Amazon Web Services DOP-C02 - AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional

The operating system (Amazon Linux) uses yum for package management. To use both the default and a custom repository, the simplest method is to add the custom repository configuration file under /etc/yum.repos.d/ using the yum-config-manager CLI, and enable it. This allows the system to access both repositories during patching automatically.

This approach requires minimal setup and effort and leverages the existing yum patching mechanisms.

Option A and D involve managing multiple patch baselines in Systems Manager Patch Manager, which does not natively support custom repositories — it relies on the underlying OS package manager.

Option B (Direct Connect) is not necessary unless network connectivity is an issue.

Thus, option C meets the requirement with the least effort.

To meet the requirements, the DevOps engineer needs to configure the CloudWatch alarm to stop the EC2 instances when the average of the NetworkPacketsIn metric is less than 5 for at least 3 hours in a 12-hour time window. This means that the alarm should trigger when 3 out of 12 datapoints are below the threshold of 5. The alarm should also treat missing data as not breaching the threshold, so that the EC2 instances continue to run if there is no data for the metric during the evaluation period. The DevOps engineer can add an EC2 action to stop the instance when the alarm enters the ALARM state, which is a built-in action type for CloudWatch alarms.

Use a Service Control Policy (SCP) with a Null condition on lambda:VpcIds to deny Lambda function creation or update when not VPC-attached. This enforces compliance across all accounts automatically without manual remediation, aligning with AWS Control Tower governance recommendations.

Accessing a secret from AWS Secrets Manager that is encrypted with a customer managed KMS key requires two distinct permission layers to succeed:

Secrets Manager permissions (via IAM) such as secretsmanager:GetSecretValue for the IAM role assumed by the Kubernetes service account.

KMS key usage permissions in the KMS key policy , allowing the same IAM principal to perform kms:Decrypt (and possibly kms:GenerateDataKey ) on the customer managed key.

In this scenario, the service account assumes an IAM role explicitly created to access the secrets. The symptom is an HTTP 403 “Access Denied” when retrieving the secret. If the IAM role has Secrets Manager permissions but the call still fails, the typical root cause is that the KMS key policy does not trust or allow that IAM role , so the decrypt operation fails.

Option B correctly identifies that the KMS key policy must include the Kubernetes service account IAM role as a principal with the appropriate KMS actions.

Option A and C refer to the EKS cluster IAM role, which is not the principal making the call. Option D is unrelated: the role’s ability to “access the EKS cluster” does not affect its ability to call Secrets Manager or KMS. The missing KMS key policy permission is the underlying cause.

To allow an EC2 instance to access CodeArtifact, an IAM role attached via an instance profile must be granted permissions to access the CodeArtifact repository. The EC2 instance assumes this role.

The instance then uses the AWS CLI command aws codeartifact login to authenticate and configure the package manager (e.g., pip) to use the CodeArtifact repository. This command obtains an authorization token and sets up repository credentials securely on the instance.

Service-linked roles (Option A) are managed by AWS services, not used for instance access. CodeArtifact does not support ACLs (Option C), and resource-based policies (Option B) do not grant access to EC2 instances by principal.

This method is standard for securely managing credentials and access to CodeArtifact in automated deployments.

(A) Use ECR replication to keep images synchronized between Regions, minimizing CI/CD pipeline changes.

(C) DynamoDB global tables allow multi-Region replication and provide local read/write access, so tasks should interact with the DynamoDB replica in their Region.

(D) Use S3 cross-Region replication or separate buckets with replication; tasks access the bucket in the same Region for latency and data sovereignty.

(B) Using DynamoDB global table but pointing tasks to only one Region reduces resilience.

(E) S3 Multi-Region Access Points are newer but add complexity and are not required for minimal changes.

(F) Managing CI/CD pipeline for multiple Regions and failover routing adds complexity beyond minimal changes.

AWS CloudWatch Events can be used to monitor events across different AWS resources, and a CloudWatch Event Rule can be created to trigger an AWS Lambda function when a deployment issue is detected in the pipeline. The Lambda function can then evaluate the issue and send a notification to the appropriate stakeholders through an Amazon SNS topic. This approach allows for real-time notifications and faster resolution times.

AWS Config can monitor compliance by checking EC2 software inventory. Custom Config rules can automatically trigger Systems Manager Automation documents as remediation actions when noncompliant (software missing). This meets policy enforcement goals with automation.

This solution will meet the requirements because it will use a CloudFormation custom resource to execute custom logic during the stack set operation. A custom resource is a resource that you define in your template and that is associated with an AWS Lambda function. The Lambda function runs whenever the custom resource is created, updated, or deleted, and can perform any actions that are supported by the AWS SDK. In this case, the Lambda function can use the GuardDuty API to check whether GuardDuty is already enabled in each target account, and if not, enable it. This way, the DevOps engineer can avoid deploying the stack set to accounts that already have GuardDuty enabled, and prevent failure during the deployment.

The requirement is to update the infrastructure to ensure that only the Lambda function’s execution role can access the values in Secrets Manager. The solution must apply the principle of least privilege, which means granting the minimum permissions necessary to perform a task.

To do this, the DevOps engineer needs to use the following steps:

Create a KMS customer managed key that trusts Secrets Manager and allows the Lambda function’s execution role to decrypt. A customer managed key is a symmetric encryption key that is fully managed by the customer. The customer can define the key policy, which specifies who can use and manage the key. By creating a customer managed key, the DevOps engineer can restrict the decryption permission to only the Lambda function’s execution role, and prevent other principals from accessing the secret values. The customer managed key also needs to trust Secrets Manager, which means allowing Secrets Manager to use the key to encrypt and decrypt secrets on behalf of the customer.

Update Secrets Manager to use the new customer managed key. Secrets Manager allows customers to choose which KMS key to use for encrypting each secret. By default, Secrets Manager uses the default KMS key for Secrets Manager, which is a service-managed key that is shared by all customers in the same AWS Region. By updating Secrets Manager to use the new customer managed key, the DevOps engineer can ensure that only the Lambda function’s execution role can decrypt the secret values using that key.

Ensure that the Lambda function’s execution role has the KMS permissions scoped on the resource level. The Lambda function’s execution role is an IAM role that grants permissions to the Lambda function to access AWS services and resources. The role needs to have KMS permissions to use the customer managed key for decryption. However, to apply the principle of least privilege, the role should have the permissions scoped on the resource level, which means specifying the ARN of the customer managed key as a condition in the IAM policy statement. This way, the role can only use that specific key and not any other KMS keys in the account.