3.2 Design high-performing and elastic compute solutions.
Objective 3.2 sits in Design High-Performing Architectures, which carries 24% of the Solutions Architect Associate exam. The questions below are original, written from the official objective title above, and each explanation cites the AWS page it rests on.
Objective title verbatim from the official objectives. AWS exam page ↗
A worked example
Shown solved, with the whole explanation open: this is what every question here carries.
A team runs an MPI simulation across 40 instances in one Availability Zone. Node to node latency dominates the run time. How do you place the fleet?
The concept
Placement strategies trade proximity against blast radius. Packing instances onto neighbouring hardware shortens the network path between them, while pushing them apart survives a hardware failure. A workload that talks constantly between nodes needs the first trade, and pays for it with correlated failure risk.
Why this answer
Message passing across 40 nodes is bound by the round trip between them, not by capacity. Packing the fleet together inside one Availability Zone gives the lowest latency and highest packet per second performance available between EC2 instances.
- APartitions isolate racks from each other, which adds hops between partitions. That layout serves replicated storage clusters.
- Correct. Instances land close together inside one Availability Zone, which is what tightly coupled HPC needs.
- CSpreading puts every instance on distinct hardware. It protects a handful of critical nodes and works against the latency goal here.
- DA Dedicated Host isolates tenancy for licensing or compliance. Tenancy says nothing about how near the instances sit.
Now you: objective 3.2 questions
No account needed. The explanation opens when you answer.
Sample question 1 of 3
You deploy a replicated Cassandra cluster and need each replica group kept off hardware shared with the other groups. Which placement strategy does that?
Sample question 2 of 3
An interactive API on Lambda meets its latency target on warm invocations but misses it whenever a new environment initializes. What do you configure?
Sample question 3 of 3
A Lambda function scales with traffic and exhausts the connection limit on the RDS instance behind it. Which control caps how far the function scales?
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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.