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

Amazon QuickSight includes built-in ML-powered forecasting capabilities, allowing you to create, visualize, and interact with time series forecasts directly within the BI dashboard, with no ML experience or infrastructure management required. This is the lowest management overhead solution.

AWS Documentation Extract:

"Amazon QuickSight provides built-in ML-powered forecasting, allowing business users to forecast future trends with a few clicks and no machine learning expertise required."

(Source: Amazon QuickSight documentation)

A, C, D: Require additional setup, management, or ML knowledge.

AWS Systems Manager Session Manager allows secure, auditable SSH-like access to EC2 instances without the need to open SSH ports or manage bastion hosts. For this to work in a private subnet, an interface VPC endpoint is required (not a gateway endpoint).

The EC2 instances must have the AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore policy attached to their IAM roles to allow Systems Manager operations.

With Session Manager, all session activity can be logged centrally to Amazon CloudWatch Logs or S3, satisfying the audit requirement and improving operational efficiency over manual SSH and bastion configurations.

To route S3 traffic privately from within a VPC, AWS provides Gateway VPC Endpoints for Amazon S3. These allow private connectivity to S3 without traversing the public internet or requiring an Internet Gateway.

From AWS Documentation:

“A gateway endpoint enables you to privately connect your VPC to supported AWS services such as Amazon S3 and DynamoDB without requiring an Internet Gateway, NAT device, or public IP.”

(Source: Amazon VPC User Guide – Gateway Endpoints)

Why A is correct:

Gateway VPC endpoints route S3 traffic internally within the AWS network.

Improves security and data privacy while reducing exposure to the public internet.

Requires only a simple route table modification and IAM policy configuration.

Why other options are incorrect:

B: S3 is a regional service; you cannot “move” it inside a VPC.

C: Access points do not change the routing path; still uses S3 endpoints.

D: AWS Direct Connect is for hybrid environments, not intra-AWS private connectivity.

IAM Role: Attaching an IAM role to an EC2 instance profile is a secure way to manage permissions without embedding credentials.

AWS Secrets Manager: Grants controlled access to database credentials and automatically rotates secrets if configured.

Identity-Based Policy: Ensures the IAM role only has access to specific secrets, enhancing security.

AWS Secrets Manager Documentation

AWS CloudTrail Lakeis a fully managed service that allows the collection, storage, and querying ofCloudTrail eventsfor both AWS and non-AWS services. CloudTrail Lake can be customized to collect logs from various sources, ensuring a centralized audit solution. It also supports long-term storage, so logs can be retained for 7 years, meeting the compliance requirement.

Option A (Data Lake): Setting up a data lake in S3 introduces unnecessary operational complexity compared to CloudTrail Lake.

Option C (Ingest non-AWS services into CloudTrail): CloudTrail Lake is better suited for this task with less operational overhead.

Option D (CloudWatch Logs): While CloudWatch can store logs, CloudTrail Lake is specifically designed for API auditing and storage.

AWS References:

AWS CloudTrail Lake

Why Option C is Correct:

S3 Access Points: Provide scalable management of access to large datasets with specific permissions for individual prefixes.

Dynamic Prefixes: Access points simplify managing access to a growing number of prefixes without relying solely on a single bucket policy.

Fine-Grained Control: Resource-based permissions on access points enforce prefix-level isolation effectively.

Why Other Options Are Not Ideal:

Option A: Using deny/allow bucket policies introduces complexity and is less scalable for dynamic prefixes.

Option B: Encryption ensures data security but does not address access management.

Option D: Pre-signed URLs are temporary and not suitable for managing access at scale.

AWS References:

Amazon S3 Access Points:AWS Documentation - S3 Access Points

Amazon RDS Proxy is a fully managed database proxy for RDS that makes applications more scalable, more resilient to database failures, and more secure. RDS Proxy pools and shares database connections, allowing applications to open and close connections as needed without overwhelming the database. This is the recommended solution when the application cannot be modified to use connection pooling itself.

AWS Documentation Extract:

"Amazon RDS Proxy helps manage database connections to improve application scalability and performance. It pools connections and shares them among application clients, which can mitigate issues caused by opening and closing many database connections."

(Source: Amazon RDS Proxy documentation)

A: Upgrading the instance does not solve connection inefficiency and can be cost-ineffective.

B: Increasing IOPS only helps if storage is a bottleneck, not if connections are the issue.

D: Multi-AZ improves availability, not connection management.

SSE-KMS (Server-side encryption with AWS Key Management Service) not only encrypts data at rest but also integrates with AWS CloudTrail to provide detailed logs of key usage — meeting the audit requirement.

“SSE-KMS provides the ability to audit key usage to see who used the key and when, via AWS CloudTrail.”

— Amazon S3 Encryption Documentation

Benefits:

Encryption with customer-managed or AWS-managed KMS keys

Audit trails of key usage events

Fine-grained access control

Incorrect Options:

A: SSE-S3 does not support auditing of key usage.

C: SSE-C does not integrate with CloudTrail or KMS.

D: Self-managed keys require external key infrastructure and custom audit logging.

Spot Instances can be interrupted when AWS needs the capacity back. To reduce interruptions and improve availability, AWS provides the capacity-optimized allocation strategy.

Capacity-optimized strategy launches Spot Instances from the most available Spot capacity pools instead of the lowest-priced ones, reducing interruption rates.

By adding multiple instance types (e.g., using Instance Type Flexibility), the Auto Scaling group can launch instances in a broader set of pools, improving the chance that capacity is available.

Scheduled scaling actions combined with a diverse set of instances under the capacity-optimized strategy ensure higher resilience and better timing for instance launches.

This approach directly supports the Resiliency design principle in the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

???? References:

Best Practices for EC2 Spot Instances

Capacity-Optimized Allocation Strategy

When using an SQS queue as an event source for AWS Lambda, the visibility timeout of the SQS queue plays a critical role in preventing duplicate message processing.

"If your Lambda function doesn't process the message and delete it from the queue within the visibility timeout period, the message becomes visible again and can be processed again by the same or another function instance."

— AWS Lambda with SQS

In this scenario, the third-party API may take up to 60 seconds to respond. Since the Lambda function is configured with a 65-second timeout, the visibility timeout of the queue must be greater than or equal to the maximum function execution time to avoid the same message being reprocessed.

Incorrect Options:

A: Memory allocation doesn’t impact duplicate message handling.

B: Timeout is already sufficient; increasing it further does not solve the core issue.

C: Delivery delay controls initial delivery delay, not reprocessing logic.

AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service designed to centralize and automate data protection across AWS services including EC2 and RDS. It allows users to define backup schedules (backup plans) and automatically create and retain backups. AWS Backup also offers restore testing plans, allowing users to automate the validation of backups by restoring them in a controlled manner. This service is built to minimize operational overhead by removing the need to manage custom scripts, manual processes, or additional orchestration services. This aligns with AWS best practices for resilience, automation, and operational excellence.

Reference Extract from AWS Documentation / Study Guide:

"AWS Backup enables you to centralize and automate data protection across AWS services. You can create backup plans, schedule backups, and set lifecycle policies. AWS Backup also enables restore testing to verify your backup integrity, with minimal manual intervention."

Source: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Official Study Guide, Resiliency and Disaster Recovery section; AWS Backup User Guide.

To ensure that only specific AWS Lambda functions can read from or write to an Amazon SQS queue, useresource-based policiesattached directly to the SQS queue. These policies explicitly grant permissions to the IAM roles used by the Lambda functions. Additionally, the Lambda execution roles must also have IAM policies that permit SQS access. This dual-layer approach follows the AWS security best practice of granting least privilege access and ensures that no other service or entity can interact with the queue.

This is a common and supported pattern documented in theAmazon SQS Developer Guide, where resource-based policies restrict access at the queue level while IAM roles control permissions at the function level.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams in on-demand mode is purpose-built for real-time ingestion of streaming data and scales automatically with traffic, which is ideal for fluctuating workloads like clickstream data.

Combined with AWS Lambda, which scales concurrently based on incoming events, this setup ensures efficient, real-time processing with minimal configuration and cost overhead.

Option B involves Firehose, which is not optimal for low-latency processing. Option C is incorrect as Kinesis Video Streams is designed for video data, not clickstream. Option D introduces Flink, which adds unnecessary complexity when Lambda suffices.