Compute, Containers and Serverless Performance
Performance questions test EC2 families, Auto Scaling, Lambda, ECS, EKS, Fargate, placement groups, burst behavior, and matching compute to workload shape.
How to study for AWS Solutions Architect Associate
Treat each question as an architecture tradeoff: identify security boundaries, failure modes, performance needs, data paths, and cost constraints before choosing services.
Core concepts
Concept 1
Compute, Containers and Serverless Performance questions reward architecture tradeoff reasoning rather than picking the most familiar AWS service.
Exam cue: Identify the workload requirement, failure mode, data path, access boundary, and operational constraint.
Concept 2
The best answer maps requirements to security, resilience, performance, and cost constraints before choosing services.
Exam cue: Match the AWS service to the Well-Architected pillar the scenario is testing.
Concept 3
Eliminate answers that ignore shared responsibility, single points of failure, data movement, scaling behavior, or total cost.
Exam cue: Prefer managed, durable, least-privilege, multi-AZ, and right-sized designs when requirements call for them.
Risk pitfalls and guardrails
Choosing the most powerful service when a simpler managed service satisfies the requirement.
Guardrail: Avoid answers that use broad permissions, public data paths, single-AZ state, overbuilt compute, or commitment pricing without predictable usage.
Solving performance while ignoring security, availability, or cost constraints stated in the scenario.
Guardrail: Avoid answers that use broad permissions, public data paths, single-AZ state, overbuilt compute, or commitment pricing without predictable usage.
Assuming one Availability Zone, public access, or manual operations are acceptable without justification.
Guardrail: Avoid answers that use broad permissions, public data paths, single-AZ state, overbuilt compute, or commitment pricing without predictable usage.
Memory anchors
EC2 Family
EC2 instance families optimize for compute, memory, storage, accelerated computing, or general-purpose workloads.
Auto Scaling Group
An Auto Scaling group maintains and adjusts EC2 capacity based on policy or schedule.
Lambda
AWS Lambda runs event-driven code without managing servers.
ECS
Amazon ECS orchestrates containers on AWS-managed or customer-managed capacity.
EKS
Amazon EKS provides managed Kubernetes control plane capabilities.
Fargate
AWS Fargate runs containers without managing EC2 instances.
Placement Group
A placement group influences EC2 placement for latency, throughput, or fault tolerance needs.
Burstable Instance
Burstable instances use CPU credits for temporary performance bursts.
Graviton
AWS Graviton processors can improve price performance for supported workloads.
Compute Fit
Compute selection should match latency, scaling, runtime, and operational requirements.
Checkpoint rule
Do the check-up only after you can summarize each concept in one sentence and identify one dangerous pitfall from memory.
Knowledge Check (after reading)
Short check-up to confirm understanding of this module.
Check-up Questions
A tightly coupled HPC workload needs the lowest possible network latency between EC2 instances in one Availability Zone. Which placement strategy fits?
A critical workload runs seven EC2 instances and requires each instance on distinct underlying hardware to reduce correlated failure. Which placement strategy fits?
Answer all questions to submit.
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Move forward only after this module is stable.
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