Study guide · SAA-C03

Design Resilient Architectures

26% of the exam by AWS's own published weighting.

What it covers

The official exam guide breaks this domain into 2 objectives:

  • Design scalable and loosely coupled architectures
  • Design highly available and/or fault-tolerant architectures

Practice this domain

A drill pulls every published question in this domain and grades each one as you go. Flashcards skip the grading entirely — read the stem, flip when you're ready, move on.

A sample question

Multiple subscribers are attached to one SNS topic, but each should receive only the messages relevant to it (for example, only high-priority orders). How can this be done without extra filtering code in the subscribers?

  • AApply an SNS filter policy so each subscriber gets only matching messages.
  • BCreate a separate topic for every possible message attribute combination.
  • CHave each subscriber receive all messages and discard the irrelevant ones.
  • DMove to a single SQS queue and let one consumer sort the messages.

SNS subscription filter policies match message attributes so each subscriber receives only relevant messages, with no subscriber-side filtering. A topic per combination explodes in count, receiving everything wastes work, and a single queue removes the fan-out.

An application uses an RDS Multi-AZ deployment, and the team believes it is protected against a full Regional outage. Which statement is accurate?

  • AMulti-AZ replicates the database across multiple Regions automatically.
  • BMulti-AZ requires no additional design for Regional disaster recovery.
  • CMulti-AZ protects against an AZ failure but not a full Regional outage.
  • DMulti-AZ and single-AZ offer identical protection against Regional outages.

Multi-AZ provides failover across Availability Zones within one Region; surviving a full Regional outage requires a separate multi-Region DR design. It does not replicate across Regions, and it is stronger than single-AZ for AZ failures.

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