AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Practice Test (SAA-C03)

AWS Shield is designed specifically to protect internet-facing applications from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. By providing always-on detection and automatic response to common infrastructure layer (layer 3 and 4) attacks, AWS Shield maintains the availability of an application during such incidents. Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior, AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect web applications from common web exploits, and Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications on EC2 instances. Of these options, only AWS Shield is specifically focused on DDoS protection.

The correct service is designed to help developers follow the path of a request through their application, which can consist of a combination of AWS services, resources, third-party services, and other components to create an application. It enables the identification and analysis of performance bottlenecks and pinpointing the root cause of issues. CloudTrail is for tracking user activity and API usage, CloudWatch is primarily for monitoring operations and performance, and CodeDeploy automates code deployments to any instance.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability and is designed to handle large amounts of data with consistent, single-digit millisecond latency which makes it suitable for applications that need high-performance data retrieval. On the other hand, Amazon RDS is primarily used for relational database use cases with SQL querying needs, whereas Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse solution optimized for complex querying over large datasets, and Amazon Neptune is a graph database service that is used for applications working with highly connected data.

This statement is True. Containers are an ideal choice for microservices architectures as they package applications and their dependencies into a portable unit. This encapsulation allows each microservice to be developed, deployed, and scaled independently, without affecting other services. Containers provide consistency across environments and enable rapid deployment and scaling, which are essential characteristics of scalable and loosely coupled architectures. Utilizing container orchestration services like Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS enhances the management and scalability of these containerized applications.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, multi-region, serverless database that supports key-value and document data models, making it suitable for a wide variety of applications. Being serverless, it automatically scales to accommodate the workload. Amazon RDS is relational and not primarily serverless, although it has some auto-scaling features. Amazon Aurora is a relational database and, while it offers serverless options, it does not support non-relational data models. Amazon Redshift is a data warehousing service and does not offer a serverless, non-relational database.

The concept of 'shared responsibility' within a cloud computing model entails that the cloud service provider is accountable for the security of the computing infrastructure, including data centers, hardware, and foundational cloud services. Conversely, the customer is in charge of security measures that pertain to their own data, applications, and other assets operating within the cloud infrastructure. This question focuses on the critical understanding that while the provider ensures a secure infrastructure foundation, the customer must take responsibility for aspects of security that are within their control, such as data encryption, access controls, and application security.

Auto Scaling is the correct answer because it provides the functionality of adjusting the number of instances dynamically to cope with the load, ensuring both performance maintenance and cost optimization. Lambda, while it does scale automatically, is event-driven and designed for short-duration workloads, making it less suited for traditional web application hosting. Elastic MapReduce (EMR) focuses on data processing and big data use cases rather than web application traffic fluctuation. Fargate, although it scales easily, is a container management service and not primarily used for instance-level scaling like the situation described.

An Application Load Balancer (ALB) is designed to handle sudden spikes in traffic by automatically distributing incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, in multiple Availability Zones, providing the necessary high availability and elasticity for the web application. Network Load Balancer (NLB) is ideal for handling millions of requests per second while maintaining low latencies, but it is not as well-suited as ALB for typical web traffic patterns that require intelligent routing based on content. Amazon CloudFront distributes traffic but is primarily a content delivery network service, not a load balancer. Simple Queue Service (SQS) decouples components of a cloud application but does not address the distribution of incoming web traffic across servers.

Using roles is the recommended way to securely delegate permissions for applications running on virtual servers. Roles can be assumed by anyone or anything that is granted access, which eliminates the need for embedding credentials in the applications. Moreover, roles can provide temporary security credentials to applications to interact with other resources. In contrast, individual user accounts are meant for human access and embedding their credentials can be less secure and harder to manage. Groupings are used to assign permissions to multiple users, not applications. SCPs are used in organizational policies to govern permissions and are not the direct means for applications to access resources.

AWS Shield provides managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection for applications running on Amazon's cloud platform. It safeguards against volumetric attacks that can overwhelm network resources and cause service disruptions. AWS Shield is automatically enabled for all customers and protects against the most common network and transport layer DDoS attacks. In contrast, AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) protects applications from common web exploits and vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting but is not specifically designed to handle large-scale DDoS attacks. Amazon GuardDuty is a threat intelligence service that continuously monitors traffic for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior but does not provide direct protection against DDoS attacks. AWS Config helps with resource configuration management and compliance but does not protect against external threats.

A dedicated, private network connection service offered by the cloud provider is the correct choice as it provides a reliable and low-latency connection compared to internet-based options. A site-to-site VPN relies on the public internet and may not meet the performance and reliability requirements. A content delivery network (CDN) is designed to cache content closer to users, not to establish dedicated connections. A global DNS service is used for routing traffic efficiently but does not provide a private network connection.

The best solution is to set up identity federation using AWS IAM roles with Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) integration to the company's corporate identity provider (IdP). This approach enables employees to authenticate using their existing corporate credentials and assume IAM roles to access AWS services. It minimizes administrative overhead by removing the need to create and manage individual IAM user accounts in AWS. This method adheres to security best practices by enforcing the principle of least privilege through role-based access control.

Creating individual IAM user accounts for all employees increases management complexity and potential security risks associated with credential management. Using AWS Directory Service to synchronize the corporate directory is unnecessary if SAML federation is available as it adds extra complexity and cost. Implementing Amazon Cognito is more suitable for customer-facing web and mobile applications as it provides user login service via social media profile. Hence, is not designed for providing federated access to AWS resources for internal employees.

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency and high transfer speeds. By using a global network of edge locations, CloudFront caches copies of your static content close to users, thereby reducing latency and improving users' content load times. This makes it the best choice in scenarios where a company is expanding globally and requires an optimized content delivery solution. Other options like Direct Connect and VPN are more suitable for dedicated connections between on-premise networks and AWS or encrypted connections across the Internet, respectively, rather than for optimizing content delivery to end users. Multi-tier network architecture is a broad concept and does not directly decrease latency or increase load times for global content delivery.

Implementing Amazon Storage Gateway File Gateway enables integration between on-premises applications and cloud storage by providing a file interface backed by Amazon S3. It allows the company to store files in Amazon S3 while caching frequently accessed data locally, ensuring low-latency access for applications. This hybrid solution eliminates the need for additional on-premises storage infrastructure and offloads data to the cloud, meeting both the expansion and performance requirements. Using Amazon DataSync is designed for data transfer and migration tasks rather than providing continuous integration with local applications, since it does not maintain seamless access to the files once they land to AWS. Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration speeds up data transfers to Amazon S3 but does not offer local caching or a file interface for on-premises applications. Storing data in Amazon S3 Glacier is suitable for archiving data that is infrequently accessed and does not meet the need for low-latency access to active files.

The most appropriate configuration for having data transfer charges billed to the requesters is enabling the 'Requester Pays' option on the S3 bucket. When this option is enabled, the requester instead of the bucket owner incurs the charges for the data transfer and requests. This allows the company to share large datasets without bearing the costs of data transfer. The other options do not shift the cost of data transfer to the requester and hence are not correct.