11-20

A company has an application that runs on Amazon EC2 instances and uses an Amazon Aurora database. The EC2 instances connect to the database by using user names and passwords that are stored locally in a file. The company wants to minimize the operational overhead of credential management.What should a solutions architect do to accomplish this goal?

• Use AWS Secrets Manager. Turn on automatic rotation.

• Use AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. Turn on automatic rotation.

• Create an Amazon S3 bucket to store objects that are encrypted with an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) encryption key. Migrate the credential file to the S3 bucket. Point the application to the S3 bucket.

• Create an encrypted Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume for each EC2 instance. Attach the new EBS volume to each EC2 instance. Migrate the credential file to the new EBS volume. Point the application to the new EBS volume.

Answer explanation

-B is wrong because parameter store does not support auto rotation, unless the customer writes it themselves, A is the answer.

-AWS Secrets Manager, a service that makes it easier to rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle. You can configure Secrets Manager to rotate secrets automatically, which can help you meet your security and compliance needs. Secrets Manager offers built-in integrations for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Amazon Aurora on Amazon RDS, and can rotate credentials for these databases natively. You can control access to your secrets by using fine-grained AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies. To retrieve secrets, employees replace plaintext secrets with a call to Secrets Manager APIs, eliminating the need to hard-code secrets in source code or update configuration files and redeploy code when secrets are rotated.

A global company hosts its web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The web application has static data and dynamic data. The company stores its static data in an Amazon S3 bucket. The company wants to improve performance and reduce static and dynamic data latency. The company is using its own domain name registered with Amazon Route 53. What should a solutions architect do to meet these requirements?

• Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution that has the S3 bucket and the ALB as origins. Configure Route 53 to route traffic to the CloudFront distribution.

• Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution that has the ALB as an origin. Create an AWS Global Accelerator standard accelerator that has the S3 bucket as an endpoint Configure Route 53 to route traffic to the CloudFront distribution.

• Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution that has the S3 bucket as an origin. Create an AWS Global Accelerator standard accelerator that has the ALB and the CloudFront distribution as endpoints. Create a custom domain name that points to the accelerator DNS name. Use the custom domain name as an endpoint for the web application.

• Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution that has the ALB as an origin. Create an AWS Global Accelerator standard accelerator that has the S3 bucket as an endpoint. Create two domain names. Point one domain name to the CloudFront DNS name for dynamic content. Point the other domain name to the accelerator DNS name for static content. Use the domain names as endpoints for the web application.

Answer explanation

-Q: How is AWS Global Accelerator different from Amazon CloudFront? A: AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon CloudFront are separate services that use the AWS global network and its edge locations around the world. CloudFront improves performance for both cacheable content (such as images and videos) and dynamic content (such as API acceleration and dynamic site delivery). Global Accelerator improves performance for a wide range of applications over TCP or UDP by proxying packets at the edge to applications running in one or more AWS Regions. Global Accelerator is a good fit for non-HTTP use cases, such as gaming (UDP), IoT (MQTT), or Voice over IP, as well as for HTTP use cases that specifically require static IP addresses or deterministic, fast regional failover. Both services integrate with AWS Shield for DDoS protection.

-Endpoints for standard accelerators in AWS Global Accelerator can be Network Load Balancers, Application Load Balancers, Amazon EC2 instances, or Elastic IP addresses. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/about-endpoints.html

-This is a tough question, initially thought answer was C but after some research found A to be the most viable answer here. CloudFront can be used to reduce latency for dynamic content (the ALB in this case) by using edge locations to connect via AWS network instead of the internet, thus reducing latency. So it might not necessary cache the content but it still reduces latency and improve performance with the lowest amount of work. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/DownloadDistS3AndCustomOrigins.html#concept_elb_origin

A company performs monthly maintenance on its AWS infrastructure. During these maintenance activities, the company needs to rotate the credentials for its Amazon RDS for MySQL databases across multiple AWS Regions.Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

• Store the credentials as secrets in AWS Secrets Manager. Use multi-Region secret replication for the required Regions. Configure Secrets Manager to rotate the secrets on a schedule.

• Store the credentials as secrets in AWS Systems Manager by creating a secure string parameter. Use multi-Region secret replication for the required Regions. Configure Systems Manager to rotate the secrets on a schedule.

• Store the credentials in an Amazon S3 bucket that has server-side encryption (SSE) enabled. Use Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) to invoke an AWS Lambda function to rotate the credentials.

• Encrypt the credentials as secrets by using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) multi-Region customer managed keys. Store the secrets in an Amazon DynamoDB global table. Use an AWS Lambda function to retrieve the secrets from DynamoDB. Use the RDS API to rotate the secrets.

Answer explanation

-https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-replicate-secrets-aws-secrets-manager-multiple-regions/

-AWS Secrets Manageris Newer service, meant for storing secrets Capability to force rotation of scerets every X days Intergraion with Amazon RDS Secrets are encypted using KMS

-AWS Secrets Manager meant for storing secrets, Capability to force rotation of secrets every X days, Automate generation of secrets on rotation (uses Lambda), Integration with Amazon RDS (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Aurora).

A company runs an e-commerce application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The instances run in an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. The Auto Scaling group scales based on CPU utilization metrics. The e-commerce application stores the transaction data in a MySQL 8.0 database that is hosted on a large EC2 instance.The database's performance degrades quickly as application load increases. The application handles more read requests than write transactions. The company wants a solution that will automatically scale the database to meet the demand of unpredictable read workloads while maintaining high availability.Which solution will meet these requirements?

• Use Amazon Redshift with a single node for leader and compute functionality

• Use Amazon RDS with a Single-AZ deployment Configure Amazon RDS to add reader instances in a different Availability Zone.

• Use Amazon Aurora with a Multi-AZ deployment. Configure Aurora Auto Scaling with Aurora Replicas.

• Use Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached with EC2 Spot Instances.

Answer explanation

- AURORA is 5x performance improvement over MySQL on RDS and handles more read requests than write,; maintaining high availability = Multi-AZ deployment

-Aurora is fast, and for this case will support unpredictable workloads through its read replicas.

-"Read workloads" "Maintaining high availability" = Read replica's

-Migration from My SQL, Postgres SQL to Aurora is 5x and 3x times improves performance . Also provision for Read replicas

A company recently migrated to AWS and wants to implement a solution to protect the traffic that flows in and out of the production VPC. The company had an inspection server in its on-premises data center. The inspection server performed specific operations such as traffic flow inspection and traffic filtering. The company wants to have the same functionalities in the AWS Cloud.Which solution will meet these requirements?

• Use Amazon GuardDuty for traffic inspection and traffic filtering in the production VPC.

• Use Traffic Mirroring to mirror traffic from the production VPC for traffic inspection and filtering.

• Use AWS Network Firewall to create the required rules for traffic inspection and traffic filtering for the production VPC.

• Use AWS Firewall Manager to create the required rules for traffic inspection and traffic filtering for the production VPC.

Answer explanation

**AWS Network Firewall** is a stateful, managed network firewall and intrusion detection and prevention service for your virtual private cloud (VPC) that you created in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). With Network Firewall, you can filter traffic at the perimeter of your VPC. This includes filtering traffic going to and coming from an internet gateway, NAT gateway, or over VPN or AWS Direct Connect.

A company hosts a data lake on AWS. The data lake consists of data in Amazon S3 and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The company needs a reporting solution that provides data visualization and includes all the data sources within the data lake. Only the company's management team should have full access to all the visualizations. The rest of the company should have only limited access. Which solution will meet these requirements?

• reate an analysis in Amazon QuickSight. Connect all the data sources and create new datasets. Publish dashboards to visualize the data. Share the dashboards with the appropriate IAM roles.

• Create an analysis in Amazon QuickSight. Connect all the data sources and create new datasets. Publish dashboards to visualize the data. Share the dashboards with the appropriate users and groups.

• Create an AWS Glue table and crawler for the data in Amazon S3. Create an AWS Glue extract, transform, and load (ETL) job to produce reports. Publish the reports to Amazon S3. Use S3 bucket policies to limit access to the reports.

• Create an AWS Glue table and crawler for the data in Amazon S3. Use Amazon Athena Federated Query to access data within Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. Generate reports by using Amazon Athena. Publish the reports to Amazon S3. Use S3 bucket policies to limit access to the reports

Answer explanation

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/quicksight/latest/user/share-a-dashboard-grant-access-users.html

A company is implementing a new business application. The application runs on two Amazon EC2 instances and uses an Amazon S3 bucket for document storage. A solutions architect needs to ensure that the EC2 instances can access the S3 bucket. What should the solutions architect do to meet this requirement?

• Create an IAM role that grants access to the S3 bucket. Attach the role to the EC2 instances.

• Create an IAM policy that grants access to the S3 bucket. Attach the policy to the EC2 instances.

• Create an IAM group that grants access to the S3 bucket. Attach the group to the EC2 instances.

• Create an IAM user that grants access to the S3 bucket. Attach the user account to the EC2 instances.

Answer explanation

Always remember that you should associate IAM roles to EC2 instances

An application development team is designing a microservice that will convert large images to smaller, compressed images. When a user uploads an image through the web interface, the microservice should store the image in an Amazon S3 bucket, process and compress the image with an AWS Lambda function, and store the image in its compressed form in a different S3 bucket.A solutions architect needs to design a solution that uses durable, stateless components to process the images automatically. Which combination of actions will meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

• Create an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue. Configure the S3 bucket to send a notification to the SQS queue when an image is uploaded to the S3 bucket.

• Configure the Lambda function to use the Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue as the invocation source. When the SQS message is successfully processed, delete the message in the queue.

• Configure the Lambda function to monitor the S3 bucket for new uploads. When an uploaded image is detected, write the file name to a text file in memory and use the text file to keep track of the images that were processed.

•  Launch an Amazon EC2 instance to monitor an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue. When items are added to the queue, log the file name in a text file on the EC2 instance and invoke the Lambda function.

• Configure an Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) event to monitor the S3 bucket. When an image is uploaded, send an alert to an Amazon ample Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic with the application owner's email address for further processing.

Answer explanation

It can be done more straightforwardly. Just connect the S3 event to Lambda, and it is done. I don't think we need SQS or anything.

A company has a three-tier web application that is deployed on AWS. The web servers are deployed in a public subnet in a VPC. The application servers and database servers are deployed in private subnets in the same VPC. The company has deployed a third-party virtual firewall appliance from AWS Marketplace in an inspection VPC. The appliance is configured with an IP interface that can accept IP packets.A solutions architect needs to integrate the web application with the appliance to inspect all traffic to the application before the traffic reaches the web server.Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

• Create a Network Load Balancer in the public subnet of the application's VPC to route the traffic to the appliance for packet inspection.

• Create an Application Load Balancer in the public subnet of the application's VPC to route the traffic to the appliance for packet inspection.

• Deploy a transit gateway in the inspection VPConfigure route tables to route the incoming packets through the transit gateway.

• Deploy a Gateway Load Balancer in the inspection VPC. Create a Gateway Load Balancer endpoint to receive the incoming packets and forward the packets to the appliance.

Answer explanation

Use Gateway Load balancer REF: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/scaling-network-traffic-inspection-using-aws-gateway-load-balancer/

A company wants to improve its ability to clone large amounts of production data into a test environment in the same AWS Region. The data is stored in Amazon EC2 instances on Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. Modifications to the cloned data must not affect the production environment. The software that accesses this data requires consistently high I/O performance.A solutions architect needs to minimize the time that is required to clone the production data into the test environment.Which solution will meet these requirements?

• Take EBS snapshots of the production EBS volumes. Restore the snapshots onto EC2 instance store volumes in the test environment.

• Configure the production EBS volumes to use the EBS Multi-Attach feature. Take EBS snapshots of the production EBS volumes. Attach the production EBS volumes to the EC2 instances in the test environment.

• Take EBS snapshots of the production EBS volumes. Create and initialize new EBS volumes. Attach the new EBS volumes to EC2 instances in the test environment before restoring the volumes from the production EBS snapshots.

• Take EBS snapshots of the production EBS volumes. Turn on the EBS fast snapshot restore feature on the EBS snapshots. Restore the snapshots into new EBS volumes. Attach the new EBS volumes to EC2 instances in the test environment.

Answer explanation

https://aws.amazon.com/cn/about-aws/whats-new/2020/11/amazon-ebs-fast-snapshot-restore-now-available-us-govcloud-regions/

Minimize the time is a key requirementhttps://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-fast-snapshot-restore.html Amazon EBS fast snapshot restore (FSR) enables you to create a volume from a snapshot that is fully initialized at creation. This eliminates the latency of I/O operations on a block when it is accessed for the first time. Volumes that are created using fast snapshot restore instantly deliver all of their provisioned performance.