Free Amazon Web Services CLF-C02 Practice Exam with Questions & Answers | Set: 7

According to the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, while the customer is responsible for the security in the cloud. This means that AWS is responsible for protecting the infrastructure that runs AWS services, such as DynamoDB, while the customer is responsible for properly configuring the security of the provided service. For abstracted services, such as DynamoDB, the customer is primarily responsible for managing their data, classifying their assets, and using IAM tools to apply the appropriatepermissions12. Therefore, the customer is responsible for controlling the access to DynamoDB tables, such as by creating IAM policies, roles, and users, and using encryption and authentication mechanisms3. References:

Shared Responsibility Model - Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Security and compliance in Amazon DynamoDB - Amazon DynamoDB

What is Shared Responsibility Model? - Check Point Software

Amazon Inspector is the AWS service that can be used to perform vulnerability scans on AWS EC2 instances for software vulnerabilities automatically in a periodic fashion. Amazon Inspector automatically discovers EC2 instances and scans them for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure. Amazon Inspector uses AWS Systems Manager (SSM) and the SSM Agent to collect information about the software application inventory of the EC2 instances. This data is then scanned by Amazon Inspector for software vulnerabilities12. Amazon Inspector also integrates with other AWS services, such as AmazonEventBridge and AWS Security Hub, to automate discovery, expedite vulnerability routing, and shorten mean time to remediate (MTTR) vulnerabilities2.

Amazon RDS is a fully managed relational database service that supports several database engines, including PostgreSQL. Amazon RDS can run a managed PostgreSQL database that provides online transaction processing (OLTP), which is a type of database workload that handles frequent read and write operations on small amounts of data. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL offers high performance, availability, scalability, security, and compatibility with the PostgreSQL community edition. Amazon RDS also provides automated backups, point-in-time recovery, encryption, monitoring, and maintenance for PostgreSQL databases. References:

Hosted PostgreSQL - Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

OLTP Database, MySQL And PostgreSQL ManagedDatabase - Amazon Aurora

PostgreSQL options on AWS: Self- managed, managed, and serverless

Amazon Cognito is a service that enables you to add user sign-up and sign-in features to your web and mobile applications. Amazon Cognito also supports social and enterprise identity federation, which means you can allow your users to sign in with their existing credentials from identity providers such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. Amazon Cognito integrates with OpenID Connect (OIDC) and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 protocols to facilitate the authentication and authorization process. Amazon Cognito also provides advanced security features, such as adaptive authentication, user verification, and multi-factor authentication (MFA). References: Amazon Cognito, What is Amazon Cognito?

Hardware and infrastructure is the option that AWS is responsible for under the AWS shared responsibility model. The AWS shared responsibility model describes how AWS and customers share responsibilities for security and compliance in the cloud. AWS is responsible for security of the cloud, which means protecting the infrastructure that runs all the services offered in the AWS Cloud. This infrastructure is composed of the hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run AWS Cloud services. Customers are responsible for security in the cloud, which means taking care of the security of their own applications, data, and operating systems. This includes network and firewall configuration, client-side data encryption, management of user permissions, and more.

Understanding Operational Excellence: The Operational Excellence pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework focuses on running and monitoring systems to deliver business value and continuously improving supporting processes and procedures.

Key Concepts of Operational Excellence:

Small, Reversible Changes: Making changes in small, incremental steps allows for easier troubleshooting and rollback if issues arise.

Regular Updates: Regularly updating components ensures that systems stay up-to-date with the latest features, security patches, and performance improvements.

Automation: Implementing automation for deployments, updates, and monitoring to reduce human error and increase efficiency.

Continuous Improvement: Encouraging continuous learning and process improvement to enhance operational processes.

Implementing Operational Excellence:

Deployment Automation: Use CI/CD pipelines to automate deployments and ensure that changes can be rolled back if necessary.

Monitoring and Logging: Implement comprehensive monitoring and logging to track system health and performance.

Incident Response: Develop a robust incident response plan to handle issues quickly and efficiently.

Documentation and Training: Maintain thorough documentation and provide training to ensure teams can effectively manage and improve operations.

AWS Well-Architected Framework: Operational Excellence Pillar

 The AWS shared responsibility model describes the division of responsibilities between AWS and the customer for security and compliance. AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, which includes the hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run AWS services. The customer is responsible for security in the cloud, which includes the customer data, applications, operating systems, and network and firewall configurations. Therefore, updating the guest operating system on Amazon EC2 instances is the customer’s responsibility2

AWS Business Support is the minimum recommended tier for users who have production workloads on AWS. AWS Business Support provides 24x7 access to cloud support engineers via phone, chat, or email, as well as a guaranteed response time of less than one hour for urgent issues. AWS Business Support also includes access to AWS Trusted Advisor, a tool that provides real-time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices4.

 This is a design principle of the operational excellence pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. Performing operations as code means using scripts, templates, or automation tools to perform routine tasks, such as provisioning, configuration, deployment, and monitoring. This reduces human error, increases consistency, and enables faster recovery from failures. You can learn more about the operational excellence pillar from this whitepaper or this digital course.

Volume-based discounts are an AWS offering or benefit that can help the company optimize costs based on the amount of storage that the company uses. Volume-based discounts are discounts that AWS provides for some storage services, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS, when the company stores a large amount of data. The more data the company stores, the lower the price per GB. For example, Amazon S3 offers six storage classes, each with a different price per GB. The price per GB decreases as the amount of data stored in each storage class increases

The AWS services that are supported by Savings Plans are:

Amazon EC2: Amazon EC2 is a service that provides scalable computing capacity in the AWS cloud. You can use Amazon EC2 to launch virtual servers, configure security and networking, and manage storage. Amazon EC2 is eligible for both Compute Savings Plans and EC2 Instance Savings Plans12.

Amazon SageMaker: Amazon SageMaker is a service that helps you build and deploy machine learning models. You can use Amazon SageMaker to access Jupyter notebooks, use common machine learning algorithms, train and tune models, and deploy them to a hosted environment. Amazon SageMaker is eligible for SageMaker Savings Plans13.

The other options are not supported by Savings Plans. Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DynamoDB are database services that are eligible for Reserved Instances, but not Savings Plans4.

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior to protect your AWS accounts, workloads, and data stored in Amazon S3. With the cloud, the collection and aggregation of account and network activities is simplified, but it can be time consuming for security teams to continuously analyze event log data for potential threats. With GuardDuty, you can automate anomaly detection and get actionable findings to help you protect your AWS resources4.

 S3 Glacier Deep Archive is Amazon S3’s lowest-cost storage class and supports long-term retention and digital preservation for data that may be accessed once or twice in a year. It is designed forcustomers — particularly those in highly-regulated industries, such as the Financial Services, Healthcare, and Public Sectors — that retain data sets for 7-10 years or longer to meet regulatory compliance requirements. Customers can store large amounts of data at a very low cost, and reliably access it with a wait time of 12 hours3.

Amazon EC2 is the AWS service that the company should use to meet its requirements of retaining full control of patch management for the guest operating systems that host its applications. Amazon EC2 is a service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Users can launch virtual servers, called instances, that run various operating systems, such as Linux, Windows, macOS, and more. Users have full administrative access to their instances and can install and configure any software, including patches and updates, on their instances. Users are responsible for managing the security and maintenance of their instances, including patching the guest operating system and applications. Users can also use AWS Systems Manager to automate and simplify the patching process for their EC2 instances. AWS Systems Manager is a service that helps users manage their AWS and on-premises resources atscale. Users can use AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager to scan their instances for missing patches, define patch baselines and maintenance windows, and apply patches automatically or manually across their instances. Users can also use AWS Systems Manager to monitor the patch compliance status and patching history of their instances. References: What is Amazon EC2?, AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager

Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances are the AWS service or resource that the company should use for its iOS application development and build activities, as they enable users to run macOS on AWS and access a broad and growing set of AWS services. AWS CodeCommit is a service that provides a fully managed source control service that hosts secure Git-based repositories. AWS Amplify is a set of tools and services that enable developers to build full-stack web and mobile applications using AWS. AWS App Runner is a service that makes it easy for developers to quickly deploy containerized web applications and APIs. These concepts are explained in the AWS Developer Tools page4.

According to the AWS shared responsibility model, the customer is responsible for security in the cloud, which includes the tasks of managing data encryption and granting least privilege access to IAM users. Data encryption is the process of transforming data into an unreadable format that canonly be accessed with a key or a password. The customer must decide whether to encrypt their data at rest (when it is stored on AWS) or in transit (when it is moving between AWS and the customer or between AWS services). The customer must also choose the encryption method, algorithm, and key management solution that best suit their needs. AWS provides various services and features that support data encryption, such as AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), and AWS Encryption SDK5 IAM users are entities that represent the people or applications that interact with AWS resources and services. The customer must grant the IAM users the minimum permissions that they need to perform their tasks, and avoid giving them unnecessary or excessive access. This is known as the principle of least privilege, and it helps reduce the risk of unauthorized or malicious actions. The customer can use IAM policies, roles, groups, and permissions boundaries to manage the access of IAM users.

AWS Cost Explorer is the AWS service or tool that helps users visualize, understand, and manage spending and usage over time. AWS Cost Explorer is a web-based interface that allows users to access interactive graphs and tables that display their AWS costs and usage data. Users can create custom reports that analyze cost and usage data by various dimensions, such as service, region, account, tag, and more. Users can also view historical data for up to the last 12 months, forecast future costs for up to the next 12 months, and get recommendations for cost optimization. AWS Cost Explorer also provides preconfigured views that show common cost and usage scenarios, such as monthly spend by service, daily spend by linked account, and Reserved Instance utilization. Users can use AWS Cost Explorer to monitor their AWS spending and usage trends, identify cost drivers and anomalies, and optimize their resource allocation and budget planning. References: Cloud Cost Analysis - AWS Cost Explorer - AWS, Analyzing your costs with AWS Cost Explorer

Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive is the lowest-cost storage class in the cloud. It is designed for long-term data archiving that is rarely accessed. It offers a retrieval time of 12 hours and a durability of 99.999999999% (11 9’s). It is ideal for data that must be retained for 7 years or longer to meet regulatory compliance requirements.

AWS Config is a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. AWS Config continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations and allows you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired configurations. With AWS Config, you can review changes in configurations and relationships between AWS resources, dive into detailed resource configuration histories, and determine your overall compliance against the configurations specified in your internal guidelines. This can help you simplify compliance auditing, security analysis, change management, and operational troubleshooting1.

Changing AWS Support plans is a task that must be performed by using the AWS account root user credentials. The root user is the email address that you used to sign up for AWS. It has complete access to all AWS services and resources in the account. You should use the root user only to perform a few account and service management tasks, such as changing AWS Support plans, closing the account, or changing the account name or email address. Making changes to AWS production resources, accessing AWS Cost and Usage Reports, and granting auditors access to an AWS account for a compliance audit are tasks that can be performed by using IAM users or roles, which are entities that you create in AWS to delegate permissions to access AWS services and resources.