Free Amazon Web Services SOA-C03 Practice Exam with Questions & Answers | Set: 2

Layer 7 (application-layer) HTTP status codes such as 200, 404, and 500 are generated by web-facing services that process HTTP requests. In this architecture, both CloudFront and the Application Load Balancer (ALB) operate at Layer 7 and record HTTP response information in their access logs.

ALB access logs include detailed request and response data such as client IP address, request path, target response status code, and latency. These logs are essential for analyzing how backend EC2 instances respond to client requests.

CloudFront access logs record viewer requests and responses at the edge locations. These logs also include HTTP status codes returned to the client, making them critical for understanding end-user experience and edge-level behavior.

VPC Flow Logs capture network-level (Layer 3 and 4) traffic metadata such as source IP, destination IP, ports, and protocol. They do not contain HTTP status codes. AWS CloudTrail logs API calls to AWS services and does not capture application response codes. RDS logs contain database-related information, not HTTP responses.

Therefore, the correct sources for HTTP Layer 7 status codes are ALB access logs and CloudFront access logs.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of AWS CloudOps Documents:

The correct answer is B because cross-account role assumption requires two explicit permissions. AWS CloudOps documentation states that the target role must trust the principal, and the principal must be allowed to call sts:AssumeRole.

In the member account, the role’s trust policy must list the IAM group ARN (or the identity account) as a trusted principal. In the identity account, the IAM group must have an inline or attached policy that allows the sts:AssumeRole action for the target role ARN. This dual configuration enables secure and controlled cross-account access.

Option A is incorrect because trust policies cannot be attached to IAM groups. Option C is incorrect because sts:PassRole is used for passing roles to AWS services, not for assuming roles. Option D is incorrect because roles do not grant permissions via inline policies to principals.

This approach aligns precisely with AWS CloudOps guidance for multi-account IAM design.

AWS CodePipeline is the correct managed CI/CD service for automating infrastructure deployments from a Git repository while preserving approval gates. A pipeline can use GitHub or another supported source provider, create CloudFormation change sets, and include a manual approval action before executing the change set. Notifications can be sent through Amazon SNS so approvers are informed before deployment proceeds. This meets all requirements: automated updates, change set generation, approval notification, and low infrastructure maintenance. CloudFormation Git sync can automate stack updates from a repository, but the option describes notification only after deployment, which does not satisfy the pending approval requirement. A Lambda-based workflow would require custom orchestration and approval handling. Systems Manager Automation is not the standard Git-driven CloudFormation deployment pipeline tool. Therefore, CodePipeline with CloudFormation change sets is best.

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High availability for an EC2-based web application behind an ALB is primarily achieved by eliminating single points of failure at the infrastructure layer. A single Availability Zone (AZ) deployment is vulnerable to AZ-level impairment (power/network issues, facility events, or service disruptions). The most direct and standard AWS approach is to distribute the Auto Scaling group across multiple AZs within the same Region.

Updating the Auto Scaling group to use subnets in at least two AZs allows instances to be launched across AZs automatically. The ALB is built to route traffic across targets in multiple AZs, and Auto Scaling can replace unhealthy instances in any enabled AZ. This provides resilience without the complexity of multi-Region architectures.

Options A and B address capacity for peak load but do not address the core availability requirement. Even with more instances, a full AZ outage would still take the entire application down if all instances are in the same AZ.

Option D (multi-Region) can improve resilience further, but it introduces significantly more operational overhead: cross-Region traffic routing, data replication, DNS failover strategy, application state handling, and potentially active-active or active-passive designs. For “make the application highly available” from a single-AZ baseline, multi-AZ in the same Region is the standard, least-overhead improvement.

The AWS Cloud Operations and Security documentation specifies that for Amazon CloudFront, automatic certificate renewal is only supported for certificates issued by AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). When a certificate is managed by ACM and validated through DNS validation, ACM automatically renews the certificate before expiration without requiring manual intervention.

Option A ensures that the certificate is issued and managed by ACM, enabling full integration with CloudFront. Option E (DNS validation) is essential for automation; AWS performs revalidation automatically as long as the DNS validation record remains in place.

By contrast, email validation (Option D) requires manual user confirmation upon renewal, which prevents automatic renewals. Certificates issued by third-party certificate authorities (Option B) are manually managed and must be reimported into ACM after renewal. CloudFront does not have a direct feature (Option C) to renew certificates; it relies on ACM’s lifecycle management.

Thus, combining ACM-issued certificates (A) with DNS validation (E) ensures continuous, automated renewal with no downtime or human action required.

According to the AWS Cloud Operations and Identity Management documentation, when configuring federation between IAM Identity Center (formerly AWS SSO) and an external SAML 2.0 identity provider, two key prerequisites are required:

The IAM Identity Center SAML metadata file — This is uploaded to the external IdP to establish trust, define SAML endpoints, and enable identity federation.

The IdP metadata (including the public X.509 certificate) — This information is imported into IAM Identity Center to validate authentication assertions and encryption signatures.

IAM Identity Center and the IdP exchange this metadata to mutually establish secure, bidirectional federation.

Network-level details such as IP addresses (Option C) are unnecessary. Root access (Option D) or permissions to member accounts (Option E) are not required; only Control Tower or IAM administrative permissions in the management account are needed for setup.

Thus, the correct answer is A and B — the SAML metadata from both sides is required for federation.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of AWS CloudOps Documents:

The correct answer is C. Create a store image task. Specify the image ID and the destination S3 bucket, because this is the only AWS-supported solution that allows an AMI to be backed up to Amazon S3 and later restored while preserving the original AMI ID. This capability is essential for regulatory and compliance requirements where immutable identifiers must be retained.

According to AWS CloudOps documentation for Amazon EC2 AMI lifecycle management, the AMI store and restore feature is specifically designed for long-term retention, audit, and compliance scenarios. When an AMI is stored using a store image task, AWS packages the AMI’s configuration, metadata, and associated snapshots and saves them as encrypted objects in an Amazon S3 bucket. When the AMI is restored, AWS explicitly states that the restored AMI retains the same AMI ID as the original image, ensuring continuity for compliance tracking and operational dependencies.

Option A is incorrect because copying an AMI always results in a new AMI ID, even when copied within the same AWS Region. Option B is incorrect because archiving snapshots to Amazon S3 does not preserve AMI metadata or identity; restoring from snapshots requires creating a new AMI with a different ID. Option D is incorrect because the copy-image command is intended for cross-Region or cross-account AMI duplication and also generates a new AMI ID.

AWS CloudOps best practices clearly identify store image tasks as the correct mechanism when AMI identity preservation is required for governance, auditability, and compliance controls.

Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals is designed to provide built-in observability for containerized workloads, including Amazon EKS. It automatically collects golden signals such as latency, traffic, errors, and saturation without requiring complex instrumentation.

Application Signals supports SLO definition and SLI monitoring and correlates metrics, logs, and traces within CloudWatch. This significantly reduces operational overhead compared to manually configuring OpenTelemetry pipelines, Prometheus, and Grafana.

CloudWatch RUM and Synthetics focus on frontend monitoring, not backend service observability. Application Insights does not provide full SLO/SLI support for EKS workloads.

Therefore, CloudWatch Application Signals is the correct and least-effort solution.

VPC Flow Logs require permissions to create log groups and log streams in Amazon CloudWatch Logs. If the IAM role associated with the flow log lacks the logs:CreateLogGroup permission, CloudWatch Logs cannot be created and no logs will appear.

Option B is unrelated because CreateExportTask is used for exporting logs, not publishing them. IPv6 configuration and VPC peering do not prevent flow logs from being delivered.

Ensuring the IAM role has the correct CloudWatch Logs permissions resolves the issue.

According to the AWS Cloud Operations and Compute documentation, when workloads exhibit predictable traffic patterns, the best practice is to use scheduled scaling for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups.

With scheduled scaling, administrators can predefine the desired capacity of an Auto Scaling group to increase before anticipated demand (in this case, before the 2-hour peak) and scale back down afterward. This ensures that sufficient compute capacity is provisioned proactively, avoiding performance degradation while maintaining cost efficiency.

AWS notes: “Scheduled actions enable scaling your Auto Scaling group at predictable times, allowing you to pre-warm instances before demand spikes.”

Manual scaling (Option D) adds operational overhead. Adjusting launch templates (Option B) doesn’t affect scaling behavior, and permanently increasing minimum capacity (Option A) wastes resources outside of peak hours.

Thus, Option C provides an automated, cost-effective, and operationally efficient CloudOps solution.