Pass the Amazon Web Services AWS Certified Associate SAA-C03 Questions and answers with CertsForce

The most secure and least operationally intensive method is to configure cross-account access using resource-based policies on the S3 bucket. This allows trusted external AWS accounts (consulting agencies) to securely access the S3 data without the need to manage user credentials or build additional infrastructure.

Options A and B pose security risks. Option D increases operational complexity and violates least privilege by managing external users inside your AWS account.

TheAWS WAF Bot Control managed ruleis designed to automatically detect and mitigate bot traffic. This feature is particularly useful for addressing malicious traffic and conserving compute resources by filtering unnecessary requests at the ALB level.

Option A:Blocking IP addresses manually introduces significant operational overhead and is not scalable against dynamic, worldwide malicious traffic.

Option C:AWS Shield provides DDoS protection, but the scenario does not describe a DDoS attack. WAF is better suited for managing application-layer threats like bot traffic.

Option D:The AWS WAF IP reputation rule helps block traffic from known bad IPs but may not address bot traffic effectively.

AWS Documentation References:

AWS WAF Bot Control

AWS WAF Managed Rules

AWS guidance for NAT Gateway recommends deploying “a NAT gateway in each Availability Zone and configure your routing to ensure that resources use the NAT gateway in the same Availability Zone.” This provides “zone-independent architecture” and avoids cross-AZ data processing charges and single-AZ failures. Option B creates a single point of failure and incurs cross-AZ egress charges when private subnets in other AZs traverse a centralized NAT. NAT instances (C) are legacy, require manual scaling/failover/patching, and are not recommended for production HA. Option D is not supported (NLB cannot front a NAT Gateway as a target). With steady, uniform load, per-AZ NAT Gateways deliver high availability with predictable cost; routing each private subnet to its local NAT Gateway maintains security (no inbound initiated connections) and resilience. This meets the requirement for cost-effective, secure outbound connectivity across multiple AZs while preserving availability.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation (from AWS Solutions Architect documentation):

Amazon DynamoDB supports two read consistency models: eventually consistent reads and strongly consistent reads. When an application must always receive the most up-to-date data, it must use strongly consistent reads. Eventually consistent reads can return stale data because they provide best-effort propagation across storage nodes.

Since the problem states that requests are “not returning the latest data,” the correct solution is to enable strongly consistent reads, which immediately reflect all successful writes. This is the explicit AWS-recommended method for ensuring clients always receive the most current version of an item.

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This solution is the most scalable and efficient way to handle large volumes of survey data while automating sentiment analysis:

API Gateway and SQS: The survey results are sent to API Gateway, which forwards the data to an SQS queue. SQS can handle large volumes of messages and ensures that messages are not lost.

AWS Lambda: Lambda is triggered by polling the SQS queue, where it processes the survey data.

Amazon Comprehend: Comprehend is used for sentiment analysis, providing insights into customer satisfaction.

DynamoDB with TTL: Results are stored in DynamoDB with aTime to Live (TTL)attribute set to expire after 365 days, automatically removing old data and reducing storage costs.

Option B (EC2 API): Running an API on EC2 requires more maintenance and scalability management compared to API Gateway.

Option C (S3 and Rekognition): Amazon Rekognition is for image and video analysis, not sentiment analysis.

Option D (Amazon Lex): Amazon Lex is used for building conversational interfaces, not sentiment analysis.

AWS References:

Amazon Comprehend for Sentiment Analysis

Amazon SQS

DynamoDB TTL

AWS Compute Optimizerprovides detailed recommendations for optimizingAmazon EBS volumes, including insights into underutilized volumes, inefficient configurations, and potential cost savings. It analyzes usage patterns and provides recommendations based on historical data, making it the ideal tool for this use case.

Option A (Amazon Inspector): Amazon Inspector is for security assessments, not for cost optimization.

Option B (Systems Manager): Systems Manager does not specifically provide EBS optimization recommendations.

Option C (CloudWatch): CloudWatch metrics help monitor usage but do not offer optimization recommendations like Compute Optimizer.

AWS References:

AWS Compute Optimizer

AWS Shield Advanced is designed to provide enhanced protection against DDoS attacks with proactive engagement and response capabilities, making it the best solution for this scenario.

AWS Shield Advanced: This service provides advanced protection against DDoS attacks. It includes detailed attack diagnostics, 24/7 access to the AWS DDoS Response Team (DRT), and financial protection against DDoS-related scaling charges. Shield Advanced also integrates with Route 53 and the Application Load Balancer (ALB) to ensure comprehensive protection for your web applications.

Route 53 and ALB Protection: By adding your Route 53 hosted zones and ALB resources to AWS Shield Advanced, you ensure that these components are covered under the enhanced protection plan. Shield Advanced actively monitors traffic and provides real-time attack mitigation, minimizing the impact of DDoS attacks on your application.

Why Not Other Options?:

Option A (AWS Config): AWS Config is a configuration management service and does not provide DDoS protection or detection capabilities.

Option B (AWS WAF): While AWS WAF can help mitigate some types of attacks, it does not provide the comprehensive DDoS protection and proactive engagement offered by Shield Advanced.

Option C (GuardDuty): GuardDuty is a threat detection service that identifies potentially malicious activity within your AWS environment, but it is not specifically designed to provide DDoS protection.

AWS References:

AWS Shield Advanced- Overview of AWS Shield Advanced and its DDoS protection capabilities.

Integrating AWS Shield Advanced with Route 53 and ALB- Detailed guidance on how to protect Route 53 and ALB with AWS Shield Advanced.

Amazon RDS Proxy helps manage and pool database connections from serverless compute like AWS Lambda, significantly reducing the stress on the database during unpredictable traffic surges. It improves scalability and resiliency by efficiently managing connections, protecting the database from being overwhelmed, and enabling failover handling.

Option A is the most cost-effective and operationally efficient approach to handling unpredictable surges and improving resilience without requiring major application changes.

Option B involves a migration to DynamoDB, which is a significant architectural change and costlier initially. Option C is manual connection cleanup, insufficient for unpredictable surges. Option D increases resources but does not solve connection storm problems efficiently and is more costly.

AWS Lake Formation natively supports fine-grained access control, including:

Row-level security

Cell/column-level security

These are implemented through data filters and Lake Formation permissions on governed tables and views. This allows you to centrally define which users or groups can access which rows and which columns, including sensitive data fields, with minimal custom code or maintenance.

Why others are incorrect:

A: IAM alone does not provide row-level or cell-level data security inside Lake Formation tables.

C and D: Using Lambda to scrub or periodically remove sensitive data is complex, error-prone, and high overhead compared to built-in Lake Formation data filters.

AWS guidance is to cover steady baseline with commitments (Reserved Instances or Savings Plans) and use EC2 Spot Instances for burst capacity to minimize cost. Spot provides up to 90% discounts and is well-suited to fault-tolerant, queue-based workloads; interruptions are handled by replacing capacity automatically while messages remain durably in SQS. Using only Spot (A) risks capacity gaps; only RIs sized for peak (B) wastes cost during low demand. Option D scales on backlog but uses On-Demand for bursts, which is more expensive than Spot. With C, baseline capacity (RIs) keeps processing continuously (no downtime), and Spot adds cost-efficient throughput during spikes, aligning with Well-Architected cost and reliability patterns for queue workers.

When an application is fronted by an Application Load Balancer (ALB) and malicious traffic is detected from a specific IP, the correct way to block the IP is by using AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall).

With AWS WAF, you can create an IP Set to include the offending IP address or range.

Then create a Web ACL (Access Control List) with a rule set to BLOCK requests from that IP set.

Finally, associate the Web ACL with the ALB.

Security groups (Option A) cannot deny specific IPs because they are stateful and allow-only rules.

Amazon Detective (Option B) is a security analysis and investigation tool; it doesn’t block traffic.

AWS RAM (Option C) is for resource sharing across accounts, not for blocking IPs.

This approach aligns with AWS’s Security Pillar of the Well-Architected Framework and is fully managed, with minimal operational effort.

???? Reference:

Using AWS WAF with an Application Load Balancer

Block IPs with AWS WAF

This architecture uses ALB for routing, Auto Scaling for elasticity, SQS to buffer unprocessed orders and decouple services, and RDS Multi-AZ for high availability and durability of transactional data. This ensures resilience and fault tolerance even during traffic spikes.

A. Mutual TLS:Provides secure communication but does not integrate with AWS credential exchange.

B. AWS Signature v4:Requires direct integration with AWS and is less secure for external systems.

C. Kerberos:Not natively supported for AWS API authentication.

D. IAM Roles Anywhere:Enables AWS API access using X.509 certificates without long-term credentials.

The requirement is an event-driven pub/sub system that guarantees ordered delivery of events.

Amazon SNS FIFO topics provide the publish-subscribe model along with FIFO (First-In-First-Out) delivery and exactly-once message processing, ensuring ordered delivery to multiple subscribers.

Option A, EventBridge, provides event buses but does not guarantee event ordering across multiple subscribers. Option C (SNS standard topics) provides pub/sub but without ordering guarantees. Option D (SQS FIFO queues) guarantees order but are point-to-point queues, not pub/sub.

Thus, Amazon SNS FIFO topics meet the requirements for ordered pub/sub messaging.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with Babelfish allows Aurora to understand SQL Server T-SQL and the SQL Server wire protocol. This enables applications to continue using SQL Server drivers, minimizing code changes (Option B).

Migration of schema and data is performed using AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) and AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) (Option C), which is the AWS-recommended migration pattern for heterogeneous database migrations.

AWS DMS (Option E) does not rewrite application SQL.

RDS Proxy (Option D) does not translate SQL Server protocols.

Option A requires rewriting application queries, which contradicts the “minimal changes” requirement.