Amazon Web Services SAA-C03 - AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03)

To upload photos to an S3 bucket using Amazon CloudFront with a custom domain name, the following components are required:

ACM in us-east-1 (Option A): When using CloudFront with HTTPS, the SSL/TLS certificate must be created in theus-east-1Region. AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) handles the provisioning, management, and renewal of public certificates, making this a cost-effective and low-maintenance solution.

S3 Transfer Acceleration (Option C): Transfer Acceleration allows faster uploads to S3 from CloudFront by routing traffic through AWS’s edge locations. This significantly speeds up the data upload process, especially for users that are geographically distant from the S3 bucket's region.

Option B (ACM in eu-west-1): CloudFront only supports certificates created in us-east-1.

Option D and E (OAC and website endpoint): These are not ideal for handling secure uploads or efficient data transfers in this case.

AWS References:

Using ACM with CloudFront

Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration

Provisioned Concurrency:

AWS Lambda’s provisioned concurrency ensures that a predefined number of execution environments are pre-warmed and ready to handle requests, reducing latency during traffic spikes.

This solution optimizes costs during low-traffic periods when combined with AWS Application Auto Scaling to dynamically adjust the provisioned concurrency based ondemand.

Incorrect Options Analysis:

Option B: Switching to EC2 would increase complexity and cost for a serverless application.

Option C: A fixed concurrency level may result in over-provisioning during low-traffic periods, leading to higher costs.

Option D: Periodically warming functions does not effectively handle sudden spikes in traffic.

Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering: This storage class is designed to optimize costs by automatically moving data between two access tiers (frequent and infrequent) when access patterns change. It provides cost savings without performance impact or operational overhead.

S3 Lifecycle Rules: By creating an S3 Lifecycle rule, the company can automatically transition objects to the Intelligent-Tiering storage class. This eliminates the need for manual intervention and ensures that objects are moved to the most cost-effective storage tier based on their access patterns.

Operational Efficiency: Intelligent-Tiering requires no additional management and delivers immediate availability for frequently accessed objects. This makes it the most operationally efficient solution for the given requirements.

Amazon GuardDuty detects cryptocurrency mining and sends findings to Amazon EventBridge. You can use EventBridge to trigger an automated Lambda function to isolate EC2 instances (such as by removing security group access or stopping/isolating the instance).

AWS Documentation Extract:

"Amazon GuardDuty findings can be sent to Amazon EventBridge, which enables you to trigger an automated response using AWS Lambda."

(Source: AWS GuardDuty documentation)

B, C, D: Security Hub, Inspector, and Config are not directly used for this detection-to-isolation workflow.

To track costs by department, you must activate the custom department tag as a cost allocation tag in the AWS Organizations management account. Once activated, Cost Explorer and cost and usage reports can group costs by this tag for all linked accounts. The most operationally efficient way is to activate only the relevant department tag and create a cost and usage report grouped by that tag.

AWS Documentation Extract:

“To use a tag for cost allocation, you must activate it in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. After activation, you can use the tag to group costs in Cost Explorer and reports.”

(Source: AWS Cost Management documentation)

A, E: aws:createdBy is not related to department cost grouping and is unnecessary.

B: Applying extra filters is optional; D is more direct and operationally efficient.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation:

To prevent loss of access to the AWS root user account due to a lost MFA device, AWS recommends enabling multiple MFA devices for the root user.

Multiple MFA Devices: AWS allows up to eight MFA devices (virtual, hardware, or security keys) to be associated with a single root user account. This redundancy ensures that if one device is lost, others can be used to authenticate and access the account.

Security Best Practices: Implementing multiple MFA devices enhances account security and provides resilience against potential access issues.

By proactively setting up multiple MFA devices, the company can maintain uninterrupted access to its critical AWS resources, even in the event of a lost or malfunctioning MFA device.

The most cost-effective way to provide consistent SQL query performance on a heavily structured dataset, where some data is accessed more frequently, is to use Amazon Redshift as your main data warehouse for hot data and Amazon Redshift Spectrum to query cold data that remains in S3. With this approach, frequently queried data is loaded into Redshift for fast, consistent querying, while infrequently accessed data is left in S3 and accessed on demand via Spectrum, avoiding unnecessary data warehousing costs. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose provides an easy and scalable way to ingest streaming data directly to both S3 and Redshift.

AWS Documentation Extract:

"Amazon Redshift Spectrum allows you to run queries against exabytes of data in Amazon S3 without loading or transforming the data. Load hot data into Redshift for fast access and query cold data in S3 with Spectrum, optimizing both cost and performance."

(Source: Amazon Redshift documentation, Spectrum)

A: Athena is good for ad hoc queries but not for consistent, high-performance SQL workloads.

B, C: Loading all data into Redshift is not cost-effective if some data is infrequently accessed.

To process each form exactly once and ensure no data is lost, using an Amazon SQS FIFO (First-In-First-Out) queue is the most appropriate solution. SQS FIFO queues guarantee that messages are processed in the exact order they are sent and ensure that each message is processed exactly once. This ensures data consistency and reliability, both of which are crucial for processing user-submitted forms without data loss.

SQS acts as a buffer between the web application server and the worker tier, ensuring that submitted forms are stored reliably and forwarded to the worker tier for processing. This also decouples the application, improving its scalability and resilience.

Option B (API Gateway): API Gateway is better suited for API management rather than acting as a message queue for form processing.

Option C (SQS Standard Queue): While SQS Standard queues offer high throughput, they do not guarantee exactly-once processing or the strict ordering needed for this use case.

Option D (Step Functions): Step Functions are useful for orchestrating workflows but add unnecessary complexity for simple message queuing and form processing.

AWS References:

Amazon SQS FIFO Queues

Decoupling Application Tiers Using Amazon SQS

The best practice for granting AWS resource access to EC2 instances is to use IAM roles, not users or long-lived access keys. You create an IAM role with a policy that grants the minimum permissions required, then attach that role to an instance profile associated with the EC2 instance. The instance then automatically receives temporary credentials for AWS service access.

AWS Documentation Extract:

"Attach an IAM role to your EC2 instances to securely grant permissions to AWS services according to the principle of least privilege. Never embed access keys in EC2 instances."

(Source: AWS EC2 documentation, IAM Roles for EC2)

A, B: Using IAM users and embedding keys violates security best practices.

C: IAM role credentials are automatically managed and never need to be manually attached as keys.

Using S3 gateway endpoints allows private and cost-free access to S3 without routing traffic through a NAT gateway. NAT gateway traffic incurs charges, especially when used across multiple Availability Zones.

By using an S3 gateway endpoint, EC2 instances in private subnets can access S3 directly without needing internet access, reducing both data transfer and NAT gateway costs.

Interface endpoints are more expensive and typically used for services like API Gateway or Systems Manager.