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

Amazon S3 Access Points simplify managing data access for shared datasets in S3 by allowing the creation of distinct access policies for different applications or users. Each access point has its own policy and can be managed independently. This method avoids overloading a single bucket policy and helps remain within policy size limits.

Option D provides a scalable and operationally efficient solution by offloading individual access controls from a central bucket policy to individually managed access points, which is ideal for environments with many consuming applications.

Option Auses an IAM role attached to the EC2 instance profile, enabling secure and automated access to Secrets Manager. This is the recommended approach.

Option Buses IAM users, which is less secure and harder to manage.

Option Cis not practical for accessing secrets programmatically.

Option Dviolates best practices by granting direct access to the EC2 instance.

Amazon S3 is designed for durability, scalability, and millisecond access. For small monthly data volumes (300 MB), S3 Standard is cost-effective and provides immediate access. To meet 30-day retention, Lifecycle policies can automatically expire objects after the required time. For disaster recovery, S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) copies objects across Regions to a backup bucket, ensuring data resiliency. OpenSearch (A) is not needed because the requirement is storage and retrieval, not indexing. Aurora or RDS options (C, D) add unnecessary complexity and cost, as a relational database is not required for JSON storage and millisecond retrieval. Therefore, option B provides the simplest, most resilient, and cost-optimized solution.

The company wants to reduce end-to-end load time for its global customer base.AWS Global Acceleratorprovides a network optimization service that reduces latency by routing traffic to the nearest AWS edge locations, improving the user experience for globally distributed customers.

AWS Global Accelerator:

Global Acceleratorimproves the performance of your applications by routing traffic through AWS’s global network infrastructure. This reduces the number of hops and latency compared to using the public internet.

By creating astandard acceleratorand configuring the existing NLBs as target endpoints, Global Accelerator ensures that traffic from users around the world is routed to the nearest AWS edge location and then through optimized paths to the NLBs in each region. This significantly improves end-to-end load time for global customers.

Why Not the Other Options?:

Option A (ALBs instead of NLBs): ALBs are designed for HTTP/HTTPS traffic and provide layer 7 features, but they wouldn’t solve the latency issue for a global customer base. The key problem here is latency, and Global Accelerator is specifically designed to address that.

Option B (Route 53 weighted routing): Route 53 can route traffic to different regions, but it doesn’t optimize network performance. It simply balances traffic between endpoints without improving latency.

Option C (Additional NLBs in more regions): This could potentially improve latency but would require setting up infrastructure in multiple regions. Global Accelerator is a simpler and more efficient solution that leverages AWS’s existing global network.

AWS References:

AWS Global Accelerator

By usingAWS Global Acceleratorwith the existing NLBs, the company can optimize global traffic routing and improve the customer experience by minimizing latency. Therefore,Option Dis the correct answer.

AWS Config is a service designed to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of AWS resources. It continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations and allows you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired configurations. By starting a configuration recorder, AWS Config will capture changes to supported resource types as configuration items—without the need to modify any of the existing resources. This provides a full history of configuration changes and is specifically intended for exactly this use case.

AWS Documentation Extract:

“AWS Config provides a detailed view of the configuration of AWS resources in your AWS account. This includes how the resources are related to one another and how they were configured in the past so you can see how the configurations and relationships change over time.”

“You can start the configuration recorder, which will record the configuration changes of the supported resources in your AWS account.”

(Source: AWS Config documentation, What is AWS Config?)

Other options:

B: CloudFormation drift detection only works for resources created and managed by CloudFormation and requires stacks.

C: Amazon Detective is used for analyzing and investigating security findings, not for resource configuration tracking.

D: AWS Audit Manager is used for automating evidence collection to help with audits, not for tracking resource configurations.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Architect documents:

The best practice for securely accessing AWS services from EC2 instances is to use IAM roles associated with the instance profile.

"Applications must securely access AWS resources. The recommended way is to attach an IAM role to your EC2 instance and use temporary credentials."

— IAM Roles for Amazon EC2

IAM roles:

Provide temporary, automatically rotated credentials.

Avoid hardcoding credentials.

Ensure least privilege access.

Incorrect Options:

A: Root credentials should never be used programmatically.

B: Using static access keys is not secure.

D: MFA and versioning help with object security but don’t handle programmatic access.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation:

Using an Application Load Balancer (ALB) allows for integration with AWS WAF to inspect all incoming traffic. Running the application on Amazon ECS provides a scalable and managed container orchestration service. Utilizing Amazon Aurora Serverless for the PostgreSQL database offers automatic scaling based on application demand, which is cost-effective for workloads with variable traffic patterns, such as higher traffic on weekdays and lower traffic on weekends.

Key Problem:

Delayed Inventory table updates during peak sales.

DynamoDB Streams and Lambda processing require optimization.

Analysis of Options:

Option A:Adding a GSI is unrelated to the issue. It does not address stream processing delays or capacity issues.

Option B:Optimizing batch size reduces latency and allows the Lambda function to process larger chunks of data at once, improving performance during peak load.

Option C:Increasing write capacity for the Inventory table ensures that it can handle the increased volume of updates during peak times.

Option D:Increasing read capacity for the Orders table does not directly resolve the issue since the problem is with updates to the Inventory table.

Option E:Increasing Lambda timeout only addresses longer processing times but does not solve the underlying throughput problem.

AWS References:

DynamoDB Streams Best Practices

Provisioned Throughput in DynamoDB

AWS Organizations: AWS Organizations allows you to create multiple AWS accounts and manage them centrally. You can organize accounts into organizational units (OUs) and apply policies to these units.

Organizational Units (OUs):

Create separate OUs for each department: finance, data analytics, and development.

Place the respective AWS accounts for each department into their corresponding OUs.

Service Control Policies (SCPs):

SCPs are policies that can restrict which AWS services and actions are available to accounts in an OU.

Create SCPs to define which services each department can use and attach these policies to the appropriate OUs.

SCPs apply to all IAM users, groups, and roles within the accounts in the OU, providing centralized control over service usage.

Operational Efficiency: Using AWS Organizations and SCPs provides a scalable and centralized way to manage permissions across multiple accounts with minimal operational overhead.

Amazon CloudWatch Container Insightsis designed for monitoring containerized environments like EKS. It provides native support for collecting and visualizing metrics and logs in a centralized location through CloudWatch dashboards, offering the most operationally efficient solution.

Option A:Using the CloudWatch agent provides basic metrics but lacks the specific insights required for containerized applications.

Option B:Kinesis Data Streams and Firehose add unnecessary complexity for this use case.

Option C:CloudTrail is for auditing API activity and is not designed for application metrics and log aggregation.

AWS Documentation References:

Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights

Memory Optimized Instances: These instances are designed to deliver fast performance for workloads that process large data sets in memory. They are ideal for high-performance databases like SAP and applications with high memory utilization.

High Memory Utilization: Both the SAP application and the SQL Server database have high memory demands as per the on-premises performance data. Memory optimized instances provide the necessary memory capacity and performance.

Instance Types:

For the SAP application, using a memory optimized instance ensures the application has sufficient memory to handle the high workload efficiently.

For the SQL Server database, memory optimized instances ensure optimal database performance with high memory throughput.

Operational Efficiency: Using the same instance family for both the application and the database simplifies management and ensures both components meet performance requirements.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Architect documents:

To secure data in transit, the company should use AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) to provide SSL/TLS certificates for the Application Load Balancer. ACM allows easy provisioning, management, and renewal of public and private certificates, ensuring secure communication between users and applications.

To secure data at rest, AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is used to manage encryption keys for Amazon EBS volumes. EBS integrates with AWS KMS, allowing for server-side encryption using KMS-managed keys (SSE-KMS), thus meeting the encryption at rest requirement.

Other options:

GuardDuty (A) is for threat detection, not encryption.

AWS Shield (B) protects against DDoS attacks, not encryption.

Secrets Manager (D) manages credentials, not general data encryption.

This solution follows the AWS Well-Architected Framework – Security Pillar.

🔗 References:

Encrypting EBS volumes with KMS

Using ACM with ALB

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is the ideal solution for migrating legacy applications that require NFS (Network File System) communication. EFS provides fully managed, scalable NFS storage in the cloud, and it supports the standard NFS protocols, allowing the legacy application to continue using NFS without modification after migration to AWS.

Key AWS features:

NFS Support: EFS natively supports the NFSv4 protocol, which makes it the best solution for workloads that rely on NFS communication.

Scalability and Availability: EFS automatically scales as application demands grow, making it a highly available and reliable storage solution.

AWS Documentation: According to AWS’s best practices for file storage, EFS is recommended for any workloads requiring NFS support in a cloud environment​​.

Aurora Replicas: Provide read scalability and high availability. They allow offloading read traffic from the primary database instance.

AWS Global Accelerator: Provides improved availability and performance by routing user requests to the optimal endpoint using AWS’s global network.

“Aurora Replicas can be used to increase read scalability and availability.”

— Aurora Replicas

“AWS Global Accelerator improves the availability and performance of your applications with global users.”

— AWS Global Accelerator

Together, these enhance both the database and network layer resilience.