SAA-C03 Exam Dumps - Amazon Web Services AWS Certified Associate Questions and Answers

Amazon Macie: Detects sensitive data such as PII in S3 buckets using machine learning.

EventBridge Rule: Filters Macie findings for specific sensitive data events (e.g., SensitiveData).

SNS Notification: Provides real-time alerts to the security team for immediate action.

Amazon Macie Documentation,Amazon EventBridge Documentation

Partition Key Issue:

Using " service name " as the partition key results in uneven data distribution. Some shards may become hot due to excessive logs from certain services, leading to throttling errors.

Changing the partition key to " creation timestamp " ensures a more even distribution of records across shards.

Incorrect Options Analysis:

Option A: On-demand capacity mode eliminates throughput management but is more expensive and does not address the root cause.

Option B: Adding more shards does not solve the issue if the partition key still creates hot shards.

Option D: Using separate streams increases complexity and is unnecessary.

AWS Direct Connect provides a dedicated network connection from on-premises to AWS, offering greater bandwidth and more consistent performance than internet-based connections or VPN. AWS PrivateLink enables secure, private connectivity to supported AWS services such as Kinesis Data Firehose over Direct Connect, bypassing the public internet and providing the highest throughput and lowest latency possible. This is the recommended solution for consistently transferring large volumes of data with maximum reliability and performance.

Reference Extract from AWS Documentation / Study Guide:

" AWS Direct Connect and AWS PrivateLink provide private, high-throughput connectivity between on-premises and AWS services, bypassing the public internet and ensuring maximum performance for large data transfers. "

Source: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Official Study Guide, Hybrid Networking section.

The requirement is secure, permanent connectivity to two VPCs without enabling VPC-to-VPC communication. Option B achieves this by establishing a separate Site-to-Site VPN connection between the remote office and each VPC. Updating each VPC’s route tables ensures traffic from the remote office reaches the correct VPC resources, while preventing routing between the VPCs themselves. Options involving transit gateways (A and D) would introduce transitive routing capabilities, which violates the requirement of isolation between VPCs. Option C (VPC peering) directly conflicts with the requirement by enabling cross-VPC access. Therefore, option B is the correct solution as it maintains isolation while providing secure VPN connectivity.

AWS Global Accelerator is a service that improves global application availability and performance using the AWS global network. It supports both TCP and UDP protocols and provides optimized routing and lower latency for real-time applications such as VoIP, regardless of where the user is located globally.

AWS Documentation Extract:

" AWS Global Accelerator uses the AWS global network to optimize the path to your application endpoints, improving performance for TCP and UDP traffic, such as VoIP. "

(Source: AWS Global Accelerator documentation)

B: CloudFront accelerates HTTP/S content, not TCP/UDP.

C: Route 53 geoproximity routing is for DNS-based routing, not for traffic acceleration.

D: Network Load Balancers support TCP/UDP, but do not address global latency or provide acceleration.

IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA) is the AWS-recommended mechanism to grant fine-grained, pod-level AWS permissions in Amazon EKS. IRSA avoids the security risks of granting permissions to the entire node and aligns with the principle of least privilege.

To implement IRSA, two core components are required. First, an IAM role must be created with a trust policy that references an OIDC identity provider associated with the EKS cluster. This is why Option E is required. The OIDC provider allows AWS STS to authenticate Kubernetes service accounts and issue temporary credentials. Without this trust relationship, service accounts cannot assume IAM roles securely.

Second, the Kubernetes service account must be explicitly annotated with the ARN of the IAM role it is allowed to assume. This is provided by Option D. The annotation creates a direct mapping between a specific service account and a specific IAM role, ensuring granular access control at the pod level.

Option A is incorrect because attaching policies to the node IAM role grants permissions to all pods on the node, which violates least-privilege principles. Option B addresses network-level access but does not control AWS API authorization. Option C is incorrect because IAM roles should not be overloaded with permissions for multiple service accounts, and there is no direct one-to-one mapping between IAM roles and Kubernetes roles in this way.

Therefore, D and E together form the correct and secure IRSA configuration, enabling granular, auditable, and secure access to AWS resources from EKS workloads.

AWS Glue provides a serverless ETL solution requiring minimal development. Glue supports conversion to Parquet with managed jobs and integrates with S3 for output.

AWS Documentation References:

AWS Glue Overview

AWS best practices strongly recommend enabling MFA on the root user, but they also emphasize planning for MFA device loss. AWS allows the configuration of multiple MFA devices for the root user, which provides redundancy and ensures continued access in disaster scenarios. Option B directly addresses the requirement by enabling a backup authentication method without weakening security controls.

Adding multiple MFA devices ensures that if one device is lost, damaged, or unavailable, the organization can still authenticate securely using the secondary device. This approach maintains strong security while eliminating the risk of permanent root account lockout. It also avoids time-consuming recovery processes that require contacting AWS Support and proving account ownership.

Option A is not sufficient because IAM administrator accounts do not replace root access and cannot perform certain root-only actions. Options C and D are not feasible because new administrator accounts or policy changes cannot be made if root access is already lost.

Therefore, B is the correct and AWS-recommended solution to ensure uninterrupted, secure access to the root account while maintaining MFA protection.

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.

A spread placement group is designed to deploy each instance on distinct underlying hardware, reducing the risk of simultaneous failures. By spreading instances across multiple Availability Zones, you achieve high availability and fault tolerance, meeting the 99.99% uptime requirement. Spread placement groups are ideal for critical applications that require maximum resilience to single hardware failures. Neither cluster nor partition strategies offer the same guarantee of separation combined with cross-AZ distribution.

Reference Extract from AWS Documentation / Study Guide:

" Spread placement groups are recommended for applications that have a small number of critical instances that should be kept separate from each other. Instances in a spread placement group are placed on distinct underlying hardware, and when deployed across multiple Availability Zones, provide high availability. "

Source: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Official Study Guide, Compute and High Availability section; Amazon EC2 Placement Groups Documentation.

AWS Lake Formation natively supports fine-grained access control, including:

Row-level security

Cell/column-level security

These are implemented through data filters and Lake Formation permissions on governed tables and views. This allows you to centrally define which users or groups can access which rows and which columns, including sensitive data fields, with minimal custom code or maintenance.

Why others are incorrect:

A: IAM alone does not provide row-level or cell-level data security inside Lake Formation tables.

C and D: Using Lambda to scrub or periodically remove sensitive data is complex, error-prone, and high overhead compared to built-in Lake Formation data filters.

Amazon API Gatewayprovides a scalable and reusable solution for interacting with DynamoDB without requiring direct access by developers. By setting up a REST API with a POST methodthat integrates with DynamoDB ' sPutItemaction, developers can submit data (such as user ratings) to the DynamoDB table through API Gateway, without having to directly interact with the database. This solution is serverless and minimizes operational overhead.

Option A: Using ALB with Lambda adds complexity and is less efficient for this use case.

Option B: While using Lambda is possible, API Gateway provides a more scalable, reusable interface.

Option C: SQS with Lambda introduces unnecessary components for a simple put operation.

AWS References:

Amazon API Gateway with DynamoDB

To allocate costs based on team ownership, AWS recommends tagging resources using cost allocation tags. Activating the “owner” tag as a cost allocation tag allows AWS Cost Explorer to categorize and group spending. Additionally, filtering for Amazon ECS services enables the visibility into service-specific usage. This approach is both scalable and operationally efficient.

Key Requirements:

High availability and automatic recovery.

Separate transactional and analytical queries with minimal performance impact.

Allow up to a 4-hour lag for analytical queries.

Analysis of Options:

Option A:

Multi-AZ deployments provide high availability but do not include read replicas for separating transactional and analytical queries.

Analytical queries on the secondary DB instance would impact the transactional workload.

Incorrect Approach:Does not meet the requirement of query separation.

Option B:

Multi-AZ DB clusters provide high availability and include a reader endpoint. However, these are better suited for Aurora and not RDS for MySQL.

Incorrect Approach:Not applicable to standard RDS for MySQL.

Option C:

Multiple read replicas allow separation of transactional and analytical workloads.

Queries can be pointed to a replica in a different AZ, ensuring no impact on transactional queries.

Correct Approach:Meets all requirements with high availability and query separation.

Option D:

Creating nightly snapshots and read-only databases adds significant operational overhead and does not support the 4-hour lag requirement.

Incorrect Approach:Not practical for dynamic query separation.

AWS Solution Architect References:

Amazon RDS Read Replicas

Multi-AZ Deployments