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

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 References:

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

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

The data isfrequently accessed only for the first 30 daysand then israrely accessedbut must be retained for7 years. That pattern matchesAmazon S3 Standardfor the initial active period and thenS3 Glacier Deep Archivefor long-term retention at the lowest storage cost. AWS guidance positions Glacier Deep Archive for long-lived archive data that is accessed once or twice a year and is ideal for compliance-style retention. EFS and EBS are not cost-effective archival storage choices for this use case. S3 Standard-IA is cheaper than S3 Standard, but Glacier Deep Archive is more cost-optimized for multi-year rare access.

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Encryption at Rest: AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) provides centralized control over the cryptographic keys used to protect data. By using AWS KMS with Amazon S3, you can manage encryption keys and define policies to control access to them.

Encryption in Transit: By enforcing the aws:SecureTransport condition in the S3 bucket policy, you ensure that all data is transmitted over HTTPS, protecting data in transit.

Access Control: IAM policies allow you to define fine-grained permissions for users and roles, ensuring that only authorized entities can access the customer records.

Monitoring: AWS CloudTrail provides a record of actions taken by a user, role, or AWS service in Amazon S3, enabling you to monitor access to the records.

The company’s requirements are:

Store gigabytes of rarely accessed files daily.

Files must be available within minutes during the first year.

Retain files for 7 years cost-effectively.

The S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class provides low-cost, long-term storage for data accessed occasionally, with millisecond retrieval time. This fits the requirement for availability within minutes during the first year. After one year, transitioning files to S3 Glacier Deep Archive (the lowest cost S3 storage class) with longer retrieval times is cost-effective for data retention over 7 years.

Option B uses S3 Standard and Glacier Flexible Retrieval, which is higher cost during the first year and slower retrieval times. Option C is less cost-efficient because EBS volumes are expensive for rarely accessed data and snapshots incur additional costs. Option D uses EFS, which is designed for low-latency file storage but is more expensive than S3 Glacier classes for long-term archival.