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

State Machine Testing with Logs:

Changing the log level to ALL enables capturing detailed request and response data. This helps verify HTTP headers, body, and responses.

Incorrect Options Analysis:

Option A and B: The TestState API is not a valid option for Step Functions.

Option C: A data flow simulator does not exist for AWS Step Functions.

AWS Shield Advanced provides advanced DDoS protection for AWS workloads, including EC2, CloudFront, and RDS. When integrated with CloudFront, Shield Advanced offers comprehensive detection and mitigation against large and sophisticated DDoS attacks, along with 24x7 access to the AWS DDoS Response Team (DRT). AWS WAF provides application-level protection, but for complete DDoS mitigation, Shield Advanced is the recommended solution.

Reference Extract from AWS Documentation / Study Guide:

"AWS Shield Advanced provides expanded DDoS attack protection for applications running on AWS. It offers always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency."

Source: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Official Study Guide, Security and DDoS Protection section.

The first step is to configure a delegated administrator account for IAM Access Analyzer at the organization level. Only after delegating the administrator account can you aggregate Access Analyzer findings from all member accounts into a designated audit account. This must be set up in the AWS Organizations management account.

AWS Documentation Extract:

“You must designate a delegated administrator for IAM Access Analyzer at the organization level. The delegated administrator account aggregates findings from all member accounts.”

(Source: IAM Access Analyzer documentation)

A, C, D: These steps do not establish the organization-wide aggregation required for Access Analyzer.

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

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database engineered for extremely high throughput and millisecond-level response times at any scale. It can automatically scale to support millions of requests per second and requires no management of infrastructure, storage provisioning, or server maintenance.

AWS documentation specifically highlights DynamoDB as the optimal solution for ecommerce workloads that require consistent low-latency performance, massive scalability, and near-zero operational overhead.

Aurora and RDS cannot support millions of requests per second, and Redshift is a data warehouse not intended for transactional workloads.

Compute Savings Plansoffer the most flexible and cost-effective solution for the production instances, as they provide significant savings (up to 66%) for both EC2 and AWS Lambda usage, while allowing flexibility in the type of instance family, size, and even region. For nonproduction instances, usingOn-Demand Instancesensures you only pay for the instances when they are running, and shutting them down during off-hours further optimizes cost.

Key AWS features:

Compute Savings Plans: Provide savings based on consistent usage, making it ideal for production environments with steady load.

On-Demand Instances: Suitable for nonproduction environments that are used intermittently. Shutting them down when not in use avoids unnecessary costs.

AWS Documentation: According to AWS's cost optimization best practices, using a combination of Savings Plans for production and On-Demand Instances for nonproduction environments that are used sparingly results in optimal cost savings​​.

Option B: Pre-signed URLs provide temporary, authenticated access to S3, limiting uploads to the time frame specified. This solution is lightweight, efficient, and easy to implement.

Option Arequires the management of IAM temporary credentials, adding complexity.

Option Cinvolves unnecessary development effort.

Option Dintroduces more complexity with STS and roles than pre-signed URLs.

To restrict S3 access to a specific VPC, AWS documentation specifies using a Deny policy with aws:SourceVpc for all unmatched VPCs:

Deny if aws:SourceVpc != vpc-11aabb22

This ensures only that VPC can reach the bucket via a VPC endpoint.

Allow policies (Options B and C) are incorrectly structured or use the wrong condition logic.

Option D limits by account, not VPC, and does not enforce VPC-level access.

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To build a distributed, serverless, event-driven workflow with minimal operational overhead, AWS Step Functions orchestrating AWS Lambda is the best fit. Step Functions provides a managed state machine service that coordinates multiple steps, handles retries and error handling patterns, and maintains execution state without requiring the company to run orchestration servers. Lambda provides serverless compute for each workflow task, scaling automatically with demand and eliminating server management.

Option D directly matches “performing different aspects of the workflow” because Step Functions is specifically designed to model multi-step business processes and coordinate activities across services. It also aligns with “minimize operational overhead” because both Step Functions and Lambda are managed services: there are no instances to patch, no cluster management, and scaling is handled by the platform.

Option B contradicts the serverless goal by deploying the application on EC2 instances, increasing operational overhead (capacity management, patching, scaling, and availability concerns). Option C mixes eventing with scheduling: EventBridge can route events, but invoking Lambda “on a schedule” is not the same as orchestrating a multi-step workflow with branching, waiting, retries, compensation, and state tracking. EventBridge is excellent as an event bus, but Step Functions is the purpose-built workflow orchestrator. Option A is a mismatch because AWS Glue is primarily an ETL/data integration service; while it can run jobs and triggers, it is not the general workflow orchestrator for arbitrary application steps, and using it to invoke Lambda for a broad workflow is less direct and typically less operationally clean than a Step Functions state machine.

Therefore, D is the most aligned solution for serverless, distributed workflow orchestration with low operational burden.

To ensure ALB access only via CloudFront, AWS prescribes restricting the origin to traffic from CloudFront. For ALB origins, the standard pattern is to allow inbound to the ALB only from CloudFront edge IP ranges using security groups or ALB listener rules. Network ACLs are coarse and stateless and add operational burden. CloudFront does not have a “VPC origin” object; instead, CloudFront references the ALB DNS name. By limiting the ALB’s security group to CloudFront IP ranges, direct client access to the ALB is blocked while CloudFront remains permitted. This aligns with security best practices to “restrict origin access to only CloudFront” and use SGs for instance/ALB layer controls.

DynamoDB Global Tablesprovide a fully managed, multi-region, and multi-master database solution that allows you to deploy DynamoDB tables in multiple AWS Regions. This ensures high availability and resiliency across different geographical locations, providing a seamlessgaming experience for users. Usingprovisioned capacity modewithauto-scalingensures cost-efficiency by scaling up or down based on actual demand.

Option A: While on-demand capacity mode is flexible, provisioned capacity with auto-scaling is more cost-effective for predictable workloads.

Option B (DAX): DAX improves read performance, but it doesn't provide the multi-region replication needed for high availability and resiliency.

Option C: DynamoDB Streams with manual cross-region replication adds more complexity and operational overhead compared to Global Tables.

AWS References:

DynamoDB Global Tables

To meet the requirement of deleting objects older than 3 years while retaining certain data, this solution leverages serverless technologies to minimize operational overhead.

S3 Inventory: S3 Inventory provides a flat file that lists all the objects in an S3 bucket and their metadata, which can be configured to include data such as the last modified date. This inventory can be generated daily or weekly.

AWS Lambda Function: A Lambda function can be created to process the S3 Inventory report, filtering out the objects that need to be retained and identifying those that should be deleted.

S3 Batch Operations: S3 Batch Operations can execute tasks such as object deletion at scale. By invoking the Lambda function through S3 Batch Operations, you can automate the process of deleting the identified objects, ensuring that the solution is serverless and requires minimal operational management.

Why Not Other Options?:

Option A (AWS CLI script on EC2): Running a script on an EC2 instance adds unnecessary operational overhead and is not serverless.

Option B (AWS Batch): AWS Batch is designed for running large-scale batch computing workloads, which is overkill for this scenario.

Option C (AWS Glue + script): AWS Glue is more suited for ETL tasks, and this approach would add unnecessary complexity compared to the serverless Lambda solution.

AWS References:

Amazon S3 Inventory- Information on how to set up and use S3 Inventory.

S3 Batch Operations- Documentation on how to perform bulk operations on S3 objects using S3 Batch Operations.

Amazon Aurora MySQL–compatible offers a distributed, fault-tolerant storage system with Multi-AZ high availability and supports Aurora Replicas that “share the same underlying storage” for low-latency reads. Aurora provides Aurora Auto Scaling to “automatically add or remove Aurora Replicas based on load,” ideal for unpredictable, read-heavy workloads. This architecture offloads reads from the writer and maintains HA through automatic failover. Amazon RDS Single-AZ (B) lacks HA. Redshift (A) is a data warehouse, not a transactional DB. ElastiCache (D) can reduce read pressure but does not provide durable read replicas or automatic HA scaling at the database tier. Aurora’s design directly addresses the requirement to automatically scale reads while maintaining availability, matching Well-Architected guidance to use managed, elastic services for variable demand.

To ensure that only specific AWS Lambda functions can read from or write to an Amazon SQS queue, useresource-based policiesattached directly to the SQS queue. These policies explicitly grant permissions to the IAM roles used by the Lambda functions. Additionally, the Lambda execution roles must also have IAM policies that permit SQS access. This dual-layer approach follows the AWS security best practice of granting least privilege access and ensures that no other service or entity can interact with the queue.

This is a common and supported pattern documented in theAmazon SQS Developer Guide, where resource-based policies restrict access at the queue level while IAM roles control permissions at the function level.

AmazonEventBridgeAPI destinations allow you to send data from AWS to external systems, like Salesforce, using HTTP APIs, including those secured with OAuth. This provides a secure and scalable solution for sending messages from the order processing application to Salesforce.

Option A and B (SNS): SNS is not ideal for OAuth-secured external APIs and lacks the necessary OAuth integration.

Option D (MSK): Amazon MSK is a Kafka-based streaming solution, which is overkill for simple message forwarding to Salesforce.

AWS References:

Amazon EventBridge API Destinations

To meet the requirements, the key must support automatic rotation, and the company must be able to disable (deactivate) the key and schedule deletion. In AWS KMS, these lifecycle controls are available for customer managed keys. Automatic key rotation is supported for symmetric customer managed KMS keys used for encryption and decryption operations. When automatic rotation is enabled, AWS KMS generates new cryptographic material for the key on a regular schedule while the key ID remains the same, helping organizations meet compliance and security best practices without manual operational work.

Option C is the only choice that explicitly combines a symmetric customer managed key with automatic rotation enabled, which directly satisfies the rotation requirement. As a customer managed key, it can also be disabled (to prevent use) and scheduled for deletion (with a waiting period), meeting the rest of the lifecycle needs.

Option A is incorrect because automatic rotation is not generally available for asymmetric KMS keys in the same way; asymmetric keys are used for specialized use cases such as signing or asymmetric encryption, and rotation behavior differs. Options B and D mention “disabling envelope encryption,” which is not a configurable “option” you turn off in KMS; envelope encryption is a recommended pattern where KMS protects data keys, and services commonly use it under the hood. Those options therefore do not describe a valid configuration that meets the requirement.

Therefore, the correct solution is to create a symmetric customer managed KMS key and enable automatic rotation, while using standard KMS controls to disable and schedule deletion when required.