AWS SAP-C03: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional (updated)

Last checked October 22, 2026 against the official AWS exam page.

1. Question 1Design for New Solutions

   A global application requires a recovery time objective of under one minute and a recovery point objective of near zero for its relational database across two Regions. Which design best meets these targets?

   1. AA nightly logical export to Amazon S3 with a manual restore step
   2. BA single-AZ RDS instance with hourly backups kept for 7 days
   3. CAmazon Aurora Global Database with a secondary Region and managed failover
   4. DA daily snapshot copied to a second Region, restored on demand
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   Correct answer: C

   Aurora Global Database replicates with typically sub-second lag and supports fast cross-Region failover, which fits a strict RTO and near-zero RPO. Daily snapshots or nightly exports give RPOs of many hours, and a single-AZ instance has no regional failover.

2. Question 2Design for Organizational Complexity

   A company has 80 AWS accounts managed by separate teams. The security team needs a guardrail that prevents any member account from disabling AWS CloudTrail, regardless of the permissions granted inside the account. Which mechanism should be used?

   1. AAn AWS Config rule with a Lambda remediation action that re-enables trail logging after it has been turned off by a user
   2. BA service control policy attached to the organization root or relevant OU that denies cloudtrail:StopLogging and cloudtrail:DeleteTrail
   3. CAn IAM policy attached to every developer role in each member account, which administrators can still edit or detach
   4. DA resource-based policy on the CloudTrail S3 bucket that denies s3:DeleteObject for non-security principals, leaving the trail settings unrestricted
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   Correct answer: B

   Service control policies set the maximum permissions for accounts in an organization, so a deny in an SCP cannot be overridden by IAM grants inside a member account. Per-account IAM policies can be edited by administrators, a bucket policy does not stop the trail from being stopped, and a Config rule only detects changes after the fact.

3. Question 3Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions

   A company's production web tier costs more than expected. Traffic peaks for two hours each day and is low otherwise. Which change most directly reduces cost without degrading peak performance?

   1. AReplace the Application Load Balancer and Auto Scaling group with a single large instance in one subnet behind a fixed Elastic IP address for the web tier
   2. BDisable CloudWatch metrics collection and alarms on the web tier's Auto Scaling group to reduce monitoring costs during business hours
   3. CRun the maximum peak capacity around the clock on fixed-size On-Demand instances with no scaling policy
   4. DUse an Auto Scaling group with target tracking on CPU or request count, and purchase Savings Plans for the baseline capacity
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   Correct answer: D

   Target tracking scales capacity with demand, and Savings Plans or Reserved Instances cover the steady baseline at lower rates. Running peak capacity all day wastes money, a single instance removes resilience, and disabling metrics prevents scaling decisions.

4. Question 4Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization

   A company is moving a large on-premises Oracle database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with minimal downtime. The schema must be converted first. Which pair of services should be used?

   1. AAWS Schema Conversion Tool for schema conversion and AWS Database Migration Service for ongoing replication
   2. BAWS DataSync for continuous database file transfer and Amazon Athena for converting the Oracle schema objects into PostgreSQL DDL
   3. CAmazon Snowball Edge for live replication over the network and AWS Glue for schema conversion of the target tables in Aurora
   4. DAmazon Route 53 Resolver endpoints for DNS-based schema conversion and Amazon Neptune graph database for replication of Oracle tables
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   Correct answer: A

   The Schema Conversion Tool converts the schema and stored code for the target engine, and DMS replicates data with change data capture to minimize cutover downtime. DataSync moves files, Snowball is an offline device, and Route 53 Resolver is DNS.

5. Question 5Design for New Solutions

   A company is building a web application that must keep sessions available if one Availability Zone fails, with no code change to the application. Which combination meets this requirement?

   1. AA single vertically scaled instance type such as r6i.8xlarge with a larger EBS gp3 volume and provisioned IOPS for session state kept on the local disk of that host
   2. BStoring session data in the local memory of each web server process, with the in-memory cache replicated on a best-effort basis across instances during routine scale-in events
   3. CAn Application Load Balancer across at least two AZs with an Auto Scaling group spanning those AZs and sessions stored in ElastiCache or DynamoDB
   4. DSticky sessions enabled on the target group with a fixed duration, pinning each client to a single instance in one AZ at a time
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   Correct answer: C

   Spreading the load balancer and Auto Scaling group across AZs and moving session state to a shared store keeps sessions available when an AZ is lost. Pinning sessions to one instance or keeping them in memory loses them with that instance, and a larger single instance is still a single failure point.