Amazon Web Services SOA-C03 - AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate

The AWS Cloud Operations and Storage documentation confirms that S3 Transfer Acceleration is designed to increase upload speed for objects transferred to S3 buckets over long distances.

It uses AWS Global Edge Network and Amazon CloudFront edge locations to route data through optimized network paths, reducing latency and achieving higher throughput compared to standard S3 uploads.

After enabling Transfer Acceleration on the bucket, users upload files to the accelerated endpoint (e.g., bucketname.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com). This feature requires no changes to application logic besides endpoint modification and provides immediate performance improvement.

CloudFront (Option A) is for content delivery, not uploads. ElastiCache (Option B) and Global Accelerator (Option C) are unrelated to S3 upload performance.

Thus, Option D is correct — enable S3 Transfer Acceleration for faster, optimized file uploads.

According to the AWS Cloud Operations and Identity Management documentation, when configuring federation between IAM Identity Center (formerly AWS SSO) and an external SAML 2.0 identity provider, two key prerequisites are required:

The IAM Identity Center SAML metadata file — This is uploaded to the external IdP to establish trust, define SAML endpoints, and enable identity federation.

The IdP metadata (including the public X.509 certificate) — This information is imported into IAM Identity Center to validate authentication assertions and encryption signatures.

IAM Identity Center and the IdP exchange this metadata to mutually establish secure, bidirectional federation.

Network-level details such as IP addresses (Option C) are unnecessary. Root access (Option D) or permissions to member accounts (Option E) are not required; only Control Tower or IAM administrative permissions in the management account are needed for setup.

Thus, the correct answer is A and B — the SAML metadata from both sides is required for federation.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of AWS CloudOps Documents:

With the Managed-CachingDisabled policy, CloudFront is configured to minimize edge caching, so the remaining caching behavior users experience often comes from browser (client-side) caching. If users refresh and still see old content, it typically indicates the browser is allowed to reuse a cached copy without revalidating. The correct fix is to control client caching using HTTP response headers on the S3 object.

Adding a Cache-Control: max-age=0 header instructs browsers that the object becomes stale immediately and should be revalidated on subsequent requests (often resulting in conditional requests using If-Modified-Since or ETag behavior). This preserves correctness—users will fetch or revalidate the latest file—without requiring heavier operational actions like frequent CloudFront invalidations or changing to an optimized caching policy that may increase edge caching.

Option B can worsen the issue by increasing caching if object headers permit it. Option C is unrelated; versioning affects object history and recovery, not browser cache behavior. Option D affects payload size transfer (gzip/brotli), not cache freshness.

According to AWS Cloud Operations and VPC Networking documentation, when VPCs are peered, security groups can reference peer account security groups directly to restrict traffic between them.

This feature allows specifying the security group ID (sg-1234abcd) from the source account (111122223333) in the target database’s security group inbound rule. AWS automatically validates that the VPCs are connected through an existing VPC peering connection and that mutual permissions are properly configured.

You do not prefix the security group ID with the account or peering connection (Options A and B), and using the destination account ID (Option D) is incorrect because it represents the database side, not the source.

Hence, the correct configuration is Option C, which references the application servers’ security group directly for precise, least-privilege access control.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of AWS CloudOps Documents:

The requirement is to alert before throttling occurs. For a DynamoDB table in provisioned capacity mode, throttling happens when demand approaches or exceeds provisioned throughput. CloudWatch provides direct table metrics such as ConsumedReadCapacityUnits and ProvisionedReadCapacityUnits (and related utilization signals). Creating an alarm on ConsumedReadCapacityUnits with a threshold set close to the table’s provisioned read capacity provides an early warning that the table is nearing its limit—before actual throttling prevents reads. The alarm can publish directly to the existing SNS topic so the operations team is notified proactively.

Option C and D focus on detecting throttling after it occurs by matching throttling exceptions in logs. That is reactive and violates “before throttled.” Option B (auto scaling) may reduce the likelihood of throttling, but it does not directly satisfy the alerting requirement and “scaling events” notifications are not a reliable proxy for “approaching throttle” (and may not fire early enough depending on scaling configuration). The simplest, most direct CloudOps approach is a CloudWatch alarm on consumption nearing provisioned capacity.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of AWS CloudOps Doocuments:

VPC Flow Logs show the request arriving and being ACCEPTed on dstport 8080 and the corresponding response being REJECTed on the return path to the client’s ephemeral port (59003). AWS networking guidance states that security groups are stateful (return traffic is automatically allowed) while network ACLs are stateless and require explicit inbound and outbound rules for both directions. CloudOps operational guidance for VPC networking further notes that when you allow an inbound request (for example, TCP 8080) through a subnet’s network ACL, you must also allow the outbound ephemeral port range (typically 1024–65535) for the response traffic; otherwise, the return packets are dropped and appear as REJECT in flow logs. The observed pattern—request accepted to 8080, response rejected to 59003—matches a missing outbound ephemeral-range allow on the subnet’s NACL. Therefore, the cause is the subnet NACL, not security groups or on-premises ACLs. The remediation is to add an outbound ALLOW rule on the NACL for the appropriate ephemeral TCP port range back to the on-premises CIDR (and the corresponding inbound rule if asymmetric).

Per the AWS Cloud Operations and Event Management documentation, Amazon EventBridge provides native scheduling capabilities that can trigger events at defined intervals—such as weekly, daily, or cron-based schedules.

Creating an EventBridge rule that runs every Saturday and publishes a message to an SNS topic fully automates the notification process without maintaining servers or manual jobs. This approach is serverless, highly reliable, and fully managed by AWS.

By contrast:

EC2 cron jobs (Option A) require instance management, patching, and cost overhead.

SNS subscriptions (Option C) handle message delivery, not scheduling.

Step Functions (Option D) are designed for complex workflows, not simple scheduled triggers.

Thus, Option B provides the most operationally efficient CloudOps solution by integrating EventBridge scheduled events with SNS topics for automated, recurring notifications.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of AWS CloudOps Doocuments:

Use Amazon S3 Event Notifications with AWS Lambda to trigger image processing on object creation. S3 natively supports invoking Lambda for events such as s3:ObjectCreated:*, providing a serverless, low-latency pipeline without managing additional services. AWS operational guidance states that “Amazon S3 can directly invoke a Lambda function in response to object-created events,” allowing you to pass event metadata (bucket/key) to the function for resizing and writing results back to S3. This approach minimizes operational overhead, scales automatically with upload volume, and integrates with standard retry semantics. SNS or SQS can be added for fan-out or buffering patterns, but they are not required when the requirement is simply “invoke the Lambda function on upload.” CloudWatch alarms do not detect individual S3 object uploads and cannot directly satisfy per-object triggers. Therefore, configuring S3 → Lambda event notifications meets the requirement most directly and aligns with CloudOps best practices for event-driven, serverless automation.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of AWS CloudOps Documents:

The correct solution is B. Configure RDS Proxy, because RDS Proxy is specifically designed to manage and pool database connections for Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS. AWS CloudOps documentation states that RDS Proxy reduces database load and prevents connection exhaustion by reusing existing connections and managing spikes in application demand.

In this scenario, the ecommerce application maintains many idle connections, which consume database connection slots even when not actively used. During peak traffic, new connections cannot be established, resulting in the “Too many connections” error. RDS Proxy sits between the application and the Aurora DB cluster, maintaining a smaller, efficient pool of database connections and multiplexing application requests over those connections.

Option A is incorrect because RCUs and WCUs apply to DynamoDB, not Aurora. Option C is incorrect because enhanced networking improves network throughput and latency but does not manage database connections. Option D is incorrect because changing instance types does not address idle connection buildup and can still result in connection exhaustion.

AWS CloudOps best practices recommend RDS Proxy for applications with connection-heavy workloads, unpredictable traffic patterns, or serverless components.

According to the AWS Cloud Operations and Deployment documentation, EC2 Image Builder is the AWS-managed service for automating the creation, maintenance, validation, and deployment of secure and compliant Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).

It allows CloudOps teams to define image pipelines that include only approved software modules and configuration scripts. EC2 Image Builder automatically tests and verifies these AMIs for compliance before deployment.

This process ensures configuration consistency, eliminates manual installation errors, and simplifies ongoing patch management. The service integrates with AWS Systems Manager, Amazon Inspector, and AWS CloudFormation for end-to-end automation.

In contrast:

Amazon Detective and GuardDuty (Options A & B) are security monitoring tools, not image management solutions.

Run Command (Option C) applies ad-hoc updates but does not create standard, reusable AMIs.

Therefore, Option D is correct—EC2 Image Builder provides the most operationally efficient and compliant way to create an approved baseline AMI for future deployments.