SAA-C03 Exam Dumps : AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03)

To achieve high availability for the website, two key actions should be taken:

Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ: By migrating the database to an RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ deployment, the database becomes highly available. Multi-AZ provides automatic failover from the primary database to a standby replica in another Availability Zone, ensuring database availability even in the case of an AZ failure.

Application Load Balancer and Auto Scaling: Deploying an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in front of the EC2 instances ensures that traffic is evenly distributed across the instances. Configuring an Auto Scaling group to run EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones ensures that the application remains available even if one instance or one AZ becomes unavailable. This setup enhances fault tolerance and improves reliability.

Why Not Other Options?:

Option A (Internet Gateway per AZ): Internet Gateways are region-wide resources and do not need to be provisioned per Availability Zone. This option does not contribute to high availability.

Option C (DynamoDB + Auto Scaling): DynamoDB would require changes to the application code to switch from MySQL, which is not possible per the question's constraints.

Option D (DataSync): AWS DataSync is used for data transfer and synchronization, not for achieving high availability for a database.

AWS References:

Amazon RDS Multi-AZ Deployments- Explanation of how Multi-AZ deployments work in Amazon RDS.

Application Load Balancing- Details on how to configure and use ALB for distributing traffic across multiple instances.

Setting the RDS backup retention policy to 30 days forautomated backupsthrough AWS Backup allows the company to retain backups cost-effectively. Manual backups, however, are notautomatically managed by RDS's retention policy, so they need to be manually deleted if they are older than 30 days to avoid unnecessary storage costs.

Key AWS features:

Automated Backups: Can be configured with a retention policy of up to 35 days, ensuring that older automated backups are deleted automatically.

Manual Backups: These are not subject to the automated retention policy and must be manually managed to avoid extra costs.

AWS Documentation: AWS recommends using backup retention policies for automated backups while manually managing manual backups​.

SQS Standard queues provide at-least-once delivery; they can, by design, deliver duplicate messages, and you cannot turn that off.

To guarantee no duplicates to consumers, AWS provides SQS FIFO queues with exactly-once processing semantics in conjunction with deduplication.

The minimal change to achieve this behavior is to:

Recreate the queue as a FIFO queue and

Enable content-based deduplication, so SQS automatically deduplicates messages with identical bodies within the deduplication window.

Why others are not correct:

A: Long polling reduces empty responses and costs but does not eliminate duplicates.

C: Content-based deduplication is available only for FIFO queues, not for standard queues—so you cannot “modify” a standard queue this way.

D: Moving to Amazon MQ is a much bigger architectural change and adds more operational overhead; it’s not the “fewest changes” approach.