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

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.

The company needs a cloud-based storage solution for frequently accessed data with low latency, while retaining their current on-premises infrastructure for some data storage. AWS Storage Gateway'sVolume Gateway with cached volumesis the most appropriate solution for this scenario.

AWS Storage Gateway - Volume Gateway (Cached Volumes):

Volume Gateway with cached volumesallows you to store frequently accessed data in the AWS Cloud while keeping the most recently accessed data cached locally on-premises. This ensures low-latency access to active data while providing scalability for the rest of the data in the cloud.

The cached volume option stores the primary data in Amazon S3 but caches frequently accessed data locally, ensuring fast access. This configuration is well-suited for applications that require fast access to frequently used data but can tolerate cloud-based storage for the rest.

Since the company is facing limited on-premises storage, cached volumes provide an ideal solution, as they reduce the need for additional on-premises storage infrastructure.

Why Not the Other Options?:

Option A (S3 File Gateway): S3 File Gateway provides a file-based interface (SMB/NFS) for storing data directly in S3. While it is great for file storage, the company’s need for block-level storage with iSCSI targets makes Volume Gateway a better fit.

Option C (Volume Gateway - Stored Volumes): Stored volumes keep all the data on-premises and asynchronously back up to AWS. This would not address the company's storage limitations since they would still need substantial on-premises storage.

Option D (Tape Gateway): Tape Gateway is designed for archiving and backup, not for frequently accessed low-latency data.

AWS References:

AWS Storage Gateway - Volume Gateway

AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) is the recommended tool for a lift-and-shift strategy, especially for time-sensitive migrations. It automates the replication of on-premises VMs to AWS, minimizing the effort required for migration and testing.

Key steps:

Replication with AWS MGN: The AWS Replication Agent is installed on the VMs to continuously replicate data to AWS, allowing you to manage migration easily.

Testing and Cutover: Initial replication allows for testing in AWS before performing the final cutover, ensuring that the migration process is smooth and data integrity is maintained.

AWS Documentation: AWS MGN is recommended for migrating virtual machines to the cloud with minimal downtime and disruption​​.

AWS Secrets Manager is designed specifically to securely store and manage sensitive information such as database credentials. It integrates seamlessly with AWS services like Lambda and RDS, and it provides automatic credential rotation with minimal operational overhead.

AWS Secrets Manager: By storing the database credentials in Secrets Manager, you ensure that the credentials are securely stored, encrypted, and managed. Secrets Manager provides a built-in mechanism to automatically rotate credentials at regular intervals (e.g., every 30 days), which helps in maintaining security best practices without requiring additional manual intervention.

Lambda Integration: The Lambda function can be easily configured to retrieve the credentials from Secrets Manager using the AWS SDK, ensuring that the credentials are accessed securely at runtime.

Why Not Other Options?:

Option A (Parameter Store with Rotation): While Parameter Store can store parameters securely, Secrets Manager is more tailored for secrets management and automatic rotation, offering more features and less operational overhead.

Option C (Encrypted Lambda environment variable): Storing credentials directly in Lambda environment variables, even when encrypted, requires custom code to manage rotation, which increases operational complexity.

Option D (KMS with automatic rotation): KMS is for managing encryption keys, not for storing and rotating secrets like database credentials. This option would require more custom implementation to manage credentials securely.

AWS References:

AWS Secrets Manager- Detailed documentation on how to store, manage, and rotate secrets using AWS Secrets Manager.

Using Secrets Manager with AWS Lambda- Guidance on integrating Secrets Manager with Lambda for secure credential management.

The issue described in the question, where incoming traffic seems to favor one EC2 instance, is often caused by session affinity (also known as sticky sessions) being enabled on the Application Load Balancer (ALB). When session affinity is enabled, the ALB routes requests from the same client to the same EC2 instance. This can cause an imbalance in traffic distribution, leading to performance bottlenecks on certain instances while others remain underutilized.

To resolve this issue, disabling session affinity ensures that the ALB distributes incoming traffic evenly across all EC2 instances, allowing better load distribution and reducing latency. The ALB will rely on its round-robin or least outstanding requests algorithm (depending on the configuration) to distribute traffic more evenly across instances.

Option B (Network Load Balancer): The NLB is designed for Layer 4 (TCP) traffic and low latency use cases, but it is not needed here as the problem is with load balancing logic at the application layer (Layer 7). The ALB is more appropriate for HTTP/HTTPS traffic.

Option C (Increase EC2 Instances): Adding more EC2 instances does not solve the root issue of uneven traffic distribution.

Option D (Health Check Frequency): Adjusting health check frequency won't address the imbalance caused by session affinity.

AWS References:

Application Load Balancer Sticky Sessions

AWS Shield Advanced provides expanded DDoS attack protection for your Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, CloudFront distributions, Route 53 hosted zones, and AWS Global Accelerator standard accelerators.https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/what-is-aws-waf.html

This solution meets the requirement of migrating a Windows-based application that requires the use of a shared Windows file system attached to multiple Amazon EC2 Windows instances that are deployed across multiple Availability Zones. Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides fully managed shared storage built on Windows Server, and delivers a wide range of data access, data management, and administrative capabilities. It supports the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol and can be mounted to EC2 Windows instances across multiple Availability Zones.

Option A is incorrect because AWS Storage Gateway in volume gateway mode provides cloud-backed storage volumes that can be mounted as iSCSI devices from on-premises application servers, but it does not support SMB protocol or EC2 Windows instances. Option C is incorrect because Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides a scalable and elastic NFS file system for Linux-based workloads, but it does not support SMB protocol or EC2 Windows instances. Option D is incorrect because Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) providespersistent block storage volumes for use with EC2 instances, but it does not support SMB protocol or attaching multiple instances to the same volume.