CLF-C02 Exam Results

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.

IAM roles are a way to delegate access to resources in different AWS accounts. IAM roles allow users to assume a set of permissions for a limited time without having to create or share long-term credentials. IAM roles can be used to grant cross-account access by creating a trust relationship between the accounts and specifying the permissions that the role can perform. Users can then switch to the role and access the resources in the other account using temporary security credentials provided by the role. References: Cross account resource access in IAM, IAM tutorial: Delegate access across AWS accounts using IAM roles, How to Enable Cross-Account Access to the AWS Management Console

According to the AWS shared responsibility model, AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, which includes the tasks of monitoring the health of an Availability Zone and protecting the infrastructure that runs Amazon EC2 instances. An Availability Zone is a physically isolated location within an AWS Region that has its own power, cooling, and network connectivity. AWS monitors the health and performance of each Availability Zone and notifies customers of any issues or disruptions. AWS also protects the infrastructure that runs AWS services, such as Amazon EC2, by implementing physical, environmental, and operational security measures. AWS is not responsible for patching an Amazon EC2 instance operating system, configuring a security group, or managing access to the data in an Amazon S3 bucket. These are the customer’s responsibilities for security in the cloud. The customer must ensure that the operating system and applications on their EC2 instances are up to date and secure. The customer must also configure the security group rules that control the inbound and outbound traffic for their EC2 instances. The customer must also manage the access permissions and encryption settings for their S3 buckets and objects2

 IAM roles are a secure way to grant permissions to applications running on an Amazon EC2 instance to make calls to other AWS services. IAM roles are entities that have specific permissions policies attached to them. You can create an IAM role and associate it with an EC2 instance when you launch it or later. The applications on the instance can then use the temporary credentials provided by the role to access AWS resources that the role allows. This way, you do not have to store any long-term credentials or access keys on the instance, which reduces the risk of compromise or misuse12.

The other options are not correct, because:

• Security groups are virtual firewalls that control the inbound and outbound traffic for your EC2 instances. Security groups do not grant permissions to access other AWS services, but rather filter the network traffic based on rules that you define3.
• AWS Firewall Manager is a service that helps you centrally configure and manage firewall rules across your accounts and resources. AWS Firewall Manager works with AWS WAF, AWS Shield Advanced, and Amazon VPC security groups. AWS Firewall Manager does not grant permissions to access other AWS services, but rather helps you enforce consistent security policies across your AWS infrastructure4.
• IAM user SSH keys are credentials that allow you to connect to your EC2 instance using SSH. SSH keys do not grant permissions to access other AWS services, but rather authenticate your identity when you log in to your instance5.

References:

• Using an IAM role to grant permissions to applications running on Amazon EC2 instances - AWS Identity and Access Management
• IAM roles for Amazon EC2 - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
• Security groups for your VPC - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
• What is AWS Firewall Manager? - AWS Firewall Manager
• Connecting to your Linux instance using SSH - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud