before a disaster, although less than fully provisioned dual-site capacity.
Incorrect Answers
A:Cross-Region replication and network usage can materially affect the total recovery cost model.
B:Provisioned capacity and managed database storage can be billed independent of active customer request volume.
D:Additional regional stacks, replication and operational coordination often increase recurring cost.
Question 577
A company chooses backup-and-restore DR for an application with a six-hour RTO. Its daily snapshots currently reside only on the same EC2 root volume in the primary AZ. What change protects recovery after that AZ becomes unavailable?
- Store usable backups in an independent service and fault domain appropriate to the disaster scope.
- Increase the web server's ALB health-check interval because it physically replicates backup bytes to another Region.
- Delete all external backups to reduce costs and assume the instance can always be recreated with its lost data.
- Keep all snapshots on the one failed EC2 host because backup frequency alone guarantees access after zone loss.
Explanation
Correct Answer
A:Recovery data must survive the failure it is meant to remediate; copies kept only on a failed instance's local disk are not independent.
Incorrect Answers
B:Health checks govern routing, not persistence or geographic placement of recovery artifacts.
C:Compute replacement and restoration of historical customer transactions require independent recoverable data.
D:Even frequent local backups cannot help when the entire storage device is unreachable in the event.
Question 578
During an outage, administrators spend four hours manually setting up VPCs, security groups, compute and databases before a backup can be restored. They need a shorter RTO without running a full standby site. Which improvement targets reconstruction time?
- Increase DNS TTL to one day so users continue querying a failed endpoint while operators configure servers.
- Delete the backup catalogs so operators have fewer files to inspect during a restoration.
- Use only longer RDS backup retention while leaving all networking and compute creation manual.
- Automate environment rebuild with tested infrastructure-as-code templates and deployment pipelines.
Explanation
Correct Answer
D:Reproducible IaC can provision required service dependencies consistently and faster than ad hoc manual configuration during a recovery emergency.
Incorrect Answers
A:Long resolver caching can prolong visible outage and does not accelerate reconstruction.
B:Removing recovery data prevents restoration rather than reducing infrastructure setup time.
C:Retention improves available recovery points but does not automate rebuilding the application environment.
Question 579
AWS Backup reports successful nightly jobs for a customer database, but no team has restored one and several required KMS keys were recently changed. What evidence is needed to assert recoverability?
- Assume every completed backup always restores, regardless of deleted KMS keys and missing service permissions.
- Perform regular representative restores and validate data integrity, key access, application start and measured recovery time.
- Increase backup frequency indefinitely without ever testing a restore into a separate environment.
- Disable restore-job logging to avoid reporting key-policy failures during validation exercises.
Explanation
Correct Answer
B:Backup job completion proves a recovery artifact was produced, not that it can be decrypted, restored and used by the business within the RTO.
Incorrect Answers
A:Encryption authorization and dependency changes can prevent restoration even when archive creation succeeded.
C:More restore points cannot demonstrate that any one can rebuild the expected application successfully.
D:Suppressing evidence conceals the root cause rather than correcting recoverability problems.
Question 580
A trading application needs near-continuous service through loss of any one of two Regions. Both Regions will accept live writes. Which prerequisite determines whether active-active is sound?
- Use Route 53 latency DNS as the only transaction replication mechanism between both Regions.
- Disable application idempotency and transaction IDs because distributing traffic eliminates duplicate side effects.
- Confirm the data model supports concurrent regional writes, conflict handling and the intended consistency guarantees.
- Run two independent writable regions and assume their separate relational databases synchronize every transaction automatically.
Explanation
Correct Answer
C:Active-active can reduce failover delay but requires deliberate distributed-write semantics; dual live endpoints alone do not prevent inconsistent trades.
Incorrect Answers
A:DNS chooses request endpoints and does not copy or coordinate state changes between databases.
B:Retries and concurrent cross-Region operations still require stable business identifiers and conflict rules.
D:Distinct regional writers do not automatically provide globally serializable commits or cross-Region conflict resolution.