Amazon Web Services CLF-C02 - AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

 Amazon GuardDuty is a service that provides intelligent threat detection and continuous monitoring for your AWS accounts, workloads, and data. Amazon GuardDuty analyzes and processes data sources, such as VPC Flow Logs, AWS CloudTrail event logs, and DNS logs, to identify malicious activities and unauthorized actions, such as reconnaissance, instance compromise, account compromise, and data exfiltration. Amazon GuardDuty can also detect threats to your data stored in Amazon S3, such as API calls from unusual locations or disabling of preventative controls. Amazon GuardDuty generates findings that summarize the details of the detected threats and provides recommendations for remediation. AWS Shield, AWS Firewall Manager, and Amazon Inspector are not the best services to meet this requirement. AWS Shield is a service that provides protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. AWS Firewall Manager is a service that allows you to centrally configure and manage firewall rules across your accounts and resources. Amazon Inspector is a service that assesses the security and compliance of your applications running on EC2 instances.

 AWS Pricing Calculator lets customers explore AWS services, and create an estimate for the cost of their use cases on AWS. AWS Pricing Calculator can also compare the costs of different AWS Regions and configurations. Cost Explorer is a tool that enables customers to visualize, understand, and manage their AWS costs and usage over time. AWS Budgets gives customers the ability to set custom budgets that alert them when their costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) their budgeted amount. AWS Purchase Order Management is a feature that allows customers to pay for their AWS invoices using purchase orders.

Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment. It works seamlessly with services including AWS Shield for DDoS mitigation, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing or Amazon EC2 as origins for your applications, and Lambda@Edge to run custom code closer to customers’ users and to customize the user experience. By using CloudFront, you can cache your content at the edge locations that are closest to your end users, reducing the network latency and improving theperformance of your application. CloudFront also offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, so you only pay for the data transfer and requests that you use.

Amazon S3 is an AWS service that provides scalable, durable, and cost-effective object storage in the cloud. Amazon S3 can store any amount and type of data, such as server logs, and offers various storage classes with different performance and pricing characteristics. Amazon S3 is the most cost-effective option for storing server logs, as it offers low-cost storage classes, such as S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) and S3 Intelligent-Tiering, that are suitable for infrequently accessed or changing access patterns data. Amazon S3 also integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon Athena and Amazon OpenSearch Service, that can query the server logs directly from S3 without requiring any additional data loading or transformation. References: Amazon S3, Amazon S3 Storage Classes, Querying Data in Amazon S3

 Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail are the AWS services that allow users to monitor and retain records of account activities that include governance, compliance, and auditing. Amazon CloudWatch is a service that collects and tracks metrics, collects and monitors log files, and sets alarms. AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Shield, and AWS WAF are AWS services that provide security and protection for AWS resources, but they do not monitor and retain records of account activities. These concepts are explained in the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials course3.

AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience1. AWS Outposts enables customers to run workloads on premises using the same AWS APIs, tools, and services that they use in the cloud2. Dedicated Hosts are physical servers with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated to a customer’s use3. Availability Zones are one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, housed in separate facilities within an AWS Region4. AWS Wavelength is an AWS Infrastructure offering optimized for mobile edge computing applications.

 The AWS account root user is the email address that you use to sign up for AWS. The root user has complete access to all AWS services and resources in the account. The root user can perform tasks that only the root user can do, such as changing the AWS Support plan, closing the account, and restoring IAM user permissions34

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a service that provides a simple, scalable, fully managed elastic NFS file system for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. It is built to scale on demand to petabytes without disrupting applications, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, eliminating the need to provision and manage capacity to accommodate growth. You can use Amazon EFS to create a shared file system that can be available to both your on-premises data center and your AWS Cloud environment. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is a service that provides persistent block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. Each Amazon EBS volume is automatically replicated within its Availability Zone to protect you from component failure, offering high availability and durability. However, Amazon EBS volumes are not shared file systems, and they cannot be available to both your on-premises data center and your AWS Cloud environment. Amazon S3 is a service that provides object storage through a web services interface. You can use Amazon S3 to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as data lakes, websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big dataanalytics. However, Amazon S3 is not a shared file system, and it cannot be available to both your on-premises data center and your AWS Cloud environment without additional configuration. Amazon ElastiCache is a service that enables you to seamlessly set up, run, and scale popular open-source compatible in-memory data stores in the cloud. You can use Amazon ElastiCache to improve the performance of your applications by allowing you to retrieve information from fast, managed, in-memory data stores, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases. However, Amazon ElastiCache is not a shared file system, and it cannot be available to both your on-premises data center and your AWS Cloud environment.

Amazon Inspector is the AWS service that can be used to perform vulnerability scans on AWS EC2 instances for software vulnerabilities automatically in a periodic fashion. Amazon Inspector automatically discovers EC2 instances and scans them for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure. Amazon Inspector uses AWS Systems Manager (SSM) and the SSM Agent to collect information about the software application inventory of the EC2 instances. This data is then scanned by Amazon Inspector for software vulnerabilities12. Amazon Inspector also integrates with other AWS services, such as AmazonEventBridge and AWS Security Hub, to automate discovery, expedite vulnerability routing, and shorten mean time to remediate (MTTR) vulnerabilities2.

Amazon Timestream is a fast, scalable, and serverless time-series database service for IoT and other operational applications that makes it easy to store and analyze trillions of events per day up to 1,000 times faster and at as little as 1/10th thecost of relational databases1. Amazon Timestream saves you time and cost in managing the lifecycle of time series data, and its purpose-built query engine lets you access and analyze recent and historical data together with a single query1. Amazon Timestream has built-in time series analytics functions, helping you identify trends and patterns in near real time1.

The other options are not suitable for storing and analyzing trillions of events per day. Amazon Neptune is a graph database service that supports highly connected data sets. Amazon Forecast is a machine learning service that generates accurate forecasts based on historical data. Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a document database service that supports MongoDB workloads.

1: Time Series Database – Amazon Timestream – Amazon Web Services

Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances are instances that let you pay for compute capacity by the hour or second (minimum of 60 seconds) with no long-term commitments. This frees you from the costs and complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware and transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs. On-Demand Instances are suitable for applications with short-term, irregular, or unpredictable workloads that cannot be interrupted, such as periodic applications that run for a few hours most days, but run for 8 hours a day for a week at the end of each month2. Amazon EC2 Standard Reserved Instances are instances that provide you with a significant discount (up to 75%) compared to On-Demand Instance pricing. In exchange, you select a term and make an upfront payment to reserve a certain amount of compute capacity for that term. Reserved Instances are suitable for applications with steady state or predictable usage that require reserved capacity3. AWS Wavelength is a service that enables developers to build applications that deliver ultra-low latency to mobile devices and users by deploying AWS compute and storage at the edge of the 5G network. Wavelength is suitable for applications that requiresingle-digit millisecond latencies, such as game and live video streaming, machine learning inference at the edge, and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR). Application Load Balancer is a service that operates at the request level (layer 7) and distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, Lambda functions, and IP addresses. Application Load Balancer is suitable for applications that need advanced routing capabilities, such as microservices or container-based architectures.

The security best practices that should be followed are A and E.

A. Grant the developer access to only the AWS resources needed to perform the job. This is an example of the principle of least privilege, which means giving the minimum permissions necessary to achieve a task. This reduces the risk of unauthorized access, data leakage, or accidental damage to AWS resources.You canuse AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to create users, groups, roles, and policies that grant fine-grained access to AWS resources12.

E. Ensure the account password policy requires a minimum length. This is a basic security measure that helps prevent brute-force attacks or guessing of passwords. A longer password is harder to crack than a shorter one.You can use IAM to configure apassword policy that enforces a minimum password length, as well as other requirements such as complexity, expiration, and history34.

B. Share the AWS account root user credentials with the developer. This is a bad practice that should be avoided. The root user has full access to all AWS resources and services, and can perform sensitive actions such as changing billing information, closing the account, or deleting all resources. Sharing the root user credentials exposes your account to potential compromise or misuse.You should never share your root user credentials with anyone, and use them only for account administration tasks5.

C. Add the developer to the administrator’s group in IAM. This is also a bad practice that should be avoided. The administrator’s group has full access to all AWS resources and services, which is more than what a developer needs to perform their job. Adding the developer to the administrator’s group violates the principle of least privilege and increases the risk of unauthorized access, data leakage, or accidental damage to AWS resources.You should create a custom group for the developer that grants only the necessary permissions for their role12.

D. Configure a password policy that ensures the developer’s password cannot be changed. This is another bad practice that should be avoided. Preventing the developer from changing their password reduces their ability to protect their credentials and comply with security policies. For example, if the developer’s password is compromised, they cannot change it to prevent further unauthorized access. Or if the company requires periodic password rotation, they cannot update their password to meet this requirement.You should allow the developer to change their password as needed, and enforce a password policy that sets reasonable rules for password management34.

AWS IAM Access Analyzer is an AWS service that helps customers identify and review the resources in their AWS account that are shared with an external entity, such as another AWS account, a root user, an organization, or a public entity. AWS IAM Access Analyzer uses automated reasoning, a form of mathematical logic and inference, to analyze the resource-based policies in the account and generate comprehensive findings that show the access level, the source of the access, the affected resource, and the condition under which the access applies. Customers can use AWS IAM Access Analyzer to audit their shared resources, validate their access policies, and monitor any changes to the resource sharing status. References: AWSIAM Access Analyzer, Identify and review resources shared with external entities, How AWS IAM Access Analyzer works

Auto Scaling groups are a feature that allows users to automatically scale the number of Amazon EC2 instances up or down based on demand or a predefined schedule. Auto Scaling groups can helpimprove the performance and availability of applications by adjusting the capacity in response to traffic fluctuations1. AWS Global Accelerator is a service that improves the availability and performance of applications by routing traffic through AWS edge locations2. Amazon Route 53 is a service that provides scalable and reliable domain name system (DNS) service3. An Elastic IP address is a static IPv4 address that can be associated with an Amazon EC2 instance4.

Amazon EC2 usage is calculated by either the hour or the second based on the size of the instance, operating system, and the AWS Region where the instances are launched. Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance, from the time an instance is launched until it’s terminated or stopped. Each partial instance-hour consumed is billed per-second for Linuxinstances and as a full hour for all other instance types1. Therefore, the customer will be billed for 3 hours and 6 minutes for running an On-Demand Amazon Linux EC2 instance for 3 hours, 5 minutes, and 6 seconds. References: Understand Amazon EC2 instance-hours billing

 Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. You can start with just a few hundred gigabytes of data and scale to a petabyte or more. This enables you to use your data to acquire new insights for your business and customers. Amazon Redshift is a relational database management system (RDBMS), so it is compatible with other RDBMS applications. You can use standard SQL to query the data.

 These are two scenarios that represent the concept of elasticity on AWS. Elasticity means the ability to adjust the resources and capacity of the system in response to changes in demand or environment. Scaling the number of Amazon EC2 instances based on traffic means using services such as AWS Auto Scaling or Elastic Load Balancing to add or remove instances as the traffic increases or decreases. Resizing Amazon RDS instances as business needs change means using the Amazon RDS console or API to modify the instance type, storage type, or storage size of the database as the workload grows or shrinks. You can learn more about the concept of elasticity on AWS from [this webpage] or [this digital course].

 The AWS service or feature that the company should use to categorize and track AWS usage cost based on business categories is cost allocation tags. Cost allocation tags are key-value pairs that users can attach to AWS resources to organize and track their AWS costs. Users can use cost allocation tags to filter and group their AWS costs by categories such as project, department, environment, or application. Users can also use cost allocation tags to generate detailed billing reports that show the costs associated with each tag3. AWS Organizations, AWS Security Hub, and AWS Cost and Usage Report are other AWS services or features that can help users with different aspects of their AWS usage, such as managing multiple accounts, monitoring security issues, or analyzing billing data, but they do not enable users to categorize and track AWS costs based on business categories.

 A and B are correct because AWS CodeCommit is the AWS service that provides a fully managed source control service that hosts secure Git-based repositories1, and AWS CodeDeploy is the AWS service that automates code deployments to any instance, including Amazon EC2 instances and servers running on-premises2. These two services can be used together to store source code and update the running software when the code changes. C is incorrect because Amazon DynamoDB is the AWS service that provides a fully managed NoSQL database service that supports key-value and document data models3. It is not related to storing source code or updating software. D is incorrect because Amazon S3 is the AWS service that provides object storage through a web service interface4. It can be used to store source code, but it does not provide source control features or update software. E is incorrect because Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is the AWS service that allows users to run, scale, and secure Docker container applications. It can be used to deploy containerized software, but it does not store source code or update software.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides a simple, scalable, fully managed elastic NFS file system for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. It is built to scale on demand to petabytes without disrupting applications, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, eliminating the need to provision and manage capacity to accommodate growth. Amazon EFS offers two storage classes: the Standard storage class, and the Infrequent Access storage class (EFS IA). EFS IA provides price/performance that is cost-optimized for files not accessed every day. Amazon EFS encrypts data at rest and in transit, and supports direct access over the internet4.