Amazon SAA-C03 Exam Questions

This solution is the most cost-effective and efficient way to break down costs per application.

Tagging Resources: By tagging all AWS resources with a specific key (e.g., 'cost') and a value representing the application's name, you can easily identify and categorize costs associated with each application. This tagging strategy allows for granular tracking of costs within AWS.

Activating Cost Allocation Tags: Once tags are applied to resources, you need to activate cost allocation tags in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. This ensures that the costs associated with each tag are included in your billing reports and can be used for cost analysis.

AWS Cost Explorer: Cost Explorer is a powerful tool that allows you to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. You can filter and group your cost data by the tags you've applied to resources, enabling you to easily see the cost breakdown for each application. Cost Explorer also supports generating regular reports, which can be scheduled and emailed to stakeholders.

Why Not Other Options?:

Option A (AWS Budgets): AWS Budgets is more focused on setting cost and usage thresholds and monitoring them, rather than providing detailed cost breakdowns by application.

Option B (Load Cost and Usage Reports into RDS): This approach is less cost-effective and involves more operational overhead, as it requires setting up and maintaining an RDS instance and running SQL queries.

Option D (AWS Billing and Cost Management Console): While you can download bills, this method is more manual and less dynamic compared to using Cost Explorer with activated tags.

AWS Reference:

AWS Tagging Strategies - Overview of how to use tagging to organize and track AWS resources.

AWS Cost Explorer - Details on how to use Cost Explorer to analyze costs.

AWS Backup is the most appropriate solution for managing backups with minimal operational overhead while meeting the regulatory requirement to retain data for 90 days and enabling point-in-time restore for up to 14 days.

AWS Backup: AWS Backup provides a centralized backup management solution that supports automated backup scheduling, retention management, and compliance reporting across AWS services, including Amazon RDS. By creating a backup plan, you can define a retention period (in this case, 90 days) and automate the backup process.

Point-in-Time Restore (PITR): Amazon RDS supports point-in-time restore for up to 35 days with automated backups. By using AWS Backup in conjunction with RDS, you ensure that your backup strategy meets the requirement for restoring data to a specific point in time within the last 14 days.

Why Not Other Options?:

Option A (RDS Automated Backups): While RDS automated backups support PITR, they do not directly support retention beyond 35 days without manual intervention.

Option B (Manual Snapshots): Manually creating and managing snapshots is operationally intensive and less automated compared to AWS Backup.

Option C (Aurora Clones): Aurora Clone is a feature specific to Amazon Aurora and is not applicable to Amazon RDS for Oracle.

AWS Reference:

AWS Backup - Overview of AWS Backup and its capabilities.

Amazon RDS Automated Backups - Information on how RDS automated backups work and their limitations.

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 Reference:

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.

This solution offers the most scalable and cost-effective approach with minimal changes to the existing web portal and no code modifications.

Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances in an Auto Scaling Group: Running the web portal on EC2 On-Demand instances ensures 100% uptime and scalability. The Auto Scaling group will maintain the desired number of instances, automatically scaling up or down as needed, ensuring high availability for the employee web portal.

AWS Lambda for Document Extraction: Lambda is a serverless compute service that allows you to run code in response to events without provisioning or managing servers. By using Lambda to run the document extraction program, you can trigger the function whenever an employee uploads a document. This approach is cost-effective since you only pay for the compute time used by the Lambda function.

No Code Changes Required: This solution integrates with the existing infrastructure with minimal implementation effort and does not require any modifications to the web portal's code.

Why Not Other Options?:

Option B (Spot Instances): Spot Instances are not suitable for workloads requiring 100% uptime, as they can be terminated by AWS with short notice.

Option C (Savings Plan): A Savings Plan could reduce costs but does not address the requirement for running the document extraction program efficiently or without code changes.

Option D (S3 with API Gateway and Lambda): This would require significant changes to the existing web portal setup, including moving the portal to S3 and reconfiguring its architecture, which contradicts the requirement of minimal implementation effort and no code changes.

AWS Reference:

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling - Information on how to use Auto Scaling for EC2 instances.

AWS Lambda - Overview of AWS Lambda and its use cases.

This solution is the most cost-effective and meets the RPO and RTO requirements of 24 hours.

Automatic Snapshots: Amazon RDS automatically creates snapshots of your DB instance at regular intervals. By copying these snapshots to another AWS Region every 24 hours, you ensure that you have a backup available in a different geographic location, providing disaster recovery capability.

RPO and RTO: Since the company's RPO and RTO are both 24 hours, copying snapshots daily to another Region is sufficient. In the event of a disaster, you can restore the DB instance from the most recent snapshot in the target Region.

Why Not Other Options?:

Option A (Cross-Region Read Replica): This could provide a faster recovery time but is more costly due to the ongoing replication and resource usage in another Region.

Option B (DMS Cross-Region Replication): While effective for continuous replication, it introduces complexity and cost that isn't necessary given the 24-hour RPO/RTO.

Option C (Cross-Region Native Backup Copy): This involves more manual steps and doesn't offer as straightforward a solution as automated snapshot copying.

AWS Reference:

Amazon RDS Automated Backups and Snapshots - Details on automated backups and snapshots in RDS.

Copying an Amazon RDS DB Snapshot - How to copy DB snapshots to another Region.