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

This option is the most operationally efficient way to meet the requirements because it allows the company to monitor and analyze the database login activity across all the accounts in the organization. By publishing the Aurora general logs to a log group in Amazon CloudWatch Logs, the company can enable the logging of the database connections, disconnections, and failed authentication attempts. By exporting the log data to a central Amazon S3 bucket, the company can store the log data in a durable and cost-effective way and use other AWS services or tools to perform further analysis or alerting on the log data. For example, the company can use Amazon Athena to query the log data in Amazon S3, or use Amazon SNS to send notifications based on the log data.

A. Attach service control policies (SCPs) to the root of the organization to identify the failed login attempts. This option is not effective because SCPs are not designed to identify the failed login attempts, but to restrict the actions that the users and roles can perform in the member accounts of the organization. SCPs are applied to the AWS API calls, not to the database login attempts. Moreover, SCPs do not provide any logging or analysis capabilities for the database activity.

B. Enable the Amazon RDS Protection feature in Amazon GuardDuty for the member accounts of the organization. This option is not optimal because the Amazon RDS Protection feature in Amazon GuardDuty is not available for Aurora PostgreSQL databases, but only for Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon RDS for MariaDB databases. Moreover, the Amazon RDS Protection feature does not monitor the database login attempts, but the network and API activity related to the RDS instances.

D. Publish all the Aurora PostgreSQL database events in AWS CloudTrail to a central Amazon S3 bucket. This option is not sufficient because AWS CloudTrail does not capture the database login attempts, but only the AWS API calls made by or on behalf of the Aurora PostgreSQL database. For example, AWS CloudTrail can record the events such as creating, modifying, or deleting the database instances, clusters, or snapshots, but not the events such as connecting, disconnecting, or failing to authenticate to the database.

References:

1 Working with Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL - Amazon Aurora

2 Working with log groups and log streams - Amazon CloudWatch Logs

3 Exporting Log Data to Amazon S3 - Amazon CloudWatch Logs

[4] Amazon GuardDuty FAQs

[5] Logging Amazon RDS API Calls with AWS CloudTrail - Amazon Relational Database Service

This solution meets the requirements because it allows the company to improve visibility into the infrastructure by using ALB access logging and Amazon Athena. ALB access logging is a feature that captures detailed information about requests sent to the load balancer, such as the client’s IP address, request path, response code, and latency. By enabling ALB access logging to Amazon S3, the company can store the access logs in an S3 bucket as compressed files. Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. By creating a table in Amazon Athena for the access logs, the company can query the logs and get results in seconds. This way, the company can better understand the abnormal traffic access patterns across the application.

References:

Access logs for your Application Load Balancer

Querying Application Load Balancer Logs

This solution meets the following requirements:

It is operationally efficient, as it only requires one transit gateway and one transit VIF to connect the Direct Connect connection to all the VPCs in the same AWS Region. The transit gateway acts as a regional network hub that simplifies the network management and reduces the number of VIFs and gateways needed.

It is scalable, as it can support up to 5000 attachments per transit gateway, which can include VPCs, VPNs, Direct Connect gateways, and peering connections. The transit gateway can also be connected to other transit gateways in different Regions or accounts using peering connections, enabling cross-Region and cross-account connectivity.

It is flexible, as it allows each VPC to communicate with all other VPCs and on-premises networks using dynamic routing protocols such as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). The transit gateway’s route propagation feature automatically propagates the routes from the attached VPCs and VPNs to the transit gateway route table, eliminating the need to manually update the route tables.

References:

Transit Gateways - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Working with transit gateways - AWS Direct Connect

Amazon VPC-to-Amazon VPC connectivity options - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Connectivity Options

A Network Load Balancer can be assigned one Elastic IP address for each Availability Zone it uses1. This allows the clients to reach the load balancer using a static IP address that can be authorized on their firewalls. An Application Load Balancer cannot be assigned an Elastic IP address2. An A record in an Amazon Route 53 hosted zone pointing to an Elastic IP address would not work because the load balancer would still use its own IP address as the source of the forwarded requests to the web service. An EC2 instance with a public IP address running as a proxy in front of the load balancer would add unnecessary complexity and cost, and would not provide the same scalability and availability as a Network Load Balancer. References: 1: Network Load Balancers - Elastic Load Balancing3, IP address type section2: How to assign Elastic IP to Application Load Balancer in AWS?4, answer section.