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

For processing thousands of images and generating large files while minimizing manual tasks and operational overhead, usingAWS Batchis the best solution. AWS Batch allows you to run large-scale, parallel, and managed batch computing jobs without needing to manage the underlying infrastructure.

AWS Batch: Automates the image processing jobs, dynamically allocating the necessary resources based on the job requirements, which reduces operational overhead.

AWS Step Functions: Orchestrates the entire image processing workflow, ensuring that tasks are executed in the correct sequence, improving manageability.

Amazon S3: Stores the processed files, providing scalable and cost-effective storage.

Option A (ECS with EC2 Spot Instances): While cost-effective, managing ECS and Spot Instances involves more operational effort.

Option C (Lambda with EC2 Spot): Lambda functions have size and duration limitations, making them less suited for large image processing tasks.

Option D (EC2 with Step Functions): Managing EC2 instances involves more overhead than using AWS Batch.

AWS References:

AWS Batch

AWS Step Functions

AWS Control Tower: Provides a managed service to set up and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on AWS best practices. It automates the setup of AWS Organizations and applies security controls (guardrails).

Networking Account:

Create a centralized networking account that includes a VPC with both private and public subnets.

This centralized VPC will manage and control the networking resources.

AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM):

Use AWS RAM to share the subnets from the networking account with the other workload accounts.

This allows different workload accounts to utilize the shared networking resources without the need to manage their own VPCs.

Operational Efficiency: Using AWS Control Tower simplifies the setup and governance of multiple AWS accounts, while AWS RAM facilitates centralized management of networking resources, reducing operational overhead and ensuring consistent security and compliance.

AWS Shield Advanced is designed to provide enhanced protection against DDoS attacks with proactive engagement and response capabilities, making it the best solution for this scenario.

AWS Shield Advanced: This service provides advanced protection against DDoS attacks. It includes detailed attack diagnostics, 24/7 access to the AWS DDoS Response Team (DRT), and financial protection against DDoS-related scaling charges. Shield Advanced also integrates with Route 53 and the Application Load Balancer (ALB) to ensure comprehensive protection for your web applications.

Route 53 and ALB Protection: By adding your Route 53 hosted zones and ALB resources to AWS Shield Advanced, you ensure that these components are covered under the enhanced protection plan. Shield Advanced actively monitors traffic and provides real-time attack mitigation, minimizing the impact of DDoS attacks on your application.

Why Not Other Options?:

Option A (AWS Config): AWS Config is a configuration management service and does not provide DDoS protection or detection capabilities.

Option B (AWS WAF): While AWS WAF can help mitigate some types of attacks, it does not provide the comprehensive DDoS protection and proactive engagement offered by Shield Advanced.

Option C (GuardDuty): GuardDuty is a threat detection service that identifies potentially malicious activity within your AWS environment, but it is not specifically designed to provide DDoS protection.

AWS References:

AWS Shield Advanced- Overview of AWS Shield Advanced and its DDoS protection capabilities.

Integrating AWS Shield Advanced with Route 53 and ALB- Detailed guidance on how to protect Route 53 and ALB with AWS Shield Advanced.

The company wants to move from an on-premises Docker environment to fully managed AWS services with persistent storage. The best fit is:

Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate launch type: This is a serverless container orchestration solution where AWS manages the underlying infrastructure, removing the need to manage EC2 or Kubernetes nodes.

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System): This is a fully managed, scalable, and shared file system for use with ECS tasks. It supports persistent storage for containers, replacing the local volumes used on-premises.

This combination (ECS + Fargate + EFS) is fully managed and requires no manual server maintenance.

Option A uses EKS with self-managed nodes, which is not fully managed.

Option C (DynamoDB) is for structured key-value storage, not for persistent file storage.

Option D uses ECS with EC2 launch type, which is not serverless and requires managing instances.

🔗 Reference:

Using Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate

Mounting EFS volumes in ECS tasks

Amazon S3 File Gateway (AWS Storage Gateway) exposes an on-premises NFS/SMB file share that durably stores files as S3 objects with local caching, enabling low-latency writes on-premises and asynchronous, near-real-time ingestion into Amazon S3 for analytics. It is purpose-built to “present a file interface backed by Amazon S3” and to “store files as objects in your S3 buckets,” so existing applications writing to a network share can transparently land data in S3 without custom scripts or job orchestration. Compared with scheduled transfers (e.g., end-of-day DataSync), S3 File Gateway continuously uploads new/changed files, better meeting the near-real-time requirement. Transfer Family (SFTP) would require custom polling and client changes, increasing operational burden. DataSync is excellent for bulk or periodic migrations/synchronizations but is not as seamless for continuous ingestion from a live file share. Therefore, updating the application to point to an S3 File Gateway share provides the simplest, performant path to near-real-time delivery into S3 for downstream analytics.

Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes are designed to deliver sub-millisecond latency and up to 256,000 IOPS per volume, with durability and high availability. This makes io2 Block Express the recommended choice for workloads requiring very high and predictable IOPS, such as enterprise databases and high-transaction-rate applications.

Reference Extract:

"EBS io2 Block Express volumes deliver up to 256,000 IOPS and sub-millisecond latency, supporting high-performance, high-durability workloads."

Source: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Official Study Guide, EBS Performance section.

AWS Budgets allows you to set custom cost and usage budgets. When actual or forecasted usage exceeds the threshold, AWS Budgets can automatically send alerts to an Amazon SNS topic. You can use AWS Cost Explorer in parallel for visual tracking of spending. This solution requires no code and has minimal operational overhead.

AWS provides EBS Block Public Access at the AWS Organizations level, which, when enabled, prevents EBS snapshots from being shared publicly across all member accounts. This is an organization-wide control that requires minimal configuration and no ongoing monitoring to prevent public sharing.

This directly satisfies the requirement:

Covers all accounts managed by Organizations.

Explicitly prevents public snapshot sharing.

Has the least operational overhead because it is a single centralized control.

AWS Config (Option A) only monitors and alerts, but does not prevent public sharing.

An IAM policy in the root account (Option C) is harder to enforce consistently across all accounts and may not cover all permission paths.

CloudTrail (Option D) only logs events and does not prevent public access.