Free SAA-C03 mock test

Free AWS Solutions Architect Associate Practice Exam 1 | SAA-C03 Mock Test

Practice solution design questions for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam.

This free AWS Solutions Architect Associate practice exam helps you work through architecture decisions across networking, storage, resilience, security, and cost optimization. Use it as a free SAA-C03 mock test to sharpen reasoning before the real certification exam.

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Start the practice exam below, answer every question honestly, and use the explanations to decide what to study next. Revisit the test whenever you want to sharpen weaker topics and track improvement.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Exam 1

1 / 10

A company maintains a data lake in an Amazon S3 bucket. The company needs to onboard multiple vendors who need to access the data lake. Each vendor has its own AWS account and requires access to separate datasets in the data lake.

The company needs a secure and scalable solution to provide the vendors with access to the data that each vendor requires. The solution must log all vendor activities for auditing.

Which solution will meet these requirements in the MOST scalable way?

Create an IAM role and IAM policy for each vendor. Use cross-account role access and instruct each vendor to use the shared role ARN. Set up S3 server access logging for the bucket.

Create an IAM user for each vendor. Use an IAM policy to grant access to the S3 data lake. Share the IAM user credentials with each vendor. Set up S3 server access logging for the bucket.

Deploy AWS IAM Identity Center. Create a user account for each vendor. Create S3 Access Grants for each vendor that have the required permissions.

Create an S3 presigned URL for each vendor that has the required permissions. Share the appropriate URL with each vendor and configure CloudTrail logs for the bucket.

2 / 10

A solutions architect is investigating compute options for a critical analytics application. The application uses long-running processes to prepare and aggregate data. The processes cannot be interrupted. The application has a known baseline load. The application needs to handle occasional usage surges.

Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Create an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group. Set the Min capacity and Desired capacity to the baseline instance count. Purchase Reserved Instances for the Auto Scaling group.

Create an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group. Set the Min capacity, Max capacity, and Desired capacity to the baseline instance count. Use On-Demand Instances to address occasional usage surges.

Re-architect the application to use AWS Lambda functions instead of Amazon EC2 instances. Purchase a one-year Compute Savings Plan to reduce Lambda cost.

Create an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group. Set the Min capacity and Desired capacity to the baseline instance count. Purchase Reserved Instances and use Spot Instances above base capacity.

3 / 10

A company uses an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group to host an API. The EC2 instances are in a target group that is associated with an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The company stores data in an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database.

The API has a weekly maintenance window. The company must ensure that the API returns a static maintenance response during the weekly maintenance window.

Which solution will meet this requirement with the LEAST operational overhead?

Create an Amazon SNS topic. Subscribe the EC2 instances to the topic and publish maintenance start and stop messages so the API can switch behavior.

Create a listener rule on the ALB to return a maintenance response when the request path matches a wildcard. Set the rule priority to one and remove the rule after maintenance.

Create an Amazon SQS queue. Subscribe the EC2 instances to the queue and publish maintenance start and stop messages so the API can switch behavior.

Create a table in Aurora PostgreSQL for a maintenance flag. Configure the API to query the flag and return a maintenance response when the flag is set.

4 / 10

A company runs applications and stores data in multiple AWS accounts. The company uses AWS Organizations to manage all its accounts.

The company needs a solution to efficiently and centrally manage data backups for the AWS services that the company uses. The solution must improve the company's disaster recovery posture. The solution must also protect data backups against accidental deletion or a malicious attack on an AWS account.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Use AWS Backup policies in Organizations to store copies of the data backups in additional AWS Regions.

Use AWS Backup in each AWS account to store copies of the data backups in additional AWS Regions.

Use AWS Backup in each AWS account to store copies of the data backups in additional Availability Zones.

Use AWS Backup policies in Organizations to store copies of the data backups in additional AWS accounts.

5 / 10

A company has customers located across the world. The company wants to use automation to secure its systems and network infrastructure. The company's security team must be able to track and audit all incremental changes to the infrastructure.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Use AWS Organizations to set up the infrastructure. Use AWS Config to track changes.

Use AWS Organizations to set up the infrastructure. Use AWS Service Catalog to track changes.

Use AWS CloudFormation to set up the infrastructure. Use AWS Config to track changes.

Use AWS CloudFormation to set up the infrastructure. Use AWS Service Catalog to track changes.

6 / 10

A media company hosts a web application on AWS. The application gives users the ability to upload and view videos. The application stores the videos in an Amazon S3 bucket. The company wants to ensure that only authenticated users can upload videos. Authenticated users must have the ability to upload videos only within a specified time frame after authentication.

Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Create an AWS Lambda function that generates pre-signed URLs when a user authenticates.

Configure the application to generate IAM temporary security credentials for authenticated users.

Develop a custom authentication service that integrates with Amazon Cognito to control and log direct S3 bucket access through the application.

Use AWS STS to assume a predefined IAM role that grants authenticated users temporary permissions to upload videos directly to the S3 bucket.

7 / 10

A company is building a data analysis platform on AWS by using AWS Lake Formation. The platform will ingest data from different sources such as Amazon S3 and Amazon RDS. The company needs a secure solution to prevent access to portions of the data that contain sensitive information.

Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Create an IAM role that includes permissions to access Lake Formation tables.

Create data filters to implement row-level security and cell-level security.

Create an AWS Lambda function that removes sensitive information before Lake Formation ingests the data.

Create an AWS Lambda function that periodically queries and removes sensitive information from Lake Formation tables.

8 / 10

A company runs Amazon EC2 instances as web servers. Peak traffic occurs at two predictable times each day. The web servers remain mostly idle during the rest of the day.

A solutions architect must manage the web servers while maintaining fault tolerance in the most cost-effective way.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Purchase Reserved Instances to ensure peak capacity at all times.

Use a cron job to stop the EC2 instances when traffic demand is low.

Use a script to vertically scale the EC2 instances during peak demand.

Use an EC2 Auto Scaling group to scale the instances based on demand.

9 / 10

A company wants to re-architect an application to use Amazon SQS queues. The company must ensure that the application can handle sudden increases in traffic.

Which Amazon SQS feature will help meet this requirement?

Message batching

FIFO queues

Visibility timeout

Long polling

10 / 10

A company has developed an API using an Amazon API Gateway REST API and AWS Lambda functions. The API serves static and dynamic content to users worldwide. The company wants to decrease the latency of transferring content for API requests.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Deploy the REST API as a Regional API endpoint. Enable caching. Enable content encoding in the API definition to compress the application data in transit.

Deploy the REST API as an edge-optimized API endpoint. Enable caching. Configure reserved concurrency for the Lambda functions.

Deploy the REST API as an edge-optimized API endpoint. Enable caching. Enable content encoding in the API definition to compress the application data in transit.

Deploy the REST API as a Regional API endpoint. Enable caching. Configure reserved concurrency for the Lambda functions.

Your score is

What this free exam covers

Resilient and highly available AWS architectures
Storage, compute, and database selection decisions
Networking, security, and identity design choices
Cost optimization and operational tradeoffs
Scenario-based reasoning for SAA-C03 style questions
Service selection under real-world constraints

Who should take this exam

Built for engineers preparing for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam and learners moving beyond Cloud Practitioner into architecture-level AWS thinking.

Study more AWS content Read more DevOps and cloud articles

How to get more value from this mock test

Take your first attempt without notes so your score reflects real exam readiness.
Review every explanation, not just the questions you missed.
Group mistakes into topics, then study those topics before retaking the test.
Use repeated practice to improve speed, confidence, and pattern recognition.

Why free practice exams matter

Free exam prep lowers the barrier for learners who want to improve without paying for every mock test. That makes these pages more useful, more shareable, and more likely to attract returning visitors who are actively preparing for certification.

FAQ

Is this AWS Solutions Architect Associate practice exam free?

Yes. This free SAA-C03 mock test is designed to help you practice architecture decisions before the official exam.

What makes SAA questions harder than Cloud Practitioner questions?

They usually require comparing multiple valid AWS designs and choosing the one that best balances resilience, performance, security, and cost.

How should I study after using this SAA mock test?

Review the services mentioned in each question, then study architecture tradeoffs across storage, compute, networking, databases, and high availability.

Practice solution design questions for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam.

Correct Answer: C

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

Correct Answer: C

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

Correct Answer: A

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

Correct Answer: A

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

Correct Answer: B

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

Correct Answer: B

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

Correct Answer: D

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

Correct Answer: D

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

Correct Answer: C

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

Correct Answer: C

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

Correct Answer: A

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

Correct Answer: A

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

Correct Answer: B

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

Correct Answer: B

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

Correct Answer: D

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

Correct Answer: D

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

Correct Answer: A

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

Correct Answer: A

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

Correct Answer: C

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

Correct Answer: C

Why Other Options Are Incorrect

What this free exam covers

Who should take this exam

How to get more value from this mock test

Why free practice exams matter

FAQ

Is this AWS Solutions Architect Associate practice exam free?

What makes SAA questions harder than Cloud Practitioner questions?

How should I study after using this SAA mock test?

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