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

Amazon Cognitoprovides scalable, serverless authentication, andLambda@Edgeis used for authorization, providing low-latency access control at the edge.Amazon CloudFrontserves the web application globally with reduced latency and ensures secure access for users around the world. This solution minimizes operational overhead while providing scalability and security.

Option B (Directory Service): Directory Service is more suitable for enterprise use cases involving Active Directory, not for web-based applications.

Option C (S3 Transfer Acceleration): S3 Transfer Acceleration helps with file transfers but does not provide authorization features.

Option D (Elastic Beanstalk): Elastic Beanstalk adds unnecessary overhead when CloudFront can handle global delivery efficiently.

AWS References:

Amazon Cognito

Lambda@Edge

Incremental Exports: Exporting DynamoDB data directly to Amazon S3 provides an automated, serverless way to make data available for analytics without operational overhead.

Analytics-Friendly Storage: Amazon S3 supports long-term analytics workloads and can integrate with tools like Athena or QuickSight.

DynamoDB Export to S3 Documentation

To serve a static website hosted in Amazon S3 over HTTPS, you must use Amazon CloudFront because S3 does not natively support HTTPS for static website endpoints.

Steps to meet HTTPS requirement:

B. Create a CloudFront distribution and configure the S3 bucket as the origin. This enables global edge caching and performance optimization.

D. Attach an SSL/TLS certificate (typically from AWS Certificate Manager) to the CloudFront distribution to handle HTTPS connections.

S3 buckets used as static website hosts only support HTTP directly. While S3 supports HTTPS for REST API access, it does not support HTTPS on static website endpoints.

This setup aligns with security best practices and supports the Secure and Operational Excellence pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

???? References:

Hosting a static website using Amazon S3 and CloudFront

CloudFront + HTTPS with ACM

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) automates the creation, retention, and deletion of EBSsnapshots. This allows organizations to define policies that ensure snapshots are only kept as long as needed, reducing costs automatically and minimizing manual effort. AWS recommends using DLM for optimizing storage and managing backup lifecycle with minimal overhead.

Amazon Athenais a serverless query service that allows you to run SQL queries directly on data stored in Amazon S3 without the need for a data warehouse. It is cost-effective because you only pay for the queries you run, and it can handleApache Parquetfiles efficiently. Additionally, Athena integrates with KMS, making it suitable for querying encrypted data.

Key AWS features:

Cost-Effective: Athena charges only for the data scanned by the queries, making it a more cost-effective solution compared to Redshift or EMR for occasional queries.

Direct S3 Querying: Athena supports querying data directly in S3, including Parquet files, without needing to move the data.

AWS Documentation: Athena's compatibility with encrypted Parquet files in S3 makes it the ideal choice for this scenario, reducing both cost and complexity​​.

Using SQS as a buffer between S3 and the Lambda function ensures durability and allows for retries in case of processing failures. Messages in the queue can be retried by Lambda, and failed processing can be directed to a dead-letter queue for further inspection. This guarantees reliable and scalable message-driven processing.

Amazon S3 Storage Lens:

S3 Storage Lens provides organization-wide visibility into object storage usage and activity trends.

It can generate metrics and insights about your S3 buckets, including versioning status.

Configuration:

Enable S3 Storage Lens at the organization level.

Configure the dashboard to include the versioning status metric.

Identify Non-Versioned Buckets:

Use the S3 Storage Lens dashboard to filter and identify buckets that do not have versioning enabled.

Storage Lens provides detailed insights and reports which can be used to enforce compliance and manage storage effectively.

Operational Efficiency: Using S3 Storage Lens provides a centralized, easy-to-use interface for monitoring bucket configurations across multiple Regions and accounts, reducing the need for custom scripts or manual checks.

For Amazon RDS relational databases experiencing read-heavy workloads, AWS best practice is to create read replicas and offload read traffic to those replicas. A read replica:

Uses asynchronous replication from the primary.

Can serve read-only queries, thereby reducing load and query latency on the primary.

Can be used behind an application-level read/write splitting mechanism or via endpoints that direct read traffic to replicas.

Performance Insights (Option A) helps diagnose performance problems but does not itself offload traffic.

DAX (Option B) is a cache for DynamoDB, not RDS.

Kinesis Data Firehose (Option D) is a streaming ingestion service and cannot increase RDS query concurrency.

Amazon RDS does not support enabling encryption at rest on an existing unencrypted DB instance. To encrypt an existing RDS instance’s data at rest, the recommended method is to:

Take a snapshot of the unencrypted DB instance.

Create an encrypted copy of the snapshot using AWS KMS. This encrypted snapshot contains the existing data encrypted at rest.

Restore a new DB instance from the encrypted snapshot. This new instance will have encryption at rest enabled.

Additionally, to manage encryption keys securely, companies can use customer managed keys (CMKs) in AWS Key Management Service (KMS). CMKs provide greater control over key management policies, rotation, and usage permissions compared to default AWS managed keys. Using a CMK allows customization of access control and auditability.

Option A is incorrect because you cannot enable encryption directly on a snapshot; you must create an encrypted copy. Option C is invalid because encryption cannot be enabled by modifying an existing instance’s configuration. Option D refers to the default AWS managed key, which is less flexible than customer managed keys.

The best practice for granting AWS resource access to EC2 instances is to use IAM roles, not users or long-lived access keys. You create an IAM role with a policy that grants the minimum permissions required, then attach that role to an instance profile associated with the EC2 instance. The instance then automatically receives temporary credentials for AWS service access.

AWS Documentation Extract:

"Attach an IAM role to your EC2 instances to securely grant permissions to AWS services according to the principle of least privilege. Never embed access keys in EC2 instances."

(Source: AWS EC2 documentation, IAM Roles for EC2)

A, B: Using IAM users and embedding keys violates security best practices.

C: IAM role credentials are automatically managed and never need to be manually attached as keys.

Amazon SQS FIFO queuesensure that orders are processed in the exact order received and maintain message deduplication.

AWS Lambdascales automatically, handling bursts and maintaining high availability in a cost-effective manner.

Option A and D:Amazon SNS does not guarantee ordered processing.

Option C:Standard SQS queues do not guarantee order.

AWS Documentation References:

Amazon SQS FIFO Queues

To track costs by department, you must activate the custom department tag as a cost allocation tag in the AWS Organizations management account. Once activated, Cost Explorer and cost and usage reports can group costs by this tag for all linked accounts. The most operationally efficient way is to activate only the relevant department tag and create a cost and usage report grouped by that tag.

AWS Documentation Extract:

“To use a tag for cost allocation, you must activate it in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. After activation, you can use the tag to group costs in Cost Explorer and reports.”

(Source: AWS Cost Management documentation)

A, E: aws:createdBy is not related to department cost grouping and is unnecessary.

B: Applying extra filters is optional; D is more direct and operationally efficient.

For bidirectional communication such as chat applications, Amazon API Gateway WebSocket API is the correct service. WebSocket APIs allow clients to establish long-lived connections and exchange messages with the backend Lambda functions in real time.

HTTP APIs and REST APIs are suitable for request-response models, not continuous two-way communication. CloudFront cannot maintain stateful WebSocket connections, so only Option C fits the requirements for a real-time, bidirectional application.

Protecting an application from layer 7 (application layer) DDoS attacks is best achieved by using AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall), which provides customizable protection against common web exploits including DDoS attacks at the application layer. AWS WAF supports managed rule groups maintained by AWS, which offer robust, tested protections against OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities and common attack patterns without requiring extensive manual rule creation.

While AWS Shield Standard provides basic network-layer DDoS protection automatically at no additional charge, it does not offer application-layer filtering capabilities. Therefore, option A alone is insufficient.

Option B, involving only custom rules, requires significant operational overhead and expertise, whereas AWS managed rules offer a turnkey solution with ongoing updates from AWS security teams.

Option D, using CloudFront in front of the ALB, can provide additional protection benefits such as caching and geographic restrictions, but the question specifically asks for protecting against layer 7 DDoS on the ALB directly. CloudFront plus WAF is a valid enhanced solution, but the direct and recommended answer in AWS official documents is to use AWS WAF managed rules directly with ALB for application-level protection.

AWS Secrets Manager is designed specifically to securely store and manage sensitive information such as database credentials. It integrates seamlessly with AWS services like Lambda and RDS, and it provides automatic credential rotation with minimal operational overhead.

AWS Secrets Manager: By storing the database credentials in Secrets Manager, you ensure that the credentials are securely stored, encrypted, and managed. Secrets Manager provides a built-in mechanism to automatically rotate credentials at regular intervals (e.g., every 30 days), which helps in maintaining security best practices without requiring additional manual intervention.

Lambda Integration: The Lambda function can be easily configured to retrieve the credentials from Secrets Manager using the AWS SDK, ensuring that the credentials are accessed securely at runtime.

Why Not Other Options?:

Option A (Parameter Store with Rotation): While Parameter Store can store parameters securely, Secrets Manager is more tailored for secrets management and automatic rotation, offering more features and less operational overhead.

Option C (Encrypted Lambda environment variable): Storing credentials directly in Lambda environment variables, even when encrypted, requires custom code to manage rotation, which increases operational complexity.

Option D (KMS with automatic rotation): KMS is for managing encryption keys, not for storing and rotating secrets like database credentials. This option would require more custom implementation to manage credentials securely.

AWS References:

AWS Secrets Manager- Detailed documentation on how to store, manage, and rotate secrets using AWS Secrets Manager.

Using Secrets Manager with AWS Lambda- Guidance on integrating Secrets Manager with Lambda for secure credential management.