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

UsingAD ConnectorwithAWS IAM Identity Center(formerly AWS Single Sign-On) allows the company to leverage its existingon-premises Active Directoryfor centralized identity management and access control. AD Connector acts as a proxy to the on-premises AD withoutrequiring additional infrastructure or complex setup. This solution integrates seamlessly with AWS, allowing the development team to use their existing AD credentials to access AWS resources across multiple accounts managed by AWS Organizations. The permissions for AWS resources can be managed centrally through IAM Identity Center by configuring permission sets.

This solution provides:

Least operational overhead: AD Connector is fully managed, and IAM Identity Center allows centralized management of permissions across accounts.

Secure access: The solution complies with security policies by using existing AD authentication mechanisms.

Option A (AWS Managed AD): Setting up a fully managed AWS AD and establishing a trust is more complex and involves additional operational overhead.

Option B (IAM Users): Manually managing IAM users and permissions is less scalable and increases operational complexity.

Option D (Cognito): Amazon Cognito is more suited for user-facing applications rather than internal identity management for AWS resources.

AWS References:

AD Connector with IAM Identity Center

AWS IAM Identity Center

For improving availability and performance of the hybrid application, the following solutions are optimal:

AWS Global Accelerator (Option A): Global Accelerator provides high availability and improves performance by using the AWS global network to route user traffic to the nearest healthy endpoint (across AWS Regions). By adding the Network Load Balancers as endpoints, Global Accelerator ensures that traffic is routed efficiently to the closest endpoint, improving both availability and performance.

Network Load Balancer (Option D): Thestateful TCP-based workloadhosted on Amazon EC2 instances and thestateless UDP-based workloadhosted on-premises are best served by Network Load Balancers (NLBs). NLBs are designed to handle TCP and UDP traffic with ultra-low latency and can route traffic to both EC2 and on-premises endpoints.

Option B (CloudFront and Route 53): CloudFront is better suited for HTTP/HTTPS workloads, not for TCP/UDP-based applications.

Option C (ALB): Application Load Balancers do not support the stateless UDP-based workload, making NLBs the better choice for both TCP and UDP.

AWS References:

AWS Global Accelerator

Network Load Balancer

The correct and secure approach is to use Amazon CloudFront with Origin Access Control (OAC) to protect the S3 origin and attach AWS WAF to the CloudFront distribution to inspect and filter traffic at the edge before reaching the origin.

From AWS Documentation:

“AWS WAF is integrated with Amazon CloudFront, allowing inspection of HTTP(S) requests at the edge location before forwarding to your origin. To restrict direct access to the S3 bucket, use Origin Access Control (OAC).”

(Source: Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide – Serving private content)

Why Option D is correct:

CloudFront is the only service that integrates with AWS WAF for full HTTP layer inspection.

Origin Access Control (OAC) ensures that only CloudFront can access the S3 origin—replacing older Origin Access Identity (OAI) features.

The S3 bucket policy is configured to trust requests only from CloudFront using OAC signed requests.

Why the other options are incorrect:

Option A: WAF ARN is not a principal in S3 bucket policy. IAM does not support bucket policies based on WAF ARNs.

Option B: Incorrect – CloudFront doesn't "forward requests to WAF"; rather, WAF is associated with CloudFront and inspects requests at the edge.

Option C: S3 does not use security groups; they are for EC2/network interfaces. This shows a misunderstanding of how S3 works.