Design High-Performing Architectures
Free AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C04) practice — 6 questions on Design High-Performing Architectures, with explanations. No sign-up. Full 12-question mixed test →
A genomics research company runs a PostgreSQL database on EC2 that requires sustained 220,000 IOPS and sub-millisecond latency for variant-calling queries. Which EBS volume type meets this requirement?
io2 Block Express supports up to 256,000 IOPS and 4,000 MB/s throughput with sub-millisecond latency on Nitro-based instances, meeting both the IOPS and latency requirements.
A serverless order-processing Lambda function experiences cold-start latency spikes of 3-5 seconds during flash-sale traffic bursts, causing checkout timeouts. The function must respond in under 200ms consistently even during rapid scale-out events. Which configuration BEST resolves this?
Provisioned Concurrency keeps execution environments pre-initialized so new invocations skip the cold-start init phase; pairing it with Application Auto Scaling lets the pool grow ahead of predictable traffic bursts like flash sales.
A mobile multiplayer game uses a custom UDP-based protocol for real-time player position updates and needs consistent low-latency global routing to the nearest healthy regional endpoint, with static IP addresses for firewall allowlisting. Which service should the solutions architect select?
Global Accelerator provides static anycast IP addresses and routes non-HTTP TCP/UDP traffic over the AWS global network to the nearest healthy endpoint, with fast automatic failover — ideal for real-time gaming and IoT protocols.
An e-commerce product catalog service backed by DynamoDB experiences read latency of 5-10ms during peak traffic, but the business requires microsecond-level response times for read-heavy catalog lookups without extensive application refactoring. Which solution BEST meets this requirement?
DAX is a DynamoDB-native, API-compatible in-memory cache that delivers microsecond read latency; because it's API-compatible, applications typically only need to swap the DynamoDB client for the DAX client, requiring minimal refactoring.
A logistics company ingests GPS telemetry from 50,000 delivery vehicles, producing highly variable throughput throughout the day (from 5,000 to 500,000 records/second). Data must land in S3 within 60 seconds of ingestion for near-real-time dashboards, and the team wants to avoid managing shard capacity manually. Which solution meets these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?
Data Firehose automatically scales to handle variable throughput, requires no shard or consumer management, and buffers data with a minimum interval of 60 seconds before delivering to S3 — directly matching the near-real-time and low-ops requirements.
A media company in Sydney needs to upload large 4K video files (50-100 GB each) to an S3 bucket in the us-east-1 region several times per day. Setting up a dedicated network connection would take weeks and isn't justified for this workload volume. Which approach provides the FASTEST uploads with the LEAST setup time?
S3 Transfer Acceleration routes uploads through the nearest CloudFront edge location and over the AWS global network backbone to the destination bucket, dramatically improving upload speed over long distances, and can be enabled in minutes with no infrastructure to provision.
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