AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer Associate SOA-C03 Practice Question

A company runs 50 Linux EC2 instances whose application data resides on attached EBS volumes. Security policy mandates encrypted, daily backups that must be retained for 35 days and automatically copied to a secondary AWS Region. The operations team wants a fully managed, scalable solution with minimal custom code or scripts. Which approach satisfies the requirements with the LEAST operational effort?

Use EC2 Image Builder to create daily AMIs for the instances, share the AMIs to the secondary Region, and configure lifecycle policies to delete images after 35 days.
Create an AWS Backup plan that selects the EC2 instances by tag, enables default KMS encryption, sets a 35-day retention rule, and configures cross-Region copy to a backup vault in the secondary Region.
Schedule an AWS Lambda function with EventBridge that calls the CreateSnapshot API for each EBS volume, encrypts the snapshot, copies it to the target Region, and deletes snapshots older than 35 days.
Attach a Data Lifecycle Manager policy to each EBS volume to create encrypted daily snapshots, retain them for 35 days, and enable cross-Region copy.

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Answer Description

AWS Backup provides a central, fully managed service that natively supports EC2 instance and EBS volume backups. A backup plan can be targeted to resources by tag, apply default KMS encryption, set a 35-day retention rule, and create automatic cross-Region copy jobs without any custom code. Data Lifecycle Manager can also do snapshot automation, but it requires a separate policy per Region and does not manage cross-account or other resource types from one place, adding additional overhead. A custom Lambda solution or an EC2 Image Builder pipeline would achieve the goals but would require writing and maintaining code and schedules, increasing operational burden. Therefore, using AWS Backup is the lowest-effort, fully managed option that meets all requirements.

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