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

Creating a listener rule on theApplication Load Balancer (ALB)to return a maintenance response during the maintenance window is the most straightforward solution with the least operational overhead. The rule can be configured to match all incoming requests and return a custom response, and it can be easily removed once maintenance is complete.

Option A (Aurora table flag): This adds unnecessary complexity for a temporary maintenance response.

Option B and D (SQS or SNS): These options introduce more components than needed for a simple maintenance message.

AWS References:

ALB Listener Rules

AWS Glue Crawler: AWS Glue is a fully managed ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) service that makes it easy to prepare and load data for analytics. A Glue crawler can automatically discover new data and schema in Amazon S3, making it easy to keep the data catalog up-to-date.

Crawling the Data:

Set up an AWS Glue crawler to scan the S3 bucket containing the clickstream data.

The crawler will automatically detect the schema and create/update the tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog.

Amazon Athena:

Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL.

Once the data catalog is updated by the Glue crawler, use Athena to query the clickstream data directly in S3.

Operational Efficiency: This solution leverages fully managed services, reducing operational overhead. Glue crawlers automate data cataloging, and Athena provides a serverless, pay-per-query model for quick data analysis without the need to set up or manage infrastructure.

AWS Transfer Family: This service provides fully managed support for file transfers directly into and out of Amazon S3 using the SFTP, FTPS, and FTP protocols.

SFTP Endpoints:

Set up an AWS Transfer Family server and configure SFTP endpoints to handle the file transfers.

This service is scalable and managed, reducing operational overhead compared to running an SFTP solution on EC2 instances.

Integration with Active Directory:

Choose the AWS Directory Service option as the identity provider for the Transfer Family server.

Use AD Connector to link the on-premises Active Directory with AWS, allowing employees to use their existing AD credentials to access the SFTP service.

Operational Efficiency: This solution leverages managed services for both file transfer and identity management, ensuring minimal changes to the current authentication mechanisms and reducing operational overhead.

Amazon FSx for Lustre is the ideal solution for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads that require parallel access to a shared file system with low latency. FSx for Lustre is designed specifically to meet the needs of such workloads, offering sub-millisecond latencies, which makes it well-suited for the 1 ms latency requirement mentioned in the question.

Here is why FSx for Lustre is the best fit:

Parallel File System: FSx for Lustre is a parallel file system that can scale across hundreds of Amazon EC2 instances, providing high throughput and low-latency access to data. It is optimized for processing large datasets in parallel, which is essential for HPC workloads.

Low Latency: FSx for Lustre is capable of providing access latencies well within 1 ms, making it ideal for performance-sensitive workloads like HPC.

Seamless Integration with Amazon S3: FSx for Lustre can be linked to an Amazon S3 bucket. This integration allows data to be imported from S3 into FSx for Lustre before the workload begins and exported back to S3 after processing. This feature is crucial for manual postprocessing because it enables engineers to access the dataset in S3 after processing.

Performance: FSx for Lustre is built for workloads that require high performance, such as machine learning, analytics, media processing, and financial simulations, which are typical for HPC environments.

In contrast:

Amazon EFS (Option A): While EFS provides shared file storage and scales across multiple EC2 instances, it does not offer the same level of performance or sub-millisecond latencies as FSx for Lustre. EFS is more suited for general-purpose workloads, not high-performance computing.

Mounting S3 as a file system (Option B and D): S3 is object storage, not a file system designed for low-latency access and parallel processing. Mounting S3 buckets directly or using AWS Resource Access Manager to share the bucket would not meet the low-latency (1 ms) or performance requirements needed for HPC workloads.

Therefore, Amazon FSx for Lustre (Option C) is the most appropriate and verified solution for this scenario.

AWS References:

Amazon FSx for Lustre

Best Practices for High Performance Computing (HPC)

Amazon FSx and Amazon S3 Integration