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

AWS Control Tower provides a straightforward way to set up and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on AWS best practices. It automates the setup of a baseline environment, or landing zone, that includes:

Service Control Policies (SCPs): These are used to manage permissions across AWS Organizations, allowing you to set permission guardrails. SCPs can restrict access to specific AWS services and actions, helping enforce security best practices.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): AWS Control Tower can enforce MFA for the root user across all accounts, enhancing security.

Centralized Governance: It offers centralized logging and monitoring, making it easier to manage and audit multiple AWS accounts.

To authenticate users using an on-premises Active Directory Federation Service (AD FS), AWS provides the AWS Directory Service AD Connector. AD Connector is a proxy that connects AWS applications to your on-premises Microsoft Active Directory without requiring complex directory synchronization or the need to set up a separate directory in the cloud.

By integrating AD Connector with the Application Load Balancer (ALB), you can authenticate and authorize users using your existing on-premises credentials. This setup allows the ALB to leverage the authentication capabilities of your on-premises AD FS, providing a seamless and secure user experience.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation (from AWS Solutions Architect documentation):

Amazon DynamoDB supports two read consistency models: eventually consistent reads and strongly consistent reads. When an application must always receive the most up-to-date data, it must use strongly consistent reads. Eventually consistent reads can return stale data because they provide best-effort propagation across storage nodes.

Since the problem states that requests are “not returning the latest data,” the correct solution is to enable strongly consistent reads, which immediately reflect all successful writes. This is the explicit AWS-recommended method for ensuring clients always receive the most current version of an item.

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An S3 Bucket Key reduces the cost of using AWS KMS for server-side encryption by decreasing the number of requests made to KMS. By enabling S3 Bucket Key, the company can meet its encryption requirements with KMS keys while optimizing costs by reducing the number of KMS API requests.

Key AWS features:

Cost Optimization: S3 Bucket Keys reduce the frequency of KMS calls, optimizing the cost associated with encryption while still using AWS KMS for key management.

Compliance with KMS Encryption: This solution continues to meet the strict encryption requirements of the company by using KMS managed keys.

AWS Documentation: Using an S3 Bucket Key is recommended for organizations looking to optimize encryption costs without compromising security​​.

Compute Savings Plans apply to EC2, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda usage, maximizing coverage for mixed architectures while retaining flexibility across instance families, regions, OS, and tenancy. For private connectivity, Lambda functions must be configured with VPC access to attach ENIs in the target subnets, enabling direct network access to EC2 in private subnets (no public subnets are required for intra-VPC communication). EC2 Instance Savings Plans only discount EC2 usage and are tied to a specific instance family in a region, reducing flexibility and leaving Lambda costs undiscounted. Keeping Lambda in the service VPC prevents direct access to private EC2 without VPC configuration. Thus, a 1-year Compute Savings Plan plus connecting Lambda to the private subnets minimizes total cost and meets connectivity needs.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is designed for low-latency ingestion of streaming data. Combined with Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink, telemetry can be processed and aggregated in near real time. Processed metrics can be sent to Amazon CloudWatch, which natively supports creating dashboards, metrics visualization, and alarms. Firehose (B) is primarily for batch ingestion and delivery, not real-time analytics. EMR with Athena (C) introduces more complexity and is better for large-scale offline analytics. DynamoDB Streams (D) is not a fit because telemetry data is not stored in DynamoDB. Therefore, option A provides the most suitable and real-time analytics pipeline for telemetry data.

Amazon Macie is a fully managed data security and data privacy service that uses machine learning and pattern matching to discover and protect sensitive data in AWS. To scale across Regions and accounts in AWS Organizations, Macie supports delegated administration, automated sensitive data discovery, and multi-account aggregation through a centralized admin account.

AWS S3 Multi-Region Access Points enable customers to use a single global endpoint for S3 bucket access across multiple AWS Regions, providing automatic routing to the nearest Region. This reduces public network congestion by directing user data to the closest S3 bucket and supports high availability with active-active configuration.

Cross-Region Replication ensures data is replicated between buckets in different Regions, meeting the failover and resilience requirements with minimal management overhead.

Option D aligns best with AWS’s recommended approach to resilient, low-latency, and simplified multi-Region S3 access.

Option A lacks the global endpoint and automatic failover. Option B incorrectly describes Multi-Region Access Points configuration and suggests global endpoints per Region, which is contradictory. Option C’s cross-account replication adds complexity and does not provide a single global endpoint.

AWS Control Tower: Provides a managed service to set up and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on AWS best practices. It automates the setup of AWS Organizations and applies security controls (guardrails).

Networking Account:

Create a centralized networking account that includes a VPC with both private and public subnets.

This centralized VPC will manage and control the networking resources.

AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM):

Use AWS RAM to share the subnets from the networking account with the other workload accounts.

This allows different workload accounts to utilize the shared networking resources without the need to manage their own VPCs.

Operational Efficiency: Using AWS Control Tower simplifies the setup and governance of multiple AWS accounts, while AWS RAM facilitates centralized management of networking resources, reducing operational overhead and ensuring consistent security and compliance.

AWS Batch supports Windows-based jobs and automates provisioning and scaling of compute environments. Paired with AWS Fargate, it removes the need to manage infrastructure. This solution requires the least operational overhead and is cloud-native, providing flexibility and scalability.

AWS Config is a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. By creating a Config rule, you can automatically check whether your Amazon EBS volumes are encrypted and flag those that are not, with minimal cost and configuration effort.

AWS Config Rule: AWS Config provides managed rules that you can use to automatically check the compliance of your resources against predefined or custom criteria. In this case, you wouldcreate a rule to evaluate EBS volumes and determine if they are encrypted. If a volume is not encrypted, the rule will flag it, allowing you to take corrective action.

Operational Overhead: This approach significantly reduces operational overhead because once the rule is in place, it continuously monitors your EBS volumes for compliance, and there’s no need for manual checks or custom scripting.

Why Not Other Options?:

Option A (Lambda with API calls and EventBridge): While this can work, it involves writing and maintaining custom code, which increases operational overhead compared to using a managed AWS Config rule.

Option B (API calls on Fargate): Running API calls on Fargate is more complex and costly compared to using AWS Config, which provides a simpler, managed solution.

Option C (IAM policy with Cost Explorer): This option does not directly enforce encryption compliance and involves manual intervention, making it less efficient and more prone to errors.

AWS References:

AWS Config Rules- Overview of AWS Config rules and how they can be used to evaluate resource configurations.

Amazon EBS Encryption- Information on how to manage and enforce encryption for EBS volumes.

With AWS Shield Advanced, you can add multiple protected resources (like ALBs) to a protection group and choose an aggregation type for mitigation and billing.

Sum aggregation provides combined protection for all resources in the group during blue/green deployment.

“You can add multiple resources to a Shield Advanced protection group and choose an aggregation type. Sum aggregation provides combined protection across all resources.”

— Shield Advanced Protection Groups

This ensures the new ALB inherits protection and avoids additional configuration during deployment.

The best practice to securely provide short-term access to AWS resources, such as Amazon S3, without using long-term credentials, is to use AWS Security Token Service (STS). According to the AWS IAM Best Practices and the Security Pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, temporary credentials should always be used over long-term credentials when possible.

From AWS IAM Documentation:

“Use temporary credentials (IAM roles and AWS STS) instead of long-term access keys. Temporary security credentials are short-term, automatically expire, and are retrieved using AWS STS.”

(Source: IAM Best Practices – IAM User Guide)

Option D outlines the use of a trust relationship and assume-role mechanism via AWS STS. This allows the on-premises application to request temporary, scoped-down credentials to upload files to S3 securely. This approach is:

Secure – Uses short-lived credentials with least privilege

Scalable – No need for EC2 or VPN tunnels

Low Operational Overhead – No infrastructure to maintain

AWS-Recommended – Aligned with security best practices

In contrast:

Option A uses long-term credentials, which is a security risk.

Option B requires additional infrastructure (EC2, VPN), increasing complexity and cost.

Option C relies on IP-based access, which is insecure and not a form of identity-based authentication.

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.