A company's static website hosted on Amazon S3 was launched recently, and is being used by tens of thousands of users. Subsequently, website users are experiencing 503 service unavailable errors…

Question

Options

• AThe request rate to Amazon S3 is too high.
• BThere is an error with the Amazon RDS database.
• CThe requests to Amazon S3 do not have the proper permissions.
• DThe users are in different geographical region and Amazon Route 53 is restricting access.

• A
  71% (24)
• B
  9% (3)
• C
  15% (5)
• D
  6% (2)

Explanation

Amazon S3 returns 503 Slow Down errors when request rates exceed its per-prefix throughput limits - with tens of thousands of users hitting a static site simultaneously, this threshold is easily breached, and S3 throttles excess requests with a 503 response.

Why the distractors are wrong:

• B - S3 static websites don't use RDS; there's no database involved in serving static files.
• C - Permission issues return 403 Forbidden, not 503.
• D - Route 53 doesn't restrict access by geography by default, and the error described isn't a DNS issue.

Memory tip: Think "503 = S3 is saying slow down." If you see a sudden surge in users + S3 + 503, the answer is always rate limiting - the fix is to add random prefixes to S3 object keys to distribute requests across multiple prefixes, increasing throughput capacity.

No community discussion yet for this question.