Amazon Web Services Updated SAA-C03 Exam Questions and Answers by philip

To allocate costs based on team ownership, AWS recommends tagging resources using cost allocation tags. Activating the “owner” tag as a cost allocation tag allows AWS Cost Explorer to categorize and group spending. Additionally, filtering for Amazon ECS services enables the visibility into service-specific usage. This approach is both scalable and operationally efficient.

Amazon Aurora MySQL supports the SELECT INTO OUTFILE S3 SQL syntax to export query results directly to Amazon S3. This is an efficient and low-overhead method for archiving data.

Once data is in S3, Lifecycle rules can be configured to automatically transition older data to lower-cost storage classes (such as S3 Glacier) or delete it after a defined period, providing a cost-optimized and automated archive solution.

The Glue-based options involve more services and operational overhead. SCT is intended for database migrations, not for periodic data archival.

Amazon S3 supports one Lifecycle configuration per bucket that can contain multiple rules. Lifecycle rules can include filters, including object size filters: ObjectSizeGreaterThan and ObjectSizeLessThan. You can combine rules so that one targets large objects and another provides a default expiration. Here, configure Rule 1 with a size filter ObjectSizeGreaterThan = 1 TB and Expiration = 2 days (48 hours) to purge very large videos early. Configure Rule 2 with Expiration = 7 days without a size filter to serve as a catch-all maximum retention for all objects. Options B and D are invalid because S3 does not allow multiple Lifecycle configurations per bucket. Option C cannot distinguish large files; it would delete all files at the same schedule without honoring the 48-hour policy for >1 TB objects. This single configuration with two rules meets both retention targets with minimal overhead and full S3-native capability.

Amazon RDS does not support enabling encryption at rest on an existing unencrypted DB instance. To encrypt an existing RDS instance’s data at rest, the recommended method is to:

Take a snapshot of the unencrypted DB instance.

Create an encrypted copy of the snapshot using AWS KMS. This encrypted snapshot contains the existing data encrypted at rest.

Restore a new DB instance from the encrypted snapshot. This new instance will have encryption at rest enabled.

Additionally, to manage encryption keys securely, companies can use customer managed keys (CMKs) in AWS Key Management Service (KMS). CMKs provide greater control over key management policies, rotation, and usage permissions compared to default AWS managed keys. Using a CMK allows customization of access control and auditability.

Option A is incorrect because you cannot enable encryption directly on a snapshot; you must create an encrypted copy. Option C is invalid because encryption cannot be enabled by modifying an existing instance’s configuration. Option D refers to the default AWS managed key, which is less flexible than customer managed keys.