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

Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments provide automatic failover for relational databases such as MySQL, ensuring high availability and durability. The feature maintains synchronous replication between a primary DB instance and a standby in a separate Availability Zone. AWS guarantees that failover typically completes within minutes, ensuring an RTO and RPO of less than 2 minutes. Option A requires manual promotion of replicas, which cannot meet the strict RTO/RPO requirement. Option C depends on custom scripts and manual synchronization, introducing operational risk. Option D creates active-active EC2-based databases, which do not provide synchronous replication or automated failover. Therefore, Multi-AZ RDS (B) is the managed, resilient, and operationally efficient solution that meets the business requirements.

AWS Secrets Manager is designed specifically to securely store and manage sensitive information such as database credentials. It integrates seamlessly with AWS services like Lambda and RDS, and it provides automatic credential rotation with minimal operational overhead.

AWS Secrets Manager: By storing the database credentials in Secrets Manager, you ensure that the credentials are securely stored, encrypted, and managed. Secrets Manager provides a built-in mechanism to automatically rotate credentials at regular intervals (e.g., every 30 days), which helps in maintaining security best practices without requiring additional manual intervention.

Lambda Integration: The Lambda function can be easily configured to retrieve the credentials from Secrets Manager using the AWS SDK, ensuring that the credentials are accessed securely at runtime.

Why Not Other Options?:

Option A (Parameter Store with Rotation): While Parameter Store can store parameters securely, Secrets Manager is more tailored for secrets management and automatic rotation, offering more features and less operational overhead.

Option C (Encrypted Lambda environment variable): Storing credentials directly in Lambda environment variables, even when encrypted, requires custom code to manage rotation, which increases operational complexity.

Option D (KMS with automatic rotation): KMS is for managing encryption keys, not for storing and rotating secrets like database credentials. This option would require more custom implementation to manage credentials securely.

AWS References:

AWS Secrets Manager- Detailed documentation on how to store, manage, and rotate secrets using AWS Secrets Manager.

Using Secrets Manager with AWS Lambda- Guidance on integrating Secrets Manager with Lambda for secure credential management.

This solution offers the least operational overhead while meeting the security and global availability requirements:

Amazon CloudFront and S3: Hosting the static frontend on S3 and serving it via CloudFront provides low-latency global distribution, high availability, and security. S3 is a cost-effective and serverless option for hosting static assets, and CloudFront ensures that the application is cached closer to the users, reducing latency globally.

AWS Lambda and API Gateway: Refactoring the microservices to use Lambda functions with API Gateway allows for a fully serverless, scalable, and highly available backend. This reduces the need for managing EC2 instances, as Lambda automatically scales to meet demand and only charges for the actual usage.

RDS for MySQL: Migrating the MySQL database from an EC2 instance to Amazon RDS significantly reduces operational overhead. RDS manages backups, patching, and scaling, and it offers high availability options (e.g., Multi-AZ).

Option AandDinvolve using EC2 Reserved Instances for the database, which requires more operational maintenance than using RDS.

Option Csuggests using a Network Load Balancer with Lambda, which adds unnecessary complexity for this use case.

AWS References:

Amazon S3 and CloudFront Integration

AWS Lambda with API Gateway

Amazon RDS for MySQL

AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) is designed to protect public-facing web applications from common web exploits and allows for deep inspection of HTTP and HTTPS requests. By enabling logging on AWS WAF, you can gain insights into traffic flow, request sources, and blocked requests, which improves both security visibility and posture. Integrating AWS WAF logging with Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose allows automatic, near-real-time delivery of log data to Amazon S3 for analysis, reporting, or integration with analytics tools. This solution not only secures the website but also enables comprehensive traffic analysis, satisfying both requirements efficiently.

Reference Extract from AWS Documentation / Study Guide:

"AWS WAF provides detailed logs of web requests, which can be delivered to Amazon S3 via Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. This logging enables analysis of web traffic and sources, supporting both security and operational monitoring."

Source: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Official Study Guide, Security and Compliance section; AWS WAF Developer Guide (Logging and Monitoring).