FirstTry

Objective 2.2

SAA-C03

Design highly available and/or fault-tolerant architectures.

Objective 2.2 sits in Design Resilient Architectures, which carries 26% of the Solutions Architect Associate exam. The questions below are original, written from the official objective title above, and each explanation cites the Amazon Web Services (AWS) page it rests on.

Objective title verbatim from the official objectives. Amazon Web Services (AWS) exam page ↗

A worked example

Shown solved, with the whole explanation open: this is what every question here carries.

2-2Design Resilient Architectures

A team turned on Multi-AZ for an RDS instance hoping the standby would absorb reporting queries. Reports still hit the primary. What do they add?

Provisioned IOPS storage on the primaryFaster storage takes some of the pain out of running reports beside writes. Both workloads still land on one instance.
A failover priority tier on the standbyPriority decides which spare gets chosen during a failover. The queries still have nowhere else to go.
A larger instance class for the primaryA bigger box absorbs the load for a while and bills you to run two jobs on hardware sized for the busier one.
A read replica for the reporting workloadCorrect · your answerCorrect. It carries its own endpoint, so the reports stop competing with production traffic.

Correct.

Checked against docs.aws.amazon.com, August 2026

Concept

A standby kept for durability is not spare capacity. Copying writes into a second zone protects you from losing that zone, and it adds nowhere new for queries to land.

Why D

The synchronous copy exists so a failure can be survived, and it accepts no client connections until it is promoted. Reporting traffic needs an asynchronous copy of its own that applications can address.

Source

The high availability option isn't a scaling solution for read-only scenarios. You can't use a standby replica to serve read traffic. To serve read-only traffic, use a Multi-AZ DB cluster or a read replica instead…

AWS docs: Multi-AZ DB instance deployments and failover, checked August 2026
#rds#multi-az#read-replica#high-availability

Now you: objective 2.2 questions

No account needed. The explanation opens when you answer.

Sample question 1 of 3

2-2Design Resilient Architectures

An Aurora cluster runs one writer and no replicas. After the writer instance fails, what does the application see?

Sample question 2 of 3

2-2Design Resilient Architectures

A workload runs in three Regions and each user should reach whichever Region answers fastest for them. Which routing policy fits?

Sample question 3 of 3

2-2Design Resilient Architectures

Data must be current within minutes in a second Region, application servers may start at failover, and idle cost must stay low. Which strategy fits?

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Read the sources

These are the official pages the questions above cite. Reading them is studying the objective from the primary source, which is what the explanations point you toward anyway.

More objectives in Design Resilient Architectures