SAA-C03 Exam Dumps - AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03)

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

Option Bensures the use of S3 Object Lock and Versioning to meet compliance for immutability. CloudFront enhances performance while a bucket policy ensures secure access.

Option Alacks immutability safeguards.

Option Cintroduces unnecessary complexity.

Option Dmisses out on additional security benefits offered by CloudFront.

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

To serve a static website hosted in Amazon S3 over HTTPS, you must use Amazon CloudFront because S3 does not natively support HTTPS for static website endpoints.

Steps to meet HTTPS requirement:

B. Create a CloudFront distribution and configure the S3 bucket as the origin. This enables global edge caching and performance optimization.

D. Attach an SSL/TLS certificate (typically from AWS Certificate Manager) to the CloudFront distribution to handle HTTPS connections.

S3 buckets used as static website hosts only support HTTP directly. While S3 supports HTTPS for REST API access, it does not support HTTPS on static website endpoints.

This setup aligns with security best practices and supports the Secure and Operational Excellence pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

🔗 References:

Hosting a static website using Amazon S3 and CloudFront

CloudFront + HTTPS with ACM

AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that works with Amazon EKS. With Fargate, you do not need to provision or manage EC2 instances or clusters. You simply define and deploy your pods, and Fargate automatically launches the required compute resources. This results in the lowest operational overhead because AWS manages the infrastructure. Fargate profiles allow you to specify which pods run on Fargate.

AWS Documentation Extract:

“AWS Fargate is a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets you focus on building applications without managing servers. With Amazon EKS and Fargate, you only need to define your application’s pods; Fargate provisions and manages the required compute resources for you.”

(Source: Amazon EKS documentation, AWS Fargate integration)

Other options:

A: Self-managed nodes require you to manage EC2 instances.

B: Managed node groups reduce some overhead, but you are still responsible for patching and managing the EC2 instances.

D: Managed node groups with Karpenter automate scaling but do not remove the need to manage underlying instances.

AWS Systems Manager Session Manager allows secure, auditable SSH-like access to EC2 instances without the need to open SSH ports or manage bastion hosts. For this to work in a private subnet, an interface VPC endpoint is required (not a gateway endpoint).

The EC2 instances must have the AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore policy attached to their IAM roles to allow Systems Manager operations.

With Session Manager, all session activity can be logged centrally to Amazon CloudWatch Logs or S3, satisfying the audit requirement and improving operational efficiency over manual SSH and bastion configurations.

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.

Amazon RDS Proxy is a fully managed database proxy for RDS that makes applications more scalable, more resilient to database failures, and more secure. RDS Proxy pools and shares database connections, allowing applications to open and close connections as needed without overwhelming the database. This is the recommended solution when the application cannot be modified to use connection pooling itself.

AWS Documentation Extract:

"Amazon RDS Proxy helps manage database connections to improve application scalability and performance. It pools connections and shares them among application clients, which can mitigate issues caused by opening and closing many database connections."

(Source: Amazon RDS Proxy documentation)

A: Upgrading the instance does not solve connection inefficiency and can be cost-ineffective.

B: Increasing IOPS only helps if storage is a bottleneck, not if connections are the issue.

D: Multi-AZ improves availability, not connection management.

For an application requiring TCP communication and high availability:

Network Load Balancer (NLB)is the best choice for load balancing TCP traffic because it is designed for handling high-throughput, low-latency connections.

Auto Scaling groupensures that the application can automatically scale based on demand, adding or removing EC2 instances as needed, which is crucial for handling user growth.

Option C (Application Load Balancer): ALB is primarily for HTTP/HTTPS traffic, not ideal for TCP.

Option D (Manual scaling): Manually adding instances does not provide the automation or scalability required.

Option E (Gateway Load Balancer): GLB is used for third-party virtual appliances, not for direct application load balancing.

AWS References:

Network Load Balancer

Auto Scaling Group