Amazon Web Services Updated SOA-C03 Exam Questions and Answers by serena

The most secure pattern is to use an IAM role for Amazon EC2 with the minimum required permissions. AWS guidance states: “Use roles for applications that run on Amazon EC2 instances” and “grant least privilege by allowing only the actions required to perform a task.” By attaching a role to the instance, short-lived credentials are automatically provided through the instance metadata service; this removes the need to create long-term access keys or embed secrets. Granting only sqs:SendMessage, sqs:ReceiveMessage, and sqs:DeleteMessage against the specific SQS queues enforces least privilege and aligns with CloudOps security controls. Options A and B rely on IAM user access keys, which contravene best practices for workloads on EC2 and increase credential-management risk. Option C uses a role but grants sqs:*, violating least-privilege principles. Therefore, Option D meets the security requirement with scoped, temporary credentials and precise permissions.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of AWS CloudOps Documents:

The requirement is to alert before throttling occurs. For a DynamoDB table in provisioned capacity mode, throttling happens when demand approaches or exceeds provisioned throughput. CloudWatch provides direct table metrics such as ConsumedReadCapacityUnits and ProvisionedReadCapacityUnits (and related utilization signals). Creating an alarm on ConsumedReadCapacityUnits with a threshold set close to the table’s provisioned read capacity provides an early warning that the table is nearing its limit—before actual throttling prevents reads. The alarm can publish directly to the existing SNS topic so the operations team is notified proactively.

Option C and D focus on detecting throttling after it occurs by matching throttling exceptions in logs. That is reactive and violates “before throttled.” Option B (auto scaling) may reduce the likelihood of throttling, but it does not directly satisfy the alerting requirement and “scaling events” notifications are not a reliable proxy for “approaching throttle” (and may not fire early enough depending on scaling configuration). The simplest, most direct CloudOps approach is a CloudWatch alarm on consumption nearing provisioned capacity.

The AWS Cloud Operations and Storage documentation confirms that S3 Transfer Acceleration is designed to increase upload speed for objects transferred to S3 buckets over long distances.

It uses AWS Global Edge Network and Amazon CloudFront edge locations to route data through optimized network paths, reducing latency and achieving higher throughput compared to standard S3 uploads.

After enabling Transfer Acceleration on the bucket, users upload files to the accelerated endpoint (e.g., bucketname.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com). This feature requires no changes to application logic besides endpoint modification and provides immediate performance improvement.

CloudFront (Option A) is for content delivery, not uploads. ElastiCache (Option B) and Global Accelerator (Option C) are unrelated to S3 upload performance.

Thus, Option D is correct — enable S3 Transfer Acceleration for faster, optimized file uploads.

The Storage Gateway service enables hybrid cloud backup by presenting local block storage that synchronizes with AWS cloud storage. For scenarios where all data must remain available locally while still backed up to AWS, the correct mode is gateway-stored volumes.

AWS documentation defines:

“Use stored volumes if you want to keep all your data locally while asynchronously backing up point-in-time snapshots to Amazon S3 for durable storage.”

These volumes expose an iSCSI interface compatible with POSIX file systems, allowing direct use by on-premises backup software.

Gateway-cached volumes (Option C) store primary data in AWS with limited local cache, violating the “all data must be available locally” requirement. Options A and B are object-based storage solutions, not compatible with POSIX or block-based backup applications.

Therefore, Option D fully satisfies CloudOps reliability and continuity best practices by ensuring local availability, cloud durability, and POSIX compatibility for backups.