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

An IAM user can enable an MFA device for their own user when their IAM policy grants the required permissions (such as iam:CreateVirtualMFADevice and iam:EnableMFADevice). The root user can enable MFA for the root user credentials, but it is not the only principal that can enable MFA. IAM roles cannot have MFA devices attached, and MFA can be configured through both the AWS Management Console and the AWS CLI.

Using multiple Availability Zones provides high availability and fault tolerance for applications by distributing resources within a region across physically separated data centers. This ensures that if one Availability Zone becomes unavailable or compromised, others can continue to operate, reducing the potential impact on the application's users. The incorrect answers mention increasing performance and reducing latency, which are benefits related to edge locations and caching respectively, rather than the primary purpose of Availability Zones.

Amazon Macie is the AWS service specifically crafted for the purpose of analyzing and securing content that resides within Amazon S3. It uses machine learning and pattern matching to automatically recognize sensitive information such as healthcare records. When it detects unsecured data or abnormal data access patterns, it triggers alerts. This fits the requirement of the healthcare company to keep its patient records secure according to compliance regulations. Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that monitors malicious activities rather than classifying content. While AWS Secrets Manager secures and rotates secrets such as database credentials and API keys, it does not classify or monitor object content within S3. Lastly, Amazon Cognito focuses on user identity management and would not assist with the data classification or monitoring needs of the healthcare company.

Amazon ElastiCache effectively addresses the challenge of reducing database load by caching query results. It supports caching strategies, both for Redis and Memcached, that can store frequently accessed data in-memory, thereby improving application performance by providing low-latency access to the data and reducing the load on the database tier. This aligns with the criteria specified for enhancing performance and scalability for read-heavy operations, making it the best option given the scenario described.

Amazon RDS Read Replicas are not the ideal choice because, while they can reduce the load by serving read requests, they are not a caching layer and do not offer the same low latency as an in-memory cache. Using RDS Multi-AZ would provide high availability but would not address the performance issue related to read-heavy queries as effectively as a caching layer. Amazon S3 is primarily used for object storage and is not suitable for caching database query results.

The service that enables logging of account actions and automatic detection of top-level user API activity is the correct answer, which is Amazon CloudTrail. It records events that are made within an account and can be set up to generate alerts when specific activities, including those by the top-level account user, are detected. The service known for configuration tracking is not suitable for monitoring account activities directly. The service responsible for identity management does not offer automated detection or alerting for specific user actions. The service focused on threat detection primarily monitors for unusual activity but is not specifically designed for tracking the usages of top-level user credentials.

Attach a resource-based policy (bucket policy) to the S3 bucket that identifies the network administration team's AWS account as the principal and grants only the required permissions. A bucket policy is evaluated in the account that owns the resource and explicitly supports specifying an entire account in the Principal element, which cleanly limits access to that account.

IAM identity-based policies in the security engineers' account cannot by themselves grant principals from another account access to the bucket; a resource-based policy in the bucket owner's account is still required for cross-account access. Although legacy S3 ACLs can grant permissions to another AWS account via that account's canonical user ID, AWS now recommends disabling ACLs and using bucket policies for simpler management and finer-grained control. Restricting access by source IP address does not satisfy the requirement because any principal from any account could still reach the bucket if it originates from the allowed network range.

Deploying identical stacks in multiple AWS Regions and using Amazon Route 53 latency-based (or geolocation) routing with health checks fulfills both goals. Each Region serves traffic from the closest users, reducing latency, and EU data can be stored exclusively in the EU Region (for example, eu-central-1) with cross-Region replication disabled, satisfying residency rules. CloudFront or Global Accelerator alone improve network performance but still route dynamic writes to the original Region, violating data-residency. Increasing instance size, placement groups, or dedicated network links also leave the workload single-Region and do not address compliance.

Establishing groups for each department and assigning the corresponding policies necessary for their access needs would offer the best solution. This strategy enables clear role definition and privilege segregation. Users are allocated to their respective groups, simplifying the administration and modification of permissions in adherence to their roles. The incorrect choices involve strategies that either increase management complexity without providing additional value, mismatch the scenario's requirements, or fail to offer the precise control needed for departmental resource access within a common environment.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is designed for decoupling producers and consumers with a fully managed message queue. Standard queues provide at-least-once delivery and automatically scale to virtually any throughput, allowing independent scaling of microservices .

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is optimized for real-time analytics of large, ordered data streams and requires shard management; it is more complex than needed for simple message hand-off and may lose data if consumers fall behind shard retention.

Amazon EventBridge offers at-least-once event delivery but is optimized for routing events to multiple targets and has soft throughput quotas that can throttle extreme burst traffic.

AWS Step Functions orchestrates stateful workflows rather than providing a high-throughput message buffer between microservices.

Therefore, SQS is the most appropriate choice.

The correct answer is Amazon Cognito, which allows developers to add user sign-up, sign-in, and access control to their web and mobile applications quickly and easily. It also supports federated authentication with social identity providers, such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon, which is the functionality described in the question. The other services listed have different primary uses: AWS IAM is designed for secure AWS resource management, AWS Control Tower is for governance across multiple AWS accounts, and Amazon GuardDuty specializes in security threat detection and continuous monitoring.

AWS is responsible for protecting the infrastructure that runs AWS services, which includes the physical security of data centers, network infrastructure, and managed service patching, like Amazon RDS. Customers are responsible for managing the security inside the database, such as the data itself, controlling who can access the data, and using encryption to protect the data. While AWS will patch database engines, the logical database schema is within the customer's control, thus the correct answer is 'Patching the underlying database software'.

Designing a microservice to be stateless allows any instance of the service to process any incoming request. All state information (for example, user sessions or shopping-cart data) is stored in an external, shared data store such as Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon ElastiCache. Because instances do not rely on locally held state, Auto Scaling groups or container orchestrators can freely add or remove instances, and an Application Load Balancer can route requests to any healthy instance. Approaches that keep state on the instance (sticky sessions, local file storage, or in-memory caches within the service) couple requests to specific instances and hinder horizontal scaling.

Granting s3:GetObject on the specific bucket path arn:aws:s3:::app-logs/* limits both the actions and the resource scope to exactly what the application needs, satisfying the least-privilege principle. The other options either grant broader actions (write or list), apply to every bucket in the account, or use a managed policy that provides read access to all buckets, all of which exceed the stated requirement.

The correct approach involves setting up trust relationships between accounts by creating roles that can be assumed as needed. The idea is to provide temporary credentials that can be used within certain security parameters defined by the role’s permission policy. This enables the enterprise to control access precisely without having to manage permanent credentials for each developer for each environment, adhering to the principle of least privilege. Generating dedicated user credentials or creating shared roles in both accounts doesn't follow the best practice of using temporary credentials for cross-account access and may not meet security and audit requirements. Enabling direct access by modifying resource policies could compromise security by making the role too permissive and is not aligned with recommended security practices.

Create a VPC with multiple public subnets (for example, in different Availability Zones for high availability). Launch the compute resources for each application (such as EC2 instances or Application Load Balancers) in the appropriate subnet and attach a dedicated security group to each application's network interfaces. Configure the security-group rules to allow inbound TCP 443 (HTTPS) from 0.0.0.0/0 and to deny all other inbound traffic (no rules permitting traffic from the other applications' security groups). Because a security group is evaluated at the instance or ENI level, this prevents the applications from initiating unsolicited traffic to one another while still allowing internet users to reach each application over HTTPS.

The other options either expose additional ports, place all applications behind a single overly permissive security group, or rely on opening SSH (port 22) rather than HTTPS, so they do not meet both the isolation and HTTPS-only requirements.

The question asks what can you do to maintain operational continuity if one data center in a region has an outage. Keep in mind that with AWS, one region is made of many data centers groups into availability zones. Therefor, a multi-AZ setup would help mitigate and prevent outages during a data center outage.

Choosing a Multi-AZ deployment for an RDS instance provides high availability by automatically maintaining a synchronous standby replica in a different data center, or Availability Zone. In case of an infrastructure failure, the database will fail over to the standby so that database operations can resume quickly without manual intervention. This choice is the most aligned with the requirement for operational continuity within a single region in the face of a data center outage. The other answers either describe strategies that introduce geographical redundancy, which goes beyond the scope of the question, or load balancing, which does not address the need for automatic failover at the data layer.

Implementing fine-grained access controls by assigning tailored IAM roles to each tier's respective EC2 instances ensures that each tier operates with only the permissions necessary for its duties. This strict adherence to the principle of least privilege prevents excessive permissions that could be exploited in case of a security breach. Providing overarching administrative credentials to all tiers, using root account access, or stripping all permissions contradict the security best practice of granting least privilege to perform required functions and are, therefore, incorrect.

The process of federation involves the integration of an external directory service with IAM roles. By setting up federation, users authenticate with their local credentials on their existing directory system and then receive temporary security credentials to operate on the console or interact with services via APIs or CLI. This method honors the principle of least privilege and simplifies credential management while providing secure access. Manually creating IAM users is redundant and insecure for large enterprise environments. Assigning long-term credentials goes against security best practices, making them a poor choice. Lastly, developing a bespoke authentication portal partial to the corporation's internal system does not use AWS built-in mechanisms for secure access management and is less efficient and potentially less secure.

Using the selected service, enterprises can manage multiple environments by setting up a well-architected baseline, automating the provisioning of new environments, and uniformly applying policy controls across all environments for security and compliance. While the other options provide specific security features or advisory services, they do not offer the comprehensive solution needed for centralized governance and automated environment setup.

The correct answer is Amazon API Gateway because it securely manages API requests, supports developer access control, handles request transformations, and enforces rate limiting. It integrates with AWS services like Lambda and Cognito, making it ideal for managing web and mobile API traffic. The incorrect options lack full API management capabilities - AWS Direct Connect is for private networking, S3 is for storage, and Cognito only handles authentication. Step Functions is for workflow automation, and Lambda executes backend logic but lacks API request management. While some of these services complement API Gateway, none provide a complete solution on their own.