AWS Solutions Architect Associate
AWS Solutions Architect Associate practice questions
17 free questions with explanations across 4 exam domains. Pick an answer to see if you got it right.
These are original practice questions based on the official exam outline, not real exam questions.
A company needs to store infrequently accessed data that must be retrievable within milliseconds when needed, but wants to minimize storage cost. Which S3 storage class is MOST appropriate?
Answer: B. S3 Standard-IA is specifically designed for infrequently accessed data that still requires millisecond retrieval — Glacier tiers trade retrieval speed for lower cost, which doesn't fit the 'milliseconds when needed' requirement.
An application requires that EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group be able to automatically replace unhealthy instances across two Availability Zones. Which combination of services MOST directly enables this?
Answer: B. This is a core Resilient Architectures scenario: an ALB's health checks feed directly into the Auto Scaling group's replacement logic, which is exactly the mechanism for multi-AZ self-healing.
A company wants to reduce latency for users accessing static website content across multiple continents. Which AWS service is PRIMARILY designed for this?
Answer: B. CloudFront is AWS's CDN, specifically designed to cache and serve content from edge locations close to end users — directly reducing latency for globally distributed traffic, which is a core Performance domain topic.
A company needs a fully managed relational database that automatically fails over to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone during an outage. Which feature enables this?
Answer: B. RDS Multi-AZ specifically maintains a synchronously replicated standby in a different AZ and handles automatic failover — this is the core Resilient Architectures pattern for managed relational databases.
An application needs to process messages asynchronously and ensure that if a consumer fails, the message isn't lost. Which service is MOST appropriate?
Answer: B. SQS decouples producers and consumers, and a dead-letter queue specifically catches failed message processing attempts instead of silently losing them — a core decoupling pattern.
Which IAM element defines WHAT actions a principal is allowed or denied to perform on specific AWS resources?
Answer: B. IAM policies are JSON documents that explicitly define allowed/denied actions on resources — distinct from trust relationships (which define who can assume a role) and network-layer controls like security groups.
A company wants to run containerized workloads without managing the underlying EC2 servers. Which AWS service BEST fits this requirement?
Answer: B. Fargate is specifically AWS's serverless compute engine for containers — it removes the need to provision or manage EC2 instances, unlike ECS/EKS on EC2 launch type.
Which S3 feature allows objects to automatically transition to cheaper storage tiers based on age, without manual intervention?
Answer: B. Lifecycle policies are specifically designed to automate storage-class transitions (e.g., Standard to Standard-IA to Glacier) based on object age, directly serving cost optimization.
A company needs to grant a Lambda function permission to read from a specific S3 bucket without embedding credentials in the code. What is the BEST approach?
Answer: B. IAM execution roles are the AWS-recommended way to grant Lambda functions permissions — avoiding hardcoded credentials entirely, which is a core Security domain best practice.
Which service would you use to distribute incoming application traffic across multiple EC2 instances in different Availability Zones?
Answer: B. Elastic Load Balancing is purpose-built to distribute traffic across targets in multiple AZs and integrates directly with health checks and Auto Scaling for resilience.
About these practice questions
Are these real AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam questions?
No. They are original practice questions written to test the topics in the official exam outline. Real exam questions are confidential, and sites claiming to have them break the vendor's rules.
How should I use these AWS Solutions Architect Associate practice questions?
Answer each one before reading the explanation, note the topics you get wrong, and go back to those parts of your study plan.