FirstTry

Objective 3.2

SAA-C03

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 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.

3-2Design High-Performing Architectures

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?

Partition placement groupPartitions isolate racks from each other, which adds hops between partitions. That layout serves replicated storage clusters.
Dedicated Host allocationA Dedicated Host isolates tenancy for licensing or compliance. Tenancy says nothing about how near the instances sit.
Cluster placement groupCorrect · your answerCorrect. Instances land close together inside one Availability Zone, which is what tightly coupled HPC needs.
Spread placement groupSpreading puts every instance on distinct hardware. It protects a handful of critical nodes and works against the latency goal here.

Correct.

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

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 C

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.

Source

Cluster – Packs instances close together inside an Availability Zone. This strategy enables workloads to achieve the low-latency network performance necessary for tightly-coupled node-to-node communication that is typical of high-performance computing (HPC) applications…

AWS docs: Placement groups for your Amazon EC2 instances, checked August 2026
#ec2#placement-groups#hpc#latency

Now you: objective 3.2 questions

No account needed. The explanation opens when you answer.

Sample question 1 of 3

3-2Design High-Performing Architectures

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

3-2Design High-Performing Architectures

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

3-2Design High-Performing Architectures

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.

More objectives in Design High-Performing Architectures