Free Amazon Web Services SAA-C03 Practice Exam with Questions & Answers | Set: 4

Option Bensures the use of S3 Object Lock and Versioning to meet compliance for immutability. CloudFront enhances performance while a bucket policy ensures secure access.

Option Alacks immutability safeguards.

Option Cintroduces unnecessary complexity.

Option Dmisses out on additional security benefits offered by CloudFront.

When using imported key material with AWS KMS, you maintain control over the key lifecycle. AWS KMS allows you to import new key material into an existing KMS key (of type "external" or "imported"), thus rotating the key material without changing the key ID or ARNs. This enables applications to continue using the same key for cryptographic operations without disruption.

You can also set an expiration time for the old key material, after which AWS KMS deletes the old material and requires new key material to be imported, enforcing regular rotation per your compliance requirements.

AWS Documentation Extract:

"To rotate imported key material, you can re-import new key material into the same KMS key. This retains the same key ID and ARNs so applications are unaffected. You can set an expiration time for imported key material and replace it as needed, ensuring compliance with your rotation policy."

(Source: AWS Key Management Service Developer Guide, Importing Key Material, Rotating Key Material)

Other options:

A: You cannot create a new KMS key with the same key ID as an existing one.

B: Deleting and recreating the key disrupts application access because the key ID changes.

D: Automatic rotation is only available for AWS-managed keys, not for imported key material.

The best solution to query and filter S3 data directly without downloading the full object is to use Amazon Athena.

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that lets you use SQL to analyze structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data directly in Amazon S3, without needing to move or transform the data.

It supports formats like CSV, JSON, ORC, Parquet, and Avro and integrates with AWS Glue Data Catalog for schema management.

Athena is serverless, meaning there’s no infrastructure to manage, and it's billed per query, which keeps it cost-effective.

Option B (EMR) is heavier and requires managing a cluster.

Option C (API Gateway) is not suited for querying S3 datasets.

Option D (ElastiCache) is a memory store, not a query engine.

???? Reference:

What is Amazon Athena?

Using a Lambda function as part of the Kinesis Data Firehose pipeline allows for real-time detection and masking of PII before data is written to S3. This ensures that PII is never stored in its raw form in the data lake.

Option B:Amazon Macie can scan and classify data but does not provide in-line PII masking for data ingestion.

Option C:Server-side encryption secures data but does not mask PII.

Option D:CloudHSM is unnecessary for PII masking and adds complexity without addressing the requirements.

AWS Documentation References:

Using Lambda with Kinesis Data Firehose

The requirement is to monitor network metrics such as total packet loss and round-trip time (RTT) between on-premises and AWS over Site-to-Site VPN with minimal operational overhead. AWS CloudWatch Network Monitor (formerly known as VPC Network Manager) provides a managed solution to monitor connectivity, including packet loss and latency, between AWS and on-premises networks. This solution does not require managing any additional infrastructure like EC2 instances or Lambda functions and thus reduces operational overhead significantly.

CloudWatch Network Monitor leverages AWS-managed probes and integrates natively with CloudWatch dashboards and alarms, enabling automated, centralized monitoring of network health. This aligns with the AWS Well-Architected Framework’s operational excellence pillar by minimizing manual intervention and enabling proactive detection of network issues.

Option B, C, and D involve creating custom probes with EC2, Lambda, or Batch jobs, which increases complexity, cost, and maintenance effort. They also require scheduling, script management, and additional monitoring infrastructure.

Amazon GuardDuty includes RDS Protection that “monitors and profiles access to your Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS databases” to detect threats such as suspicious login attempts, brute-force activity, and anomalous authentication patterns. GuardDuty can be enabled organization-wide in AWS Organizations with a delegated administrator to centralize findings for all member accounts, minimizing operational overhead. Findings include context like source IP, user, and DB instance, and integrate with Amazon EventBridge for alerting and automated response. SCPs (A) enforce or deny API permissions but do not provide detection/analytics. Exporting general logs (C) requires building and maintaining custom parsing/analytics pipelines. CloudTrail (D) records AWS control-plane API calls and does not log database-level login attempts. Therefore, enabling GuardDuty RDS Protection across the org provides the most operationally efficient, managed detection of abnormal failed and incomplete login attempts.

AWS Spot best practices recommend diversifying capacity across multiple instance types and Availability Zones and using the capacity-optimized (price-capacity-optimized) allocation strategy to choose pools with the deepest capacity for higher availability. Adding a small On-Demand base in the Auto Scaling group maintains steady, uninterrupted baseline processing while keeping costs low and absorbing Spot interruptions. Option C (lowest price) increases interruption risk. Capacity Reservations (B) target On-Demand capacity guarantees and add cost, not needed for Spot-based elasticity. Option E is redundant; diversification is already achieved with (D). This combination maximizes resiliency of Spot workloads while preserving strong cost efficiency and aligns with AWS guidance for fault-tolerant, stateless applications on Spot.

A. On-premises tool via internet:Incurs high costs due to large data transfers over the internet.

B. AWS Region tool via internet:Does not utilize Direct Connect, leading to potential latency and higher costs.

C. On-premises tool via Direct Connect:Adds latency for querying and visualization.

D. AWS Region tool via Direct Connect:Reduces latency and leverages Direct Connect for optimized data transfer costs.

Option Ais the most automated and cost-efficient solution for exporting data to S3 for analytics.

Option Binvolves manual setup of Streams to S3.

Options C and Dintroduce complexity with EMR.

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.

Auto Scalingis the most effective solution for ensuring seamless scalability of a stateless application. Key points:

Dleverages Auto Scaling with a Spot Fleet for cost efficiency and attaches an ALB to distribute traffic.

A and Bdo not provide automated scaling and would require manual intervention to add more instances.

Cchanges the instance type but does not scale out horizontally, which is required here.

AWS Documentation Reference:

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

AWS Transfer Family (SFTP) allows clients to use standard SFTP clients and SSH keys without changes. By enabling service-managed users, clients can continue uploading files with their existing tools.

The service delivers the files directly into S3, reducing latency between upload and processing. This removes the need for EC2, custom scripts, and periodic transfers. It fully meets the requirement for a managed solution with minimal disruption to client processes.

Amazon DocumentDB global clusters support managed cross-region failover, allowing you to promote a secondary region to become the new primary with minimal downtime. This ensures business continuity during maintenance or regional disruptions.

Reference Extract:

"Amazon DocumentDB global clusters support managed cross-Region failover, allowing you to recover quickly from regional disruptions with minimal downtime."

Source: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Official Study Guide, DocumentDB and Resiliency section.

AWS Global Accelerator reduces latency by directing users to the optimal Regional endpoint based on global network health and proximity. Amazon CloudFront caches static and dynamic content at edge locations for ultra-low latency access worldwide, improving performance and reducing server load.