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

Maintaining two NAT gateways for production ensures high availability. Reducing to one NAT gateway in non-production environments lowers cost while maintaining necessary connectivity. This approach is recommended by AWS for cost optimization in non-critical environments.

Reference Extract:

"For environments that do not require high availability, you can reduce costs by using a single NAT gateway and updating route tables accordingly."

Source: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Official Study Guide, Cost Optimization and NAT Gateway section.

This solution is the most cost-effective and meets the RPO and RTO requirements of 24 hours.

Automatic Snapshots: Amazon RDS automatically creates snapshots of your DB instance at regular intervals. By copying these snapshots to another AWS Region every 24 hours, you ensure that you have a backup available in a different geographic location, providing disaster recovery capability.

RPO and RTO: Since the company’s RPO and RTO are both 24 hours, copying snapshots daily to another Region is sufficient. In the event of a disaster, you can restore the DB instance from the most recent snapshot in the target Region.

Why Not Other Options?:

Option A (Cross-Region Read Replica): This could provide a faster recovery time but is more costly due to the ongoing replication and resource usage in another Region.

Option B (DMS Cross-Region Replication): While effective for continuous replication, it introduces complexity and cost that isn’t necessary given the 24-hour RPO/RTO.

Option C (Cross-Region Native Backup Copy): This involves more manual steps and doesn’t offer as straightforward a solution as automated snapshot copying.

AWS References:

Amazon RDS Automated Backups and Snapshots- Details on automated backups and snapshots in RDS.

Copying an Amazon RDS DB Snapshot- How to copy DB snapshots to another Region.

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.

Amazon S3 uses gateway VPC endpoints, which enable private, secure access to S3 without traversing the internet, compatible with IPv6.

Amazon DynamoDB uses interface VPC endpoints (powered by AWS PrivateLink) for private connectivity within the VPC.

Therefore, for secure private communication without public internet, the correct solution is to implement a gateway VPC endpoint for S3 and an interface VPC endpoint for DynamoDB.

Option B is incorrect because S3 does not support interface endpoints; Option C is incorrect because DynamoDB does not support gateway endpoints. Option D reverses the correct endpoint types.

AWS Glue Crawler: AWS Glue is a fully managed ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) service that makes it easy to prepare and load data for analytics. A Glue crawler can automatically discover new data and schema in Amazon S3, making it easy to keep the data catalog up-to-date.

Crawling the Data:

Set up an AWS Glue crawler to scan the S3 bucket containing the clickstream data.

The crawler will automatically detect the schema and create/update the tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog.

Amazon Athena:

Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL.

Once the data catalog is updated by the Glue crawler, use Athena to query the clickstream data directly in S3.

Operational Efficiency: This solution leverages fully managed services, reducing operational overhead. Glue crawlers automate data cataloging, and Athena provides a serverless, pay-per-query model for quick data analysis without the need to set up or manage infrastructure.

Amazon Route 53 Multivalue Answer Routing: This routing policy allows Route 53 to return multiple values, such as IP addresses, in response to DNS queries. This can distribute traffic across multiple resources and includes health checks to ensure traffic is only routed to healthy instances.

Health Checks:

Configure health checks for each Region to monitor the health of the website instances.

Route 53 will only include healthy instances in the DNS responses, ensuring that traffic is not routed to an unhealthy Region.

Load Distribution and Disaster Recovery:

Multivalue answer routing helps balance the load between instances in different Regions.

If instances in one Region become unhealthy, Route 53 will route traffic to the healthy instances in the other Region.

Operational Simplicity: This solution does not require complex configurations or additional resources, making it a simple yet effective way to distribute traffic and ensure high availability.

Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) is a network interface for Amazon EC2 instances that enables high throughput, low-latency networking, and OS-bypass capabilities. EFAs are designed for applications that require fast inter-node communications, such as HPC, ML, and real-time analytics. EFA provides significantly lower latency than traditional networking, which is ideal for real-time streaming and processing workloads.

Reference Extract from AWS Documentation / Study Guide:

"Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) provides low-latency, high-throughput network communications required by high-performance computing applications, enabling fast, scalable, and tightly-coupled workloads on AWS."

Source: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Official Study Guide, EC2 Networking section.

Amazon RDS Proxy helps manage and pool database connections from serverless compute like AWS Lambda, significantly reducing the stress on the database during unpredictable traffic surges. It improves scalability and resiliency by efficiently managing connections, protecting the database from being overwhelmed, and enabling failover handling.

Option A is the most cost-effective and operationally efficient approach to handling unpredictable surges and improving resilience without requiring major application changes.

Option B involves a migration to DynamoDB, which is a significant architectural change and costlier initially. Option C is manual connection cleanup, insufficient for unpredictable surges. Option D increases resources but does not solve connection storm problems efficiently and is more costly.

Key Problem:

Delayed Inventory table updates during peak sales.

DynamoDB Streams and Lambda processing require optimization.

Analysis of Options:

Option A:Adding a GSI is unrelated to the issue. It does not address stream processing delays or capacity issues.

Option B:Optimizing batch size reduces latency and allows the Lambda function to process larger chunks of data at once, improving performance during peak load.

Option C:Increasing write capacity for the Inventory table ensures that it can handle the increased volume of updates during peak times.

Option D:Increasing read capacity for the Orders table does not directly resolve the issue since the problem is with updates to the Inventory table.

Option E:Increasing Lambda timeout only addresses longer processing times but does not solve the underlying throughput problem.

AWS References:

DynamoDB Streams Best Practices

Provisioned Throughput in DynamoDB

Key Requirements:

Protect public endpoints (CloudFront distributions and ALBs) frommalicious attacks.

Centralizedmanagementacross multiple accounts in an organization.

Ability tomonitor security configurationseffectively.

Minimizeoperational overhead.

Analysis of Options

Option A:

AWS WAF:Protects web applications by filtering and blocking malicious requests. Rules can be applied to both ALBs and CloudFront distributions.

AWS Firewall Manager:Enables centralized management of WAF rules across multiple accounts in an AWS Organizations organization. It simplifies rule deployment, avoiding the need to configure rules individually in each account.

AWS Config:Monitors compliance by using rules that check Regional and global WAF configurations. Ensures that security configurations align with organizational policies.

Operational Overhead:Centralized management and automated monitoring reduce the operational burden.

Correct Approach:Meets all requirements with the least overhead.

Option B:

This approach involves applying WAF rules in each account manually.

While AWS Config and AWS Security Hub provide monitoring capabilities, managing individual WAF configurations in multiple accounts introduces significant operational overhead.

Incorrect Approach:Higher overhead compared to centralized management with AWS Firewall Manager.

Option C:

Similar to Option A but includesAmazon Inspector, which is not designed for monitoring WAF configurations.

AWS Security Hubis appropriate for monitoring but is redundant when Firewall Manager and Config are already in use.

Incorrect Approach:Adds unnecessary complexity and does not focus on monitoring WAF specifically.

Option D:

AWS Shield Advanced:Focuses on mitigating large-scale DDoS attacks but does not provide the fine-grained web application protection offered by WAF.

AWS Config:Can monitor Shield Advanced configurations but does not fulfill the WAF monitoring requirements.

Incorrect Approach:Does not address the need for WAF or centralized rule management.

Why Option A is Correct

Protection:

AWS WAF provides fine-grained filtering and protection against SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and other web vulnerabilities.

Rules can be applied at both ALBs and CloudFront distributions, covering all public endpoints.

Centralized Management:

AWS Firewall Manager enables security teams to centrally define and manage WAF rules across all accounts in the organization.

Monitoring:

AWS Config ensures compliance with WAF configurations by checking rules and generating alerts for misconfigurations.

Operational Overhead:

Centralized management via Firewall Manager and automated compliance monitoring via AWS Config greatly reduce manual effort.

AWS Solution Architect References

AWS WAF Documentation

AWS Firewall Manager Documentation

AWS Config Best Practices

AWS Organizations Documentation