Practice Free CLF-C02 AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Questions Answers With Explanation

On-Demand Instances are most cost-effective for short-term, steady, and unpredictable workloads. Using them for a one-month testing period allows flexibility without a long-term commitment. For long-term workloads (like a year or more), Reserved Instances or Savings Plans would be more cost-effective. Spot Instances are better for interruptible, flexible workloads.

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory is the AWS service that provides a managed Microsoft Active Directory in the AWS Cloud. It enables the user to use their existing Active Directory users, groups, and policies to access AWS resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, and AWS Single Sign-On. It also integrates with other Microsoft applications and services, such as Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Office 365, and Microsoft SharePoint

AWS Regions are the AWS service or resource that the company should use to select its Amazon RDS deployment area. AWS Regions are separate geographic areas where AWS clusters its data centers. Each AWS Region consists of multiple, isolated, and physically separate Availability Zones within a geographic area. Each AWS Region is designed to be isolated from the other AWS Regions to achieve the highest possible fault tolerance and stability. AWS provides a more extensive global footprint than any other cloud provider, and to support its global footprint and ensure customers are served across the world, AWS opens new Regions rapidly. AWS maintains multiple geographic Regions, including Regions in North America, South America, Europe, China, Asia Pacific, South Africa, and the Middle East. Amazon RDS is available in several AWS Regions worldwide. To create or work with an Amazon RDS DB instance in a specific AWS Region, you must use the corresponding regional service endpoint. You can choose the AWS Region that meets your latency or legal requirements. You can also use multiple AWS Regions to design a disaster recovery solution or to distribute your read workload. References: Global Infrastructure Regions & AZs - aws.amazon.com, Regions, Availability Zones, and Local Zones - Amazon Relational Database Service

Amazon Workspaces is the AWS service that provides the functionality of remotely accessing virtual desktop computers from the internet. Amazon Workspaces is a fully managed, secure desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) solution that allows users to provision cloud-based virtual desktops and access them from anywhere, using any supported device. Amazon Workspaces helps users reduce the complexity and cost of managing and maintaining physical desktops, and provides a consistent and secure user experience

 AWS Budgets allows you to set custom budgets that alert you when your costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budgeted amount. You can also use AWS Budgets to set reservation utilization or coverage targets and receive alerts when your utilization drops below the threshold you define. AWS Budgets provides you with a comprehensive view of your cost and usage, as well as your reservation utilization and coverage1.

 The tasks that are the responsibility of AWS according to the AWS shared responsibility model are securing the access of physical AWS facilities and performing infrastructure patching and maintenance. The AWS shared responsibility model defines the division of responsibilities between AWS and the customer for security and compliance. AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, which includes the physical security of the hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run the AWS services. AWS is also responsible for the maintenance and patching of the infrastructure that supports the AWS services. The customer is responsible for the security in the cloud, which includes the configuration and management of the AWS resources and applications that they use. Configuring AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), configuring security groups on Amazon EC2 instances, and patching applications that run on Amazon EC2 instances are tasks that are the responsibility of the customer, not AWS.

 The duties that are the responsibility of a company that is using AWS Lambda are security inside of code and writing and updating of code. AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that allows you to run code without provisioning or managing servers, scaling, or patching. AWS Lambda takes care of the security of the underlying infrastructure, such as the operating system, the network, and the firewall. However, the company is still responsible for the security of the code itself, such as encrypting sensitive data, validating input, and handling errors. The company is also responsible for writing and updating the code that defines the Lambda function, and choosing the runtime environment, such as Node.js, Python, or Java. AWS Lambda does not require the selection of CPU resources, as it automatically allocates them based on the memory configuration34

 A is correct because Amazon RDS is the AWS service that provides a managed relational database service that supports various database engines, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server. B is incorrect because Amazon Redshift is the AWS service that provides a managed data warehouse service that is optimized for analytical queries. C is incorrect because Amazon ElastiCache is the AWS service that provides a managed in-memory data store service that supports Redis and Memcached. D is incorrect because Amazon Neptune is the AWS service that provides a managed graph database service that supports property graph and RDF models.

 An AWS Region is a specific location within a geographic area that provides high availability. An AWS Region consists of two or more Availability Zones, which are isolated locations within the sameRegion. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security, and is connected to the other Availability Zones in the same Region by low-latency, high-throughput, and highly redundant networking. AWS services are available in multiple Regions around the world, allowing the user to choose where to run their applications and store their data1.

Compute Savings Plans are a flexible and cost-effective way to optimize long-term compute costs of AWS Lambda functions and Amazon EC2 instances. With Compute Savings Plans, customers can commit to a consistent amount of compute usage (measured in $/hour) for a 1-year or 3-year termand receive a discount of up to 66% compared to On-Demand prices3. Dedicated Hosts are physical servers with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated to the customer’s use. They are suitable for customers who have specific server-bound software licenses or compliance requirements4. Reserved Instances are a pricing model that provides a significant discount (up to 75%) compared to On-Demand pricing and a capacity reservation for EC2 instances. They are available in 1-year or 3-year terms and different payment options5. Spot Instances are spare EC2 instances that are available at up to 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. They are suitable for customers who have flexible start and end times, can withstand interruptions, and can handle excess capacity.

The company can use AWS Organizations to track the combined AWS usage costs of all of its linked accounts. AWS Organizations is a service that enables you to consolidate multiple AWS accounts into an organization that you can manage centrally. You can use AWS Organizations to create a consolidated billing report that shows the charges incurred by each account in your organization as well as the total charges across all accounts. You can also use AWS Organizations to apply policies and controls to your accounts to help you manage costs and security5.

Changing AWS Support plans is a task that must be performed by using the AWS account root user credentials. The root user is the email address that you used to sign up for AWS. It has complete access to all AWS services and resources in the account. You should use the root user only to perform a few account and service management tasks, such as changing AWS Support plans, closing the account, or changing the account name or email address. Making changes to AWS production resources, accessing AWS Cost and Usage Reports, and granting auditors access to an AWS account for a compliance audit are tasks that can be performed by using IAM users or roles, which are entities that you create in AWS to delegate permissions to access AWS services and resources.

 Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) and Amazon FSx offer file storage. File storage is a type of storage that organizes data into files and folders, and allows multiple users or applications to access and share the same files over a network. Amazon EFS is a fully managed, scalable, and elastic file system that supports the Network File System (NFS) protocol and can be used with Amazon EC2 instances and AWS Lambda functions. Amazon FSx is a fully managed service that provides two file system options: Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, which supports the Server Message Block(SMB) protocol and is compatible with Microsoft Windows applications; and Amazon FSx for Lustre, which is a high-performance file system that is optimized for compute-intensive workloads

This is a benefit of using an AWS managed service, such as Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, or AWS Lambda. AWS managed services are fully managed by AWS, which means that AWS handles the provisioning, scaling, patching, backup, and recovery of the underlying infrastructure and software. This reduces the operational overhead for the company’s IT staff, who can focus on their core business logic and innovation. You can learn more about the AWS managed services from this webpage or this digital course.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is the AWS service or feature that is used to send both text and email messages from distributed applications. Amazon SNS is a fully managed pub/sub messaging service that enables the user to send messages to multiple subscribers or endpoints, such as email addresses, phone numbers, HTTP endpoints, AWS Lambda functions, and more. Amazon SNS can be used to send notifications, alerts, confirmations, and reminders from applications to users or other applications4.

The AWS service that will meet the requirements of the company that wants to create a chatbot and integrate the chatbot with its current web application is Amazon Lex. Amazon Lex is a service that helps customers build conversational interfaces using voice and text. The company can use Amazon Lex to create a chatbot that can understand natural language and respond to user requests, using the same deep learning technologies that power Amazon Alexa. Amazon Lex also provides easy integration with other AWS services, such as Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Polly, and AWS Lambda, as well as popular platforms, such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, and Twilio. Amazon Lex helps customers create engaging and interactive chatbots for their web applications. Amazon Kendra, Amazon Textract, and Amazon Polly are not the best services to use for this purpose. Amazon Kendra is a service that helps customers provide accurate and natural answers to natural language queries using machine learning. Amazon Textract is a service that helps customers extract text and data from scanned documents using optical character recognition (OCR) and machine learning. Amazon Polly is a service that helps customers convert text into lifelike speech using deep learning. These services are more useful for different types of natural language processing and generation tasks, rather than creating and integrating chatbots.

To achieve high availability in the event of a natural disaster, the company should use EC2 instances in multiple AWS Regions. AWS Regions are geographically isolated areas that consist of multiple Availability Zones. Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an AWS Region that areengineered to be isolated from failures. By using EC2 instances in multiple AWS Regions, the company can ensure that its applications can continue to run even if one Region is affected by a disaster. AWS Global InfrastructureAWS Well-Architected Framework

 The AWS tool that will meet the requirements of the company that is planning a migration to the AWS Cloud and wants to examine the costs that are associated with different workloads is AWS Pricing Calculator. AWS Pricing Calculator is a tool that helps customers estimate the cost of using AWS services based on their requirements and preferences. The company can use AWS Pricing Calculator to compare the costs of different AWS services and configurations, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, and more. AWS Pricing Calculator also provides detailed breakdowns of the cost components, such as compute, storage, network, and data transfer. AWS Pricing Calculator helps customers plan and optimize their cloud budget and migration strategy. AWS Budgets, AWS Cost Explorer, and AWS Cost and Usage Report are not the best tools to use for this purpose. AWSBudgets is a tool that helps customers monitor and manage their AWS spending and usage against predefined budget limits and thresholds. AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that helps customers analyze and visualize their AWS spending and usage trends over time. AWS Cost and Usage Report is a tool that helps customers access comprehensive and granular information about their AWS costs and usage in a CSV or Parquet file. These tools are more useful for tracking and optimizing the existing AWS costs and usage, rather than estimating the costs of different workloads34

 Create annotated documentation is the design principle that is included in the operational excellence pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. According to the AWS Well-Architected Framework whitepaper, creating annotated documentation means "documenting your workload so that the team understands the architecture, how to operate the workload, and how the workload delivers value to customers."3 Anticipate failure, ensure performance efficiency, and optimize costs are design principles that belong to other pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, such as reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization.

AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of a customer’s AWS account. AWS CloudTrail allows customers to track user activity and API usage across their AWS infrastructure. AWS CloudTrail can also provide a history of EC2 instance events, such as launch, stop, terminate, and reboot. Cost Explorer is a tool that enables customers to visualize, understand, and manage their AWS costs and usage over time. Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS. AWS Secrets Manager helps customers protect secrets needed to access their applications, services, and IT resources.

The correct answer is C because Spot Instances are the pricing model that enables the company to run its existing custom, nonproduction workloads in the AWS Cloud quickly and cost-effectively. Spot Instances are spare Amazon EC2 instances that are available at up to 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. Spot Instances are suitable for stateless, fault-tolerant, and flexible workloads that can recover from interruptions easily. The other options are incorrect because they are not the pricing model that enables the company to run its existing custom, nonproduction workloads in the AWS Cloud quickly and cost-effectively. Reserved Instances are Amazon EC2 instances that are reserved for a specific period of time (one or three years) in exchange for a lower hourly rate. Reserved Instances are suitable for steady-state or predictable workloads that run for a long duration. On-Demand Instances are Amazon EC2 instances that are launched and billed at a fixed hourly rate. On-Demand Instances are suitable for short-term, irregular, or unpredictable workloads that cannot be interrupted. Dedicated Hosts are physical servers that are dedicated to a single customer. Dedicated Hosts are suitable for workloads that require regulatory compliance or data isolation. Reference: Amazon EC2 Instance Purchasing Options

Reliability is the cloud concept that this architecture represents. Reliability is the ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues. Deploying an application to multiple AWS Regions and configuring automatic failoverbetween those Regions enhances the reliability of the application by reducing the impact of regional failures and increasing the availability of the application4

Reserved Instances are a pricing model that offers significant discounts on Amazon EC2 usage compared to On-Demand Instances. Reserved Instances are suitable for stateful workloads that have predictable and consistent usage patterns for a long-term period. By committing to a one-year or three-year term, customers can reduce their total cost of ownership and optimize their cloud spend. Reserved Instances also provide capacity reservation, ensuring that customers have access to the EC2 instances they need when they need them. References: AWS Pricing Calculator, Amazon EC2 Pricing, [AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials: Module 3 - Compute in the Cloud]

 Global reach is the benefit of AWS Cloud computing that provides lower latency between users and applications. Global reach means that AWS customers can deploy their applications and data in multiple regions around the world, and deliver them to users with high performance and availability. AWS has the largest global infrastructure of any cloud provider, with 25 geographic regions and 81 Availability Zones, as well as 216 Points of Presence in 84 cities across 42 countries. Customers can choose the optimal locations for their applications and data based on their business requirements, such as compliance, data sovereignty, and customer proximity. Agility, economies of scale, and pay-as-you-go pricing are other benefits of AWS Cloud computing, but they do not directly provide lower latency between users and applications. Agility means that AWS customers can quickly and easily provision and scale up or down AWS resources as needed, without upfront costs or long-term commitments. Economies of scale means that AWS customers can benefit from the lower costs and higher efficiency that AWS achieves by operating at a massive scale and passing the savings to the customers. Pay-as-you-go pricing means that AWS customers only pay for the AWS resources they use, without any upfront costs or long-term contracts.

 EFS Standard-Infrequent Access (EFS Standard-IA) is the storage class that meets the requirements of storing data across multiple Availability Zones in an AWS Region, that will not be accessed regularly but must be immediately retrievable, most cost-effectively. EFS Standard-IA is designed for files that are accessed less frequently, but still require the same high performance, low latency, and high availability as EFS Standard. EFS Standard-IA has a lower storage cost than EFS Standard, but charges a small additional fee for each access. EFS One Zone and EFS One Zone-IA store data in a single Availability Zone, which reduces the availability and durability compared to EFS Standard and EFS Standard-IA.

 Identity and access management is the customer’s responsibility, according to the AWS shared responsibility model. This means that the customer is responsible for managing user access to the AWS resources, using tools such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Single Sign-On (SSO), and AWS Organizations. The customer is also responsible for securing their data in transit and at rest, using encryption, key management, and other methods. Hard drive initialization, protection of data center hardware, and security of Availability Zones are AWS’s responsibility, as they are part of the infrastructure, physical security, and network security that AWS provides to the customer12

Amazon Rekognition is the AWS service that the company should use to build the capability of identifying and removing inappropriate photos. Amazon Rekognition is a service that uses deep learning technology to analyze images and videos for various purposes, such as face detection, object recognition, text extraction, and content moderation. Amazon Rekognition can help users detect unsafe or inappropriate content in images and videos, such as nudity, violence, or drugs, and provide confidence scores for each label. Amazon Rekognition does not require any machine learning expertise, and users can easily integrate it with other AWS services

AWS CloudFormation allows developers to create, manage, and deploy AWS resources using templates, ensuring a standardized and repeatable infrastructure setup. It’s ideal for setting up development, test, and production environments consistently. AWS Cloud Map, CloudFront, and CloudTrail do not provide templated infrastructure management capabilities.

 The AWS services or features that can control VPC traffic are security groups and network ACLs. Security groups are stateful firewalls that control the inbound and outbound traffic at the instance level. You can assign one or more security groups to each instance in a VPC, and specify the rules that allow or deny traffic based on the protocol, port, and source or destination. Network ACLs are stateless firewalls that control the inbound and outbound traffic at the subnet level. You can associate one network ACL with each subnet in a VPC, and specify the rules that allow or deny traffic based on the protocol, port, and source or destination. AWS Direct Connect, Amazon GuardDuty, and Amazon Connect are not services or features that can control VPC traffic. AWS Direct Connect is a service that establishes a dedicated network connection between your premises and AWS. Amazon GuardDuty is a service that monitors your AWS account and workloads for malicious or unauthorized activity. Amazon Connect is a service that provides a cloud-based contact center solution.

AWS Fargate and Amazon S3 are both serverless services. Fargate allows users to run containers without managing the underlying infrastructure, while S3 provides object storage without the need for provisioning or managing servers. Amazon EC2, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka, and Amazon EMR involve server management to varying degrees and are not serverless by nature.

 AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager is a capability that allows users to automate the security updates for their operating systems and applications. It enables users to scan their instances for missing patches, define patch baselines, schedule patching windows, and monitor patch compliance. It supports Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon Lightsail instances, and on-premises servers. AWS Shield is a service that provides protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks for AWS resources and services. It does not automate the security updates for operating systems and applications. Connecting to each server by using a remote desktop connection and running an update script is a manual and time-consuming solution that requires a lot of operational effort. It is not a recommended best practice for automating the security updates for operating systems and applications. Amazon GuardDuty is a service that provides intelligent threat detection and continuous monitoring for AWS accounts and resources. It does not automate the security updates for operating systems and applications.

 AWS Lambda is a compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. AWS Lambda executes your code only when needed and scales automatically, from a few requests per day to thousands per second. You pay only for the compute time you consume - there is no charge when your code is not running. With AWS Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration. AWS Lambda runs your code on a high-availability compute infrastructure and performs all of the administration of the compute resources, including server and operating system maintenance, capacity provisioning and automatic scaling, code monitoring and logging

Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval is optimized for storing infrequently accessed data at a very low cost, making it suitable for data archiving and long-term backups. It provides flexible retrieval options for archived data. Other services like FSx for Lustre, EBS, and EFS are more suited for frequently accessed data and higher-performance use cases, not archival storage.

AWS Shield Standard and AWS WAF are the AWS services or tools that are designed to protect a workload from SQL injections, cross-site scripting, and DDoS attacks. According to the AWS Shield Developer Guide, "AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS. AWS Shield provides always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency, so there is no need to engage AWS Support to benefit from DDoS protection."5 According to the AWS WAF Developer Guide, “AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications or APIs against common web exploits that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. AWS WAF gives you control over how traffic reaches your applications by enabling you to create security rules that block common attack patterns, such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting, and rules that filter out specific traffic patterns you define.” VPC endpoint, virtual private gateway, and AWS Config are not designed to protect a workload from these types of attacks.

 The correct answer is B because ensuring the environmental safety and security of the AWS infrastructure that hosts Workspaces is the responsibility of AWS, according to the AWS shared responsibility model. The AWS shared responsibility model is a framework that defines the division of responsibilities between AWS and the customer for security and compliance. AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, which includes the global infrastructure, such as the regions, availability zones, and edge locations; the hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run the AWS services; and the virtualization layer that separates the customer instances and storage. The customer is responsible for the security in the cloud, which includes the customer data, the guest operating systems, the applications, the identity and access management, the firewall configuration, and the encryption. The other options are incorrect because they are the responsibility of the customer, according to the AWS shared responsibility model. Setting up multi-factor authentication (MFA) for each Workspaces user account, providing security for Workspaces user accounts through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), configuring AWS CloudTrail to log API calls and user activity, and encrypting data at rest and in transit are all tasks that the customer has to perform to secure their Workspaces environment. Reference: AWS Shared Responsibility Model, Amazon WorkSpaces Security

AWS is responsible for maintaining the physical and environmental controls of the AWS Cloud, such as power, cooling, fire suppression, and physical security1. The customer is responsible for managing the IAM user permissions, creating security group rules for outbound access, applying Amazon EC2 operating system patches, and other aspects of security in the cloud1.

 AWS Config is a service that enables users to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of AWS resources. It continuously monitors and records the configuration changes of the resources and evaluates them against desired configurations and best practices. It also provides a detailed view of the resource configuration history and relationships, as well as compliance reports and notifications. AWS Config can help users maintain consistent and secure configurations, troubleshoot issues, and simplify compliance auditing. AWS Config OverviewAWS Certified Cloud Practitioner - aws.amazon.com

 The correct answers are A and C because Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and resources that are distributed across multiple Availability Zones are AWS services and features that will improve availability and reduce the impact of failures for the web application. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is a service that enables users to automatically adjust the number of Amazon EC2 instances in response to changes in demand or performance. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps users to maintain optimal availability and performance of their applications by adding or removing instances as needed. Resources that are distributed across multiple Availability Zones are AWS features that enable users to increase the fault tolerance and resilience of their applications. Availability Zones are isolated locations within an AWS Region that have independent power, cooling, and networking. Users can launch their resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, in multiple Availability Zones to protect their applications from the failure of a single location. The other options are incorrect because they are not AWS services and features that will improve availability and reduce the impact of failures for the web application. VPC subnet ACLs are AWS features that enable users to control the inbound and outbound traffic to and from their subnets within a VPC. VPC subnet ACLs do not check the health of a service, but rather filter the network traffic based on rules. Configuration of AWS Server Migration Service (AWS SMS) is an AWS service that enables users to migrate their on-premises servers to AWS. Configuration of AWS SMS does not help to move the Amazon EC2 instances to a different AWS Region, but rather to migrate the servers from the source environment to AWS. Resources that are distributed across multiple AWS points of presence are AWS features that enable users to deliver content to their end users with low latency and high performance. AWS points of presence are edge locations that are part of the AWS Global Infrastructure. Users can use services such as Amazon CloudFront and AWS Global Accelerator to distribute their content across multiple AWS points of presence. Reference: Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, [Regions, Availability Zones, and Local Zones]

AWS Config is a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. AWS Config continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations and allows you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired configurations. With AWS Config, you can review changes in configurations and relationships between AWS resources, dive into detailed resource configuration histories, and determine your overall compliance against the configurations specified in your internal guidelines3.

 Security groups are the service or feature that meets the requirement of establishing a security layer in a VPC that will act as a firewall to control subnet traffic. Security groups are stateful firewalls that control the inbound and outbound traffic at the instance level. You can assign one or more security groups to each instance in a VPC, and specify the rules that allow or deny traffic based on the protocol, port, and source or destination. Security groups are associated with network interfaces, and therefore apply to all the instances in the subnets that use those network interfaces. Routing tables are used to direct traffic between subnets and gateways, not to filter traffic. Network ACLs are stateless firewalls that control the inbound and outbound traffic at the subnet level, but they are less granular and more cumbersome to manage than security groups. Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that monitors your AWS account and workloads for malicious or unauthorized activity, not a firewall service.

AWS Trusted Advisor is the AWS service that provides real-time guidance for provisioning resources, based on AWS best practices related to security, cost optimization, and service limits. AWS Trusted Advisor inspects the user’s AWS environment and provides recommendations for improving performance, security, and reliability, reducing costs, and following best practices. AWS TrustedAdvisor also alerts the user when they are approaching or exceeding their service limits, and helps them request limit increases3.

 AWS Pricing Calculator can be used to estimate costs before deployment. AWS Pricing Calculator is a tool that helps the user to compare the cost of AWS services for different use cases and configurations. The user can create estimates for various AWS services, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, and more. The user can also adjust the parameters, such as region, instance type, storage size, and duration, to see how they affect the cost. AWS Pricing Calculator provides a detailed breakdown of the estimated cost, as well as a summary of the key drivers of the cost.

 The ability to deploy to AWS on a global scale is a cloud benefit that AWS offers to its users. AWS has a global infrastructure that consists of AWS Regions, Availability Zones, and edge locations. Users can choose from multiple AWS Regions around the world to deploy their applications and data closer to their end users, while also meeting their compliance and regulatory requirements. Users can also leverage AWS services, such as Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, and AWS Global Accelerator, to improve the performance and availability of their global applications. AWS also provides tools and guidance to help users optimize their global deployments, such as AWS Well-Architected Framework, AWS CloudFormation, and AWS Migration Hub. AWS Global Infrastructure [AWS Cloud Value Framework] AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner - aws.amazon.com

In the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF), theGovernanceperspective focuses on aligning IT strategy and goals with business processes, which includes managing data assets, setting up an inventory of data products, and ensuring that data cataloging and metadata management are in place. This perspective is crucial for organizing data products and services, which aligns with building a comprehensive data catalog. Other perspectives like Operations, Business, and Platform do not specifically address the management of a data catalog.

 The correct answer is B because AWS Cloud9 is an AWS service that enables users to run their existing custom, nonproduction workloads in the AWS Cloud quickly and cost-effectively. AWS Cloud9 is a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) that allows users to write, run, and debug code from a web browser. AWS Cloud9 supports multiple programming languages, such as Python, Java, Node.js, and more. AWS Cloud9 also provides users with a terminal that can access AWS services and resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, AWS Lambda functions, and AWS CloudFormation stacks. The other options are incorrect because they are not AWS services that enable users to run their existing custom, nonproduction workloads in the AWS Cloud quickly and cost-effectively. AWS CodeBuild is an AWS service that enables users to compile, test, and package their code for deployment. AWS OpsWorks is an AWS service that enables users to configure and manage their applications using Chef or Puppet. AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is an AWS service that enables users to define and provision their cloud infrastructure using familiar programming languages, such as TypeScript, Python, Java, and C#. Reference: AWS Cloud9 FAQs

AWS is responsible for decommissioning end-of-life underlying storage devices that are used to host data on AWS. AWS follows strict and audited data destruction processes to ensure that customer data is not exposed to unauthorized individuals or devices when an AWS storage device reaches the end of its useful life. AWS uses techniques detailed in DoD 5220.22-M (“National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual”) or NIST 800-88 (“Guidelines for Media Sanitization”) to destroy data as part of the decommissioning process3.

 The common stakeholders for the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) platform perspective are IT architects and engineers. The AWS CAF is a guidance that helps organizations design and travel an accelerated path to successful cloud adoption. The AWS CAF organizes thecloud adoption process into six areas of focus, called perspectives, which are business, people, governance, platform, security, and operations. Each perspective is divided into capabilities, which are further divided into skills and responsibilities. The platform perspective focuses on the provisioning and management of the cloud infrastructure and services that support the business applications. The platform perspective capabilities are design, implementation, and optimization. The stakeholders for the platform perspective are the IT architects and engineers who are responsible for designing, implementing, and optimizing the cloud platform. Chief financial officers (CFOs), chief information officers (CIOs), and chief data officers (CDOs) are not the common stakeholders for the AWS CAF platform perspective. CFOs are the common stakeholders for the AWS CAF business perspective, which focuses on the value realization of the cloud adoption. CIOs are the common stakeholders for the AWS CAF governance perspective, which focuses on the alignment of the IT strategy and processes with the business strategy and goals. CDOs are the common stakeholders for the AWS CAF security perspective, which focuses on the protection of the information assets and systems in the cloud.

 AWS Abuse team is the AWS group or team that the company should notify if it suspects that its AWS resources are being used for illegal activities. AWS Abuse team is a dedicated team that handles reports of abuse, such as spam, phishing, malware, denial-of-service attacks, and unauthorized access, involving AWS resources. The company can contact the AWS Abuse team byfilling out the [Report Abuse of AWS Resources form] or sending an email to abuse@amazonaws.com. The company should provide as much information as possible, such as the source and destination IP addresses, timestamps, log files, and screenshots, to help the AWS Abuse team investigate and take appropriate actions. For more information, see [Reporting Abuse] and [AWS Acceptable Use Policy].

Amazon Route 53 is the AWS service that provides DNS resolution. DNS (Domain Name System) is a service that translates domain names into IP addresses. Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud DNS service that offers domain name registration, DNS routing, and health checking. Amazon Route 53 can route the traffic to various AWS services, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and Amazon CloudFront. Amazon Route 53 can also integrate with other AWS services, such as AWS Certificate Manager, AWS Shield, and AWS WAF. For more information, see [What is Amazon Route 53?] and [Amazon Route 53 Features].

The AWS service that is used to temporarily provide federated security credentials to a user is AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS). AWS STS is a service that enables customers to request temporary, limited-privilege credentials for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users or for users that they authenticate (federated users). The company can use AWS STS to grant federated users access to AWS resources without creating permanent IAM users or sharing long-term credentials. AWS STS helps customers manage and secure access to their AWS resources for federated users. Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Secrets Manager, and AWS Certificate Manager are not the best services to use for this purpose. Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior across the AWS accounts and resources.AWS Secrets Manager is a service that helps customers manage and rotate secrets, such as database credentials, API keys, and passwords. AWS Certificate Manager is a service that helps customers provision, manage, and deploy public and private Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates for use with AWS services and internal connected resources. These services are more useful for different types of security and compliance tasks, rather than providing temporary federated security credentials to a user.

The company should use AWS WAF to safeguard the website from SQL injection or cross-site scripting. AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect web applications from common web exploits that could affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. The company can use AWS WAF to create custom rules that block malicious requests that match certain patterns, such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting. AWS WAF can be applied to web applications that are behind an Application Load Balancer, Amazon CloudFront, or Amazon API Gateway. Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Trusted Advisor, and Amazon Inspector are not the best services to use for this purpose. Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior across the AWS accounts and resources. AWS Trusted Advisor is a service that provides best practice recommendations for cost optimization, performance, security, and fault tolerance. Amazon Inspector is a service that assesses the security and compliance of applications running on Amazon EC2 instances12

Amazon Rekognition is a machine learning service that can analyze and recognize objects, people, text, scenes, and activities in images and videos. It is specifically designed for organizing, categorizing, and searching large volumes of images based on various attributes. Amazon Transcribe is for speech-to-text, Amazon Aurora is a relational database service, and Amazon QuickSight is a business intelligence tool for data visualization.

The user authentication services managed by AWS are: Amazon Cognito and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). These services help users securely manage and control access to their AWS resources and applications. Amazon Cognito is a service that provides user sign-up, sign-in, and access control for web and mobile applications. Amazon Cognito supports various identity providers, such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon, as well as custom user pools. AWS IAM is a service that enables users to create and manage users, groups, roles, and permissions for AWS services and resources. AWS IAM supports various authentication methods, such as passwords, access keys, and multi-factorauthentication (MFA)

 Access keys are long-term credentials that consist of an access key ID and a secret access key. You use access keys to sign programmatic requests that you make to AWS using the AWS CLI or AWS API1. User name and password are credentials that you use to sign in to the AWS Management Console or the AWS Management Console mobile app2. SSH public keys are credentials that you use to authenticate with EC2 instances that are launched from certain Linux AMIs3. AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) keys are customer master keys (CMKs) that you use to encrypt and decrypt your data and to control access to your data across AWS services and in your applications4.

 According to the AWS shared responsibility model, AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, while the user is responsible for the security in the cloud. This means that AWS manages the security and maintenance of the underlying infrastructure, such as the servers, networks, and operating systems, while the user manages the security and configuration of the resources and applications that run on AWS. For AWS Lambda functions, the tasks that are the user’s responsibility are:

Establish the IAM permissions that define who can run the Lambda functions. IAM is a service that enables users to manage access and permissions for AWS resources and users. Users can create IAM policies, roles, and users to grant or deny permissions to run Lambda functions, invoke other AWS services, or access AWS resources from Lambda functions. [AWS Lambda Permissions] AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner - aws.amazon.com

Write the code for the Lambda functions to define the application logic. Lambda functions are units of code that can be written in any supported programming language, such as Python, Node.js, Java, or Go. Users can write the code for the Lambda functions using the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), the AWS SDKs, or any code editor of their choice. Users can also use AWS Lambda Layers to share and manage common code and dependencies across multiple functions. [AWS Lambda Overview] AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner - aws.amazon.com

 Using EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones in the same AWS Region is a solution that meets the requirements of sharing the same geographic area but using redundant underlying power sources. Availability Zones are isolated locations within an AWS Region that have independent power, cooling, and physical security. They are connected through low-latency, high-throughput, and highly redundant networking. By launching EC2 instances in different Availability Zones, users can increase the fault tolerance and availability of their applications. Amazon CloudFront is a contentdelivery network (CDN) service that speeds up the delivery of web content and media to end users by caching it at the edge locations closer to them. It is not a database service and cannot be used to store operational data for EC2 instances. Edge locations are sites that are part of the Amazon CloudFront network and are located in many cities around the world. They are not the same as Availability Zones and do not provide redundancy for EC2 instances. AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that allows users to automate the deployment and management of applications using Chef or Puppet. It can be used to create stacks that span multiple AWS Regions, but this would not meet the requirement of sharing the same geographic area.

AWS recommends using tags to organize resources effectively and to activate cost allocation tags to enable detailed tracking of costs by categories such as department, environment, and application. This approach provides the granularity needed for tracking and managing AWS costs accurately. AWS Cost Management and Billing tools provide insights but do not inherently categorize costs without tags.

Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) supports SQL Server and other relational databases while handling administrative tasks such as backups, patching, monitoring, and scaling. This allows the company to migrate its SQL Server database without managing the infrastructure manually. Amazon EC2for SQL Server would require more administrative overhead, as the company would be responsible for the maintenance. Amazon DynamoDB and Aurora do not support SQL Server directly.

AWS CloudTrail is an AWS service that enables users to accomplish the task of recording API calls made to AWS services. AWS CloudTrail is a service that tracks user activity and API usage across the AWS account. AWS CloudTrail records the details of every API call made to AWS services, such as the identity of the caller, the time of the call, the source IP address of the caller, the parameters and responses of the call, and more. Users can use AWS CloudTrail to audit, monitor, and troubleshoot their AWS resources and actions. The other options are incorrect because they are not tasks that users can accomplish using AWS CloudTrail. Generating an IAM user credentials report is a task that users can accomplish using IAM, which is an AWS service that enables users to manage access and permissions to AWS resources and services. Assessing the compliance of AWS resource configurations with policies and guidelines is a task that users can accomplish using AWS Config, which is an AWS service that enables users to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of their AWS resources. Ensuring that Amazon EC2 instances are patched with the latest security updates is a task that users can accomplish using AWS Systems Manager, which is an AWS service that enables users to automate operational tasks, manage configuration and compliance, and monitor system health and performance. Reference: AWS CloudTrail FAQs

AWS Secrets Manager is a service designed to securely store and manage access to sensitive information such as API keys, passwords, and database credentials. It allows automatic rotation, secure storage, and fine-grained access control for these credentials, ensuring they are securely managed. The other options do not provide encrypted storage for credentials specifically.

The statements that represent the cost-effectiveness of the AWS Cloud are:

Users can trade fixed expenses for variable expenses. By using the AWS Cloud, users can pay only for the resources they use, instead of investing in fixed and upfront costs for hardware and software. This can lower the total cost of ownership and increase the return on investment.

Users benefit from economies of scale. By using the AWS Cloud, users can leverage the massive scale and efficiency of AWS to access lower prices and higher performance. AWS passes the cost savings to the users through price reductions and innovations. AWS Cloud Value Framework

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a service that allows users to manage access to AWS resources and services. It enables users to create and manage users, groups, roles, and policies that control who can do what in AWS. IAM is always free of charge for users, as there is no additional cost for using IAM with any AWS service1. Amazon S3 is a storage service that provides scalable, durable, and secure object storage. Amazon S3 has a free tier that offers 5 GB of storage, 20,000 GET requests, and 2,000 PUT requests per month for one year. However, users are charged for any additional usage beyond the free tier limits2. Amazon Aurora is a relational database service that is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Amazon Aurora has a free tier that offers 750 hours of Aurora Single-AZ db.t2.small database usage and 20 GB of storage per month for one year. However, users are charged for any additional usage beyond the free tier limits3. Amazon EC2 is a compute service that provides resizable virtual servers. Amazon EC2 has a free tier that offers 750 hours of Linux and Windows t2.micro instances per month for one year. However, users are charged for any additional usage beyond the free tier limits4.

Amazon S3 is the AWS service that provides highly durable object storage. Amazon S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year. This means that you can store your data with high confidence that it will not be lost. Amazon S3 also provides high availability, scalability, security, and performance for your data. You can use Amazon S3 to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web5.

AWS Shared Responsibility Model Overview:

AWS manages securityofthe cloud, including physical infrastructure and foundational services.

Customers are responsible for securityinthe cloud, which includes operating system configuration, data encryption, and application patch management.

Why Patch Management Is Shared:

AWS is responsible for patching the underlying infrastructure.

Customers are responsible for patching the operating system and applications they install on their resources (e.g., EC2 instances).

Why Other Options Are Incorrect:

A. Configuration of Amazon EC2 instance operating systems:Fully the customer’s responsibility.

B. Application file system server-side encryption:Customers configure and manage encryption.

D. Security of the physical infrastructure:Fully AWS’s responsibility.

AWS Enterprise Support provides strategic planning assistance, infrastructure event management, and real-time support, which are necessary for business-critical applications. Trusted Advisor and APN do not offer direct strategic support, and while AWS Professional Services can assist with complex solutions, Enterprise Support specifically includes ongoing operational support and event management.

AWS Organizations Overview:

AWS Organizations allows a company to manage multiple AWS accounts under a single organization.

Through the feature of consolidated billing, a company can receive a single bill for all linked accounts.

Key Features of Consolidated Billing in AWS Organizations:

Aggregates usage across accounts to take advantage of volume pricing discounts.

Provides detailed cost reports for individual linked accounts.

Simplifies payment processing by centralizing billing.

Why Other Options Are Incorrect:

A. AWS Billing and Cost Management console:Used for managing budgets and payments but does not set up consolidated billing.

C. AWS Cost and Usage Report:Provides detailed cost and usage reports but does not set up consolidated billing.

D. AWS Systems Manager:Focuses on operational management, not billing.

Application Load Balancer (ALB) integrates with AWS WAF to deploy and manage WAF rules for incoming traffic. ALB can route HTTP and HTTPS traffic and apply WAF rules to protect applications from common web exploits. Network Load Balancer does not support AWS WAF, and Trusted Advisor does not deploy WAF rules.

The Envision phase of the cloud transformation journey is where the company defines its vision, business drivers, and desired outcomes for the cloud adoption. The company also identifies its capability gaps by using the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) perspectives, which are business, people, governance, platform, security, and operations2.

Scaling horizontally, or adding more instances of resources rather than increasing the size of a single instance, is a core principle of the Performance Efficiency pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It enables applications to handle increasing loads by distributing traffic across multiple resources. Other options, such as serverless architectures, managed services, and cost measurement, align with other pillars of the framework.

 The correct answer is C because AWS Trusted Advisor is an AWS service or tool that provides users with the ability to monitor AWS service quotas. AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that provides users with real-time guidance to help them provision their resources following AWS best practices. One of the categories of checks that AWS Trusted Advisor performs is service limits, which monitors the usage of each AWS service and alerts users when they are close to reaching the default limit. The other options are incorrect because they are not AWS services or tools that provide users with the ability to monitor AWS service quotas. AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables users to track user activity and API usage across their AWS account. AWS Cost and Usage Reports is a tool that enables users to access comprehensive information about their AWS costs and usage. AWS Budgets is a tool that enables users to plan their service usage, costs, and reservations. Reference: [AWS Trusted Advisor FAQs]

AWS WAF Overview:

AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) allows users to create rules to block or allow traffic based on IP addresses, request patterns, and other conditions.

It is ideal for blocking traffic from a specific IP address.

Why AWS WAF Meets the Requirement:

The company can create a WAF rule to block traffic from the malicious IP address.

WAF integrates with services like Amazon CloudFront, Application Load Balancer, and API Gateway.

Why Other Options Are Incorrect:

A. AWS Shield:Protects against DDoS attacks but does not allow custom IP blocking.

B. AWS Config:Monitors resource configurations but does not block IPs.

C. Amazon GuardDuty:Detects threats but does not block traffic directly.

The reliability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework includes the principle of testing recovery procedures to ensure systems can effectively recover from failures. Regular testing of recovery processes helps verify that systems are resilient and can handle potential disruptions. The other options align with different pillars like cost optimization and operational excellence.

Refactoring involves re-architecting and modifying an application to take advantage of cloud-native features. In this case, the company wants to modernize a monolithic application by breaking it into microservices. This process aligns with the Refactor strategy, which is aimed at modernizing and re-architecting applications. Rehost, Repurchase, and Replatform do not involve the level of re-architecting needed to move from a monolithic to a microservices architecture.

The correct answer is A because Amazon CloudFront is an AWS service that provides secure delivery of data, videos, applications, and APIs to users globally with low latency and high transfer speeds. Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) that integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and AWS Shield. Amazon CloudFront delivers content through a worldwide network of edge locations that are located close to the end users. The other options are incorrect because they are not AWS services that provide secure delivery of data, videos, applications, and APIs to users globally with low latency and high transfer speeds. Elastic Load Balancing is an AWS service that distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. Amazon S3 is an AWS service that provides object storage for data of any size and type. Amazon Elastic Transcoder is an AWS service that converts media files from their original source format into different formats that will play on various devices. Reference: Amazon CloudFront FAQs

Amazon Route 53 is a scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service that routes end-user requests to infrastructure running in AWS. It is specifically designed to host domain names and manage DNS records, making it the ideal service for hosting the domain name of a public website. AWS Lambda, CloudFront, and Direct Connect serve different functions and are not DNS hosting services.

Availability Zones are components of AWS infrastructure that can help the company ensure that the application is highly resilient. Availability Zones are multiple, isolated locations within each AWS Region. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security, and is connected to the other Availability Zones in the same Region via low-latency, high-throughput, and highly redundant networking. Availability Zones allow you to operate production applications and databases that are more highly available, fault tolerant, and scalable than would be possible from a single data center. 

AWS DataSync is designed for large-scale data transfers, especially involving large datasets with millions of files from on-premises to AWS. It provides fast and efficient transfer capabilities, and supports a one-time migration. AWS DMS is specific to databases, while Migration Hub is for tracking migrations, and Application Migration Service is for continuous replication rather than one-time file migrations.

One of the main advantages of cloud computing is the ability to trade fixed capital expenditures for variable operating expenses. By moving to the AWS Cloud, the company pays only for the resources it uses on a per-usage basis, reducing the need for large upfront investments in data center infrastructure. This benefit allows for more flexible and cost-effective spending based on actual usage. Other options, such as increased speed and agility or global reach, are also cloud benefits but do not specifically address the shift from fixed to variable expenses.

Using multiple Availability Zones within the same AWS Region meets the requirements for having instances in different locations with independent power and networking. Availability Zones are distinct physical locations within a region, each with separate power sources and networking. Edge locations are used for content delivery, and Amazon Connect and AWS Artifact locations are not relevant to EC2 deployment and infrastructure.

AWS IAM Identity Center (formerly AWS Single Sign-On) provides centralized management of user access to multiple AWS accounts within an organization in AWS Organizations. It allows users to log in once and gain access to all assigned accounts without managing separate logins for each account. Amazon Cognito is generally used for application-level user management and authentication, not for managing access across AWS accounts.

AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards AWS applications against network and transport layer attacks. AWS Shield Standard is automatically included with all AWS services and offers protection against common DDoS attacks. For more advanced protection, AWS Shield Advanced provides additional DDoS mitigation measures. Although AWS WAF, Firewall Manager, and GuardDuty contribute to security, they do not specialize in DDoS mitigation at the network layer like AWS Shield does.

 AWS Config and service control policies (SCPs) are AWS services or features that the company can use to create and define controls (guardrails) in a newly created AWS Control Tower landing zone. AWS Config is a service that enables users to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of their AWS resources. It can be used to create rules that check for compliance with the desired configurations and report any deviations. AWS Control Tower provides a set of predefined AWS Config rules that can be enabled as guardrails to enforce compliance across the landing zone1. Service control policies (SCPs) are a type of policy that can be used to manage permissions in AWS Organizations. They can be used to restrict the actions that the users and roles in the member accounts can perform on the AWS resources. AWS Control Tower provides a set of predefined SCPsthat can be enabled as guardrails to prevent access to certain services or regions across the landing zone2. Amazon GuardDuty is a service that provides intelligent threat detection and continuous monitoring for AWS accounts and resources. It is not a feature that can be used to create and define controls (guardrails) in a landing zone. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a service that allows users to manage access to AWS resources and services. It can be used to create users, groups, roles, and policies that control who can do what in AWS. It is not a feature that can be used to create and define controls (guardrails) in a landing zone. Security groups are virtual firewalls that control the inbound and outbound traffic for Amazon EC2 instances. They can be used to allow or deny access to an EC2 instance based on the port, protocol, and source or destination. They are not a feature that can be used to create and define controls (guardrails) in a landing zone.

Amazon EventBridge Overview:

EventBridge is a serverless event bus that enables applications to react to changes in AWS resources.

It supports routing events such as EC2 state changes to various targets, including AWS Step Functions.

How EventBridge Meets the Requirement:

EventBridge can capture the EC2 instance state change event and trigger the execution of a Step Functions workflow.

The integration is seamless and supports workflows triggered by multiple event sources.

Why Other Options Are Incorrect:

A. Amazon SageMaker:Used for building, training, and deploying machine learning models; not related to event triggers.

B. Amazon Connect:A cloud-based contact center service; unrelated to event triggers.

D. AWS Fargate:A compute engine for containers; does not manage events or invoke workflows.

The AWS Cloud is cost-effective for dynamic workloads because of its elasticity, allowing resources to scale up or down based on demand, and its pay-as-you-go pricing, which enables companies to pay only for what they use. Reliability, security, and high availability are also benefits of AWS, but they do not specifically relate to cost-effectiveness in the context of dynamic workloads.

To follow the principle of least privilege, the company should create an IAM user with only programmatic access since the access is limited to AWS CLI and SDKs, not the Management Console. Additionally, a custom IAM policy granting specific Amazon RDS permissions should be created and attached to this user to restrict access solely to necessary actions. Providing programmatic access only ensures adherence to security best practices by limiting access to the required interfaces.

 Using AWS Artifact to access AWS documents about the compliance of the services, and getting the compliance of the application certified by a company assessor are actions that the company should take to meet the requirements of complying with credit card regulatory requirements. AWS Artifact is a service that provides on-demand access to AWS security and compliance reports and select online agreements. Reports available in AWS Artifact include our Service Organization Control (SOC) reports, Payment Card Industry (PCI) reports, and certifications from accreditation bodies across geographies and compliance verticals that validate the implementation and operating effectiveness of AWS security controls. AWS Artifact can help you demonstrate compliance with credit card regulatory requirements by providing you with proof that the AWS services and deployment are in compliance. Getting the compliance of the application certified by a company assessor is an action that the company should take to ensure that the application meets the specific requirements of the credit card industry. A company assessor is an independent third-party entity that is qualified to assess the compliance of the application with the relevant standards and regulations. Using Amazon Inspector to submit the application for certification is not an action that the company should take, because Amazon Inspector is a service that helps you improve the security and compliance of your applications deployed on AWS by automatically assessing them for vulnerabilities and deviations from best practices, but it does not provide certification for the applications. Ensuring that the application’s underlying hardware components comply with requirements is not an action that the company should take, because the application is deployed on AWS, and AWS is responsible for the security and compliance of the underlying hardware components. This is part of the shared responsibility model, where AWS is responsible for security of the cloud, and customers are responsible for security in the cloud. Using AWS Security Hub to certify the compliance of the application is not an action that the company should take, because AWS Security Hub is a service that gives you a comprehensive view of your security posture acrossyour AWS accounts and helps you check your environment against security industry standards and best practices, but it does not provide certification for the applications.

Amazon EC2 is a service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Users can launch and manage virtual servers, known as instances, that run on the AWS infrastructure. Users are responsible for maintaining the underlying operating system of the instances, as well as any applications or software that run on them. Amazon DynamoDB is a service that provides a fully managed NoSQL database that delivers fast and consistent performance at any scale. Users do not need to manage the underlying operating system or the database software. Amazon S3 is a service that provides scalable and durable object storage in the cloud. Users do not need to manage the underlying operating system or the storage infrastructure. AWS Lambda is a service that allows users to run code without provisioning or managing servers. Users only need to upload their code and configure the triggers and parameters. AWS Lambda takes care of the underlying operating system and the execution environment.

 The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you understand the pros and cons of decisions you make while building systems on AWS. By using the Framework, you will learn architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud. The Framework consists of five pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization2.

AWS Lambda is a service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You can use Lambda to process event notifications from Amazon S3 when objects are uploaded or deleted. Lambda integrates directly with the event notification and invokes your code automatically. Therefore, the correct answer is A. 

Amazon S3 is an AWS service that provides scalable, durable, and cost-effective object storage in the cloud. Amazon S3 can store any amount and type of data, such as server logs, and offers various storage classes with different performance and pricing characteristics. Amazon S3 is the most cost-effective option for storing server logs, as it offers low-cost storage classes, such as S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) and S3 Intelligent-Tiering, that are suitable for infrequently accessed or changing access patterns data. Amazon S3 also integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon Athena and Amazon OpenSearch Service, that can query the server logs directly from S3 without requiring any additional data loading or transformation. References: Amazon S3, Amazon S3 Storage Classes, Querying Data in Amazon S3

 C is correct because moving a workload from a local data center to an architecture that is distributed between the local data center and the AWS Cloud is an example of an on-premises to hybrid migration. A hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment that uses a mix of on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud services with orchestration between the platforms. A is incorrect because on-premises to cloud native migration is the process of moving a workload from a local data center to an architecture that is fully hosted and managed on the AWS Cloud. B is incorrect because hybrid to cloud native migration is the process of moving a workload from an architecture that is distributed between the local data center and the AWS Cloud to an architecture that is fully hosted and managed on the AWS Cloud. D is incorrect because cloud native to hybrid migration is the process of moving a workload from an architecture that is fully hosted and managed on the AWS Cloud to an architecture that is distributed between the local data center and the AWS Cloud.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is the AWS service or tool that can help the company launch the number of EC2 instances that will be needed to handle the workload. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling automatically adjusts the capacity of the EC2 instances based on the demand and the predefined scaling policies. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling also helps to improve availability and reduce costs by scaling in and out as needed. For more information, see What is Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling? and [Getting Started with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling].

 AWS Shield is an AWS service that provides protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks for applications that run in the AWS Cloud. DDoS attacks are attempts to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources. AWS Shield provides two tiers of protection: AWS Shield Standard and AWS Shield Advanced. AWS Shield Standard is automatically enabled for all AWS customers at no additional charge. It provides protection against common and frequently occurring network and transport layer DDoS attacks. AWS Shield Advanced is an optional paid service that provides additional protection against larger and more sophisticated DDoS attacks. AWS Shield Advanced also provides access to 24/7 DDoS response team, cost protection, and enhanced detection and mitigation capabilities

AWS Managed Services is a service that provides operational management for AWS infrastructure and applications. It helps users migrate their workloads to AWS and provides ongoing support, security, compliance, and automation. AWS Trusted Advisor is a service that provides best practices and recommendations for cost optimization, performance, security, and fault tolerance. AWS Consulting Partners are professional services firms that help customers design, architect, build, migrate, and manage their workloads and applications on AWS. AWS Artifacts is a service that provides on-demand access to AWS compliance reports and select online agreements.

A network access control list (network ACL) is a feature that acts as a firewall for controlling traffic in and out of one or more subnets in a virtual private cloud (VPC). Network ACLs can be configured with rules that allow or deny traffic based on the source and destination IP addresses, ports, and protocols1. AWS Security Hub is a service that provides a comprehensive view of the security posture of AWS accounts and resources2. Security groups are features that act as firewalls for controlling traffic at the instance level3. AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect web applications from common web exploits4.

Amazon Neptune is a managed graph database service that is well-suited for complex queries involving relationships, such as detecting patterns indicative of fraud in credit card transactions. It supports graph query languages like Gremlin and SPARQL, making it ideal for use cases requiring intricate relationship analysis. DocumentDB, Timestream, and DynamoDB are not designed for graph-based queries.

Convertible Reserved Instances (RIs) are a type of Reserved Instance that allow you to change the attributes of the RI as long as the exchange results in the creation of Reserved Instances of equal or greater value. You can exchange Convertible RIs for other Convertible RIs from a different instance family, size, platform, tenancy, or scope (Region or Availability Zone)3.

Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment. It works seamlessly with services including AWS Shield for DDoS mitigation, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing or Amazon EC2 as origins for your applications, and Lambda@Edge to run custom code closer to customers’ users and to customize the user experience. By using CloudFront, you can cache your content at the edge locations that are closest to your end users, reducing the network latency and improving theperformance of your application. CloudFront also offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, so you only pay for the data transfer and requests that you use.

Amazon Textract is a service that automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents. Amazon Textract goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to also identify thecontents of fields in forms and information stored in tables. Amazon Textract can analyze images of scanned financial invoices and extract the total balance amounts, as well as other relevant information, such as invoice number, date, vendor name, etc5.

Amazon Athena Overview:

Amazon Athena is a serverless query service that allows users to analyze data in S3 using standard SQL.

It is commonly used to query AWS Cost and Usage Reports stored in S3.

How It Works for Cost Reports:

Cost and Usage Reports are delivered in a structured format to an S3 bucket.

Athena can query these reports without requiring additional ETL processes.

Why Other Options Are Incorrect:

A. Amazon OpenSearch Service:Designed for search and log analytics, not querying structured data.

C. Amazon Aurora:A relational database service, unsuitable for querying S3 data directly.

D. AWS Glue:Used for ETL tasks but not directly for querying.

AWS Control Tower is the easiest way to set up and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on best practices established through AWS’s experience working with thousands of enterprises as they move to the cloud. With AWS Control Tower, builders can provision new AWS accounts in a few clicks, while you have peace of mind knowing your accounts conform to your organization’s policies. AWS Control Tower automates the setup of a baseline environment, or landing zone, that is a secure, well-architected multi-account AWS environment1. AWS Control Tower helps you apply security best practices from the AWS Well-Architected Framework to all of your AWS accounts2.

AWS CloudTrail is the AWS service that can identify when an Amazon EC2 instance was terminated. AWS CloudTrail is a service that records API calls and events for AWS accounts and resources. AWS CloudTrail can capture the TerminateInstances event, which is triggered when an EC2 instance is terminated by a user or an AWS service. The event contains information such as the instance ID, the user identity, the source IP address, the time, and the reason for the termination12. Customers can use the CloudTrail console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs to viewand search for the TerminateInstances events in their event history or in their S3 buckets where they store their CloudTrail logs13.

AWS Outposts is a service that delivers AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premises or edge location for a truly consistent hybrid experience. AWS Outposts allows you to extend and run native AWS services on premises, and is available in a variety of form factors, from 1U and 2U Outposts servers to 42U Outposts racks, and multiple rack deployments. With AWS Outposts, you can run some AWS services locally and connect to a broad range of services available in the local AWS Region. Run applications and workloads on premises using familiarAWS services, tools, and APIs2. AWS Outposts is the only AWS service that supports a hybridarchitecture that gives users the ability to extend AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to data centers, co-location environments, or on-premises facilities. References: On-Premises Infrastructure - AWS Outposts Family

Amazon Athena is a serverless, interactive analytics service that allows users to run SQL queries on data stored in Amazon S3. It is ideal for occasional queries on large datasets, as it does not require any server provisioning, configuration, or management. Users only pay for the queries they run, based on the amount of data scanned. Amazon Athena supports various data formats, such as CSV, JSON, Parquet, ORC, and Avro, and integrates with AWS Glue Data Catalog to create and manage schemas. Amazon Athena also supports querying data from other sources, such as on-premises or other cloud systems, using data connectors1.

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed data warehouse service that allows users to run complex analytical queries on petabyte-scale data. However, it requires users to provision and maintain clusters of nodes, and pay for the storage and compute capacity they use. Amazon Redshift is more suitable for frequent and consistent queries on structured or semi-structured data2.

Amazon Kinesis is a platform for streaming data on AWS, enabling users to collect, process, and analyze real-time data. It is not designed for querying data stored in Amazon S3. Amazon Kinesis consists of four services: Kinesis Data Streams, Kinesis Data Firehose, Kinesis Data Analytics, and Kinesis Video Streams3.

Amazon RDS is a relational database service that provides six database engines: Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server. It simplifies database administration tasks such as backup, patching, scaling, and replication. However, it is not optimized for querying data stored in Amazon S3. Amazon RDS is more suitable for transactional workloads that require high performance and availability4.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a set of best practices and guidelines for designing and operating workloads on AWS. It helps customers achieve operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability. The framework is based on six pillars, each with its own design principles, best practices, and questions. Customers can use the framework to assess their current state, identify gaps, and implement improvements12.

AWS Support is a service that provides technical assistance, guidance, and resources for AWS customers. It offers different plans with varying levels of access to AWS experts, response times, and features3. AWS Support does not provide a comprehensive framework for operational support.

AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) is a guidance tool that helps customers plan and execute their cloud migration journey. It provides a set of perspectives, capabilities, and best practices to align the business and technical aspects of cloud adoption4. AWS CAF does not focus on operational support for existing workloads on AWS.

AWS Managed Services (AMS) is a service that operates AWS infrastructure on behalf of customers. It provides a secure and compliant environment, automates commonactivities, and applies best practices for provisioning, patching, backup, recovery, and monitoring5. AMS does not provide a framework for customers to operate their own workloads on AWS.

 Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity, while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups. Amazon RDS supports six popular database engines: Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server. Amazon RDS can support running a copy of a MySQL database in the AWS Cloud, as it offers compatibility, scalability, and availability features.

By implementingAWS CloudTrail, a company is adhering to the AWS Cloud design principle ofactivating traceability. AWS CloudTrail provides detailed logs of all API calls made in an AWS account, which helps monitor, troubleshoot, and detect unusual activity, thereby improving security and compliance. This supports the principle of "activating traceability" by enabling continuous monitoring and auditing of all actions and changes within the AWS environment.

B. Use serverless compute architectures: Incorrect, as this principle encourages the use of managed services that handle infrastructure, such as AWS Lambda, and is not directly related to CloudTrail.

C. Perform operations as code: Incorrect, as this principle emphasizes the use of code and automation for infrastructure management.

D. Go global in minutes: Incorrect, as this principle relates to the global deployment of applications and services.

AWS Cloud References:

AWS Well-Architected Framework

AWS CloudTrail

The company follows the AWS Cloud design principle of ensuring traceability by using AWS CloudTrail. AWS CloudTrail is a service that records the API calls and events made by or on behalf of the AWS account. The company can use AWS CloudTrail to monitor, audit, and analyze the activity and changes in their AWS resources and applications. AWS CloudTrail helps the company to achieve compliance, security, governance, and operational efficiency. Recovering automatically, performing operations as code, and measuring efficiency are other AWS Cloud design principles, but they are not directly related to using AWS CloudTrail. Recovering automatically means that the company can design their cloud workloads to handle failures gracefully and resume normal operations without manual intervention. Performing operations as code means that the company can automate the creation, configuration, and management of their cloud resources using scripts or templates. Measuring efficiency means that the company can monitor and optimize the performance and utilization of their cloud resources and applications34

According to security best practices, the best way to give an Amazon EC2 instance access to an Amazon S3 bucket is to have the EC2 instance assume a role to obtain the privileges to upload the file. A role is an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) entity that defines a set of permissions for making AWS service requests. You can use roles to delegate access to users, applications, or services that don’t normally have access to your AWS resources. For example, you can create a role that allows EC2 instances to access S3 buckets, and then attach the role to the EC2 instance. This way, the EC2 instance can assume the role and obtain temporary security credentials to access the S3 bucket. This method is more secure and scalable than storing or hardcoding IAM user credentials on the EC2 instance, as it avoids the risk of exposing or compromising the credentials. It also allows you to manage the permissions centrally and dynamically, and to audit the access using AWS CloudTrail. For more information on how to create and use roles for EC2 instances, see Using an IAM role to grant permissions to applications running on Amazon EC2 instances1

The other options are not recommended for security reasons. Hardcoding or storing IAM user credentials on the EC2 instance is a bad practice, as it exposes the credentials to potential attackers or unauthorized users who can access the instance or the application code. It also makes it difficult to rotate or revoke the credentials, and to track the usage of the credentials. Modifying the S3 bucket policy to allow any serviceto upload to it at any time is also a bad practice, as it opens the bucket to potential data breaches, data loss, or data corruption. It also violates the principle of least privilege, which states that you should grant only the minimum permissions necessary for a task.

 Using an IAM role to grant permissions to applications running on Amazon EC2 instances

These are two of the seven capabilities that are in the platform perspective of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF). The platform perspective helps you build an enterprise-grade, scalable, hybrid cloud platform, modernize existing workloads, and implement new cloud-native solutions1. The other five capabilities are:

Platform architecture – Establish and maintain guidelines, principles, patterns, and guardrails for your cloud environment.

Platform engineering – Build a compliant multi-account cloud environment with enhanced security features, and packaged, reusable cloud products.

Platform operations – Manage and optimize your cloud environment with automation, monitoring, and incident response.

Application development – Develop and deploy cloud-native applications using modern architectures and best practices.

Application migration – Migrate your existing applications to the cloud using proven methodologies and tools.

Performance and capacity management, infrastructure protection, and change and release management are not capabilities of the platform perspective. They are part of the operations perspective, which helps you achieve operational excellence in the cloud2. The operations perspective comprises six capabilities:

Performance and capacity management – Monitor and optimize the performance and capacity of your cloud workloads.

Infrastructure protection – Protect your cloud infrastructure from unauthorized access, malicious attacks, and data breaches.

Change and release management – Manage changes and releases to your cloud workloads using automation and governance.

Configuration management – Manage the configuration of your cloud resources and applications using automation and version control.

Incident management – Respond to incidents affecting your cloud workloads using best practices and tools.

Service continuity management – Ensure the availability and resilience of your cloud workloads using backup, recovery, and disaster recovery strategies.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service that helps you securely control access to AWS resources for your users. You use IAM to control who can use your AWS resources (authentication) and what resources they can use and in what ways (authorization). IAM is always available free of charge to users4.

B and D are correct because AWS availability and security enable customers to improve their SLAs while reducing risk and unplanned downtime1, and AWS reduces IT costs related to infrastructure, allowing customers to reinvest in other areas2. A is incorrect because migrating to the AWS Cloud does not automatically make applications available on mobile devices, as it depends on the application design and compatibility. C is incorrect because companies that migrate to the AWS Cloud still need to plan for high availability and disaster recovery, as AWS is a shared responsibility model3. E is incorrect because migrating to the AWS Cloud does not require companies to rearchitect and rewrite all enterprise applications, as AWS offers different migration strategies depending on the application complexity and business objectives4.

Cost optimization is one of the five pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It focuses on avoiding unnecessary costs, understanding and controlling where money is being spent, selecting the most appropriate and right number of resource types, analyzing spend over time, and scaling to meet business needs without overspending.

AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. You can use CloudTrail to identify who accessed an AWS service and what action was performed for a given time period. Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Security Hub, and Amazon Inspector are AWS services that provide different types of monitoring and security capabilities.

The approach that will achieve the goal of designing a reliable web application that is hosted on Amazon EC2 is to spread EC2 instances across more than one Availability Zone. An Availability Zone is a physically isolated location within an AWS Region that has its own power, cooling, and network connectivity. By spreading EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones, users can increase the fault tolerance and availability of their web applications, as well as reduce latency for end users2. Launching large EC2 instances in the same Availability Zone, spreading EC2 instances across more than one security group, or using an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from AWS Marketplace are not sufficient to ensure reliability, as they do not provide redundancy or resilience in case of an outage in one Availability Zone.

 The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) helps organizations understand how cloud adoption transforms the way they work, and it provides structure to identify and address gaps in skills and processes. The AWS CAF organizes guidance into six areas of focus, called perspectives. Each perspective reflects a different stakeholder viewpoint with its own distinct responsibilities, skills, and attributes. The Security Perspective helps you structure the selection and implementation of security controls that meet your organization’s needs2.

 Network ACLs (network access control lists) are an AWS service or feature that provides the functionality of applying security rules to a subnet for EC2 instances. A subnet is a logical partition of an IP network within a VPC (virtual private cloud). A VPC is a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where the company can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that they define. A network ACL is a virtual firewall that controls the inbound and outbound traffic for one or more subnets. The company can use network ACLs to allow or deny traffic based on protocol, port, or source and destination IP address. Network ACLs are stateless, meaning that they do not track the traffic that flows through them. Therefore, the company must create rules for both inbound and outbound traffic4

 Network ACLs (network access control lists) are an optional layer of security for your VPC that act as a firewall for controlling traffic in and out of one or more subnets. You can use network ACLs to allow or deny traffic based on protocol, port, or source and destination IP address. Network ACLs are stateless, meaning that they do not track the traffic that flows through them. Therefore, you must create rules for both inbound and outbound traffic.

S3 Access Points are a feature of Amazon S3 that allows you to easily manage access to specific data that is hosted in S3 buckets. S3 Access Points are unique hostnames that customers can use to access data in S3 buckets. You can create multiple access points for a single bucket, each with its own name and permissions. You can use S3 Access Points to provide different levels of access to different groups of customers, such as read-only or write-only access. You can also use S3 Access Points to enforce encryption or logging requirements for specific data. S3 Access Points help you keep control over the full datasets that you share with your customers, while simplifying the access management and improving the performance and scalability of your applications.

 To make a subnet public, the company should use an Amazon VPC internet gateway and an Amazon VPC route table. An internet gateway is a horizontally scaled, redundant, and highly available VPC component that allows communication between your VPC and the internet. A route table contains a set of rules, called routes, that are used to determine where network traffic from your subnet or gateway is directed. To enable internet access for a subnet, you need to attach an internet gateway to your VPC and add a route to the internet gateway in the route table associated with the subnet.

 AWS Direct Connect is a cloud service solution that makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from a customer’s premises to AWS. AWS Direct Connect does not involve the public internet, and therefore can reduce network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than internet-based connections. AWS Snowball is a petabyte-scale data transport service that uses secure devices to transfer large amounts of data into and out of the AWS Cloud. AWS Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage service that gives customers on-premises access to virtually unlimited cloud storage. A VPN connection enables customers to establish a secure and private connection between their network and AWS.

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior to protect your AWS accounts, workloads, and data stored in Amazon S3. With the cloud, the collection and aggregation of account and network activities is simplified, but it can be time consuming for security teams to continuously analyze event log data for potential threats. With GuardDuty, you can automate anomaly detection and get actionable findings to help you protect your AWS resources4.

Amazon EC2 is the AWS service that requires the customer to be fully responsible for applying operating system patches. Amazon EC2 is a service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Customers can launch virtual servers called instances and choose from various configurations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources1. Customers have full control and access to their instances, which means they are also responsible for managing and maintaining them, including applying operating system patches2. Customers can use AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager, a feature of AWS Systems Manager, to automate the process of patching their EC2 instances with both security-related updates and other types of updates3.

A company wants an AWS service to collect and process 10 TB of data locally and transfer the data to AWS. The company has intermittent connectivity.

Which AWS service will meet these requirements?

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)

AWS DataSync

AWS Backup

AWS Snowball Edge

Answer: D

The correct answer is D. AWS Snowball Edge.

AWS Snowball Edge is a physical device that can be used to collect and process data locally and then transfer it to AWS. It is designed for situations where there is limited or intermittent network connectivity, or where bandwidth costs are high.AWS Snowball Edge can store up to 80 TB of data and has compute and storage capabilities to run applications on the device1.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) is a service that helps migrate databases to AWS.It does not collect or process data locally, nor does it work offline2.

AWS DataSync is a service that helps transfer data between on-premises storage systems and AWS storage services.It does not collect or process data locally, and it requires a network connection to work3.

AWS Backup is a service that helps automate and manage backups across AWS services. It does not collect or process data locally, nor does it transfer data to AWS.It only backs up data that is already in AWS4.

AWS Well-Architected Framework promotes AWS Cloud architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems. AWS Well-Architected Framework is a set of guidelines and best practices that help the user to evaluate and improve the architecture of their applications and workloads on AWS. AWS Well-Architected Framework consists of five pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization. Each pillar provides a set of design principles, questions, and best practices that help the user to achieve the desired outcomes for their systems.

Amazon S3 is the AWS service that offers object storage. Object storage is a technology that stores and manages data in an unstructured format called objects. Each object consists of the data, metadata, and a unique identifier. Object storage is ideal for storing large amounts of unstructured data, such as photos, videos, email, web pages, sensor data, and audio files1. Amazon S3 provides industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance for object storage2.

Amazon RDS is the AWS service that offers relational database storage. Relational database storage is a technology that stores and manages data in a structured format called tables. Each table consists of rows and columns that define the attributes and values of the data. Relational database storage is ideal for storing structured or semi-structured data, such as customer records, inventory, transactions, and analytics3.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is the AWS service that offers file storage. File storage is a technology that stores and manages data in a hierarchical format called files and folders. Each file consists of the data and metadata, and each folder consists of files or subfolders. File storage is ideal for storing shared data that can be accessed by multiple users or applications, such as home directories, content repositories, media libraries, and configuration files4.

Amazon DynamoDB is the AWS service that offers NoSQL database storage. NoSQL database storage is a technology that stores and manages data in a flexible format called documents or key-value pairs. Each document or key-value pair consists of the data and metadata, and can have different attributes and values depending on the schema. NoSQL database storage is ideal for storing dynamic or unstructured data that requires high performance, scalability, and availability, such as web applications, social media, gaming, and IoT.

AWS CodePipeline is a continuous delivery and deployment service that automates the release process of software applications across different stages, such as source code, build, test, and deploy2. AWSAppSync, AWS Cloud9, and AWS CodeCommit are other AWS services related to application development, but they do not provide continuous delivery and deployment solutions34 .

 Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a service that provides a scalable and elastic file system for Linux-based workloads. It can be mounted on multiple Amazon EC2 instances across different Availability Zones within a region, allowing applications to access a common set of files1. AWS Backup is a service that provides a centralized and automated way to back up data across AWS services. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is a service that provides persistent block storage volumes for Amazon EC2 instances. AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized is a device that provides a petabyte-scale data transport and edge computing solution.

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that is ideal for applications with short-running processes and low-frequency invocation, as it only charges for the compute time consumed. Since the application is invoked only a few times a day and runs for less than 5 minutes, Lambda is the most cost-effective option. ECS, EKS, and EC2 are better suited for more persistent workloads and would be more costly in this use case.

 The correct answer is C because AWS Outposts is an AWS service that enables the company to meet the requirements. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility. AWS Outposts allows customers to run their workloads on the same hardware and software that AWS uses in its cloud, while maintaining local access and control. The other options are incorrect because they are not AWS services that enable the company to meet the requirements. AWS Device Farm is an AWS service that enables customers to test their mobile and web applications on real devices in the AWS Cloud. AWS Fargate is an AWS service that enables customers to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters. AWS Ground Station is an AWS service that enables customers to communicate with satellites and downlink data from orbit. Reference: AWS Outposts FAQs

AWS Cost Explorer is the AWS service or tool that helps users visualize, understand, and manage spending and usage over time. AWS Cost Explorer is a web-based interface that allows users to access interactive graphs and tables that display their AWS costs and usage data. Users can create custom reports that analyze cost and usage data by various dimensions, such as service, region, account, tag, and more. Users can also view historical data for up to the last 12 months, forecast future costs for up to the next 12 months, and get recommendations for cost optimization. AWS Cost Explorer also provides preconfigured views that show common cost and usage scenarios, such as monthly spend by service, daily spend by linked account, and Reserved Instance utilization. Users can use AWS Cost Explorer to monitor their AWS spending and usage trends, identify cost drivers and anomalies, and optimize their resource allocation and budget planning. References: Cloud Cost Analysis - AWS Cost Explorer - AWS, Analyzing your costs with AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Enterprise Support is the AWS Support plan that assigns an AWS concierge agent to a company’s account. AWS Enterprise Support is the highest level of support that AWS offers, and it provides the most comprehensive and personalized assistance. An AWS concierge agent is a dedicated technical account manager who acts as a single point of contact for the company and helps to optimize the AWS environment, resolve issues, and access AWS experts. For more information, see [AWS Support Plans] and [AWS Concierge Support].

The AWS account root user is the identity that has complete access to all AWS services and resources in the account. It is accessed by signing in with the email address and password that were used to create the account1. The root user should be protected and used only for a few account and service management tasks that require it1. Therefore, the following actions are best practices for an AWS account root user:

Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) on the root user. MFA is a security feature that requires users to provide two or more pieces of information to authenticate themselves, such as a password and a code from a device. MFA adds an extra layer of protection for the root user credentials, which can access sensitive information and perform critical operations in the account2.

Create an IAM user with administrator privileges for daily administrative tasks, instead of using the root user. IAM is a service that helps customers manage access to AWS resources for users and groups. Customers can create IAM users and assign them permissions to perform specific tasks on specific resources. Customers can also create IAM roles and policies to delegate access to other AWS services or external entities3. By creating an IAM user with administrator privileges, customers can avoid using the root user for everyday tasks and reduce the risk of accidental or malicious changes to the account1.

IAM roles are a way to delegate access to resources in different AWS accounts. IAM roles allow users to assume a set of permissions for a limited time without having to create or share long-term credentials. IAM roles can be used to grant cross-account access by creating a trust relationship between the accounts and specifying the permissions that the role can perform. Users can then switch to the role and access the resources in the other account using temporary security credentials provided by the role. References: Cross account resource access in IAM, IAM tutorial: Delegate access across AWS accounts using IAM roles, How to Enable Cross-Account Access to the AWS Management Console

Reserved Instances (RIs) are a pricing model that allows you to reserve EC2 instances for a specified period of time (one or three years) and receive a significant discount compared to On-Demand pricing. RIs are suitable for workloads that have predictable usage patterns and require a long-term commitment. You can choose between three payment options: All Upfront, Partial Upfront, or No Upfront. The more you pay upfront, the greater the discount1.

Savings Plans are a flexible pricing model that can help you reduce your EC2 costs by up to 72% compared to On-Demand pricing, in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of usage (measured in $/hour) for a one or three year term. Savings Plans apply to usage across EC2, AWS Lambda, and AWS Fargate. You can choose between two types of Savings Plans: Compute Savings Plans and EC2 Instance Savings Plans. Compute Savings Plans offer the most flexibility and apply to any instance family, size, OS, tenancy, or region. EC2 Instance Savings Plans offer the highest discount and apply to a specific instance family within a region2.

Spot Instances are a pricing model that allows you to bid for unused EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud and are available at a discount of up to 90% compared to On-Demand pricing. Spot Instances are suitable for fault-tolerant or stateless workloads that can run on heterogeneous hardware and have flexible start and end times. However, SpotInstances are not guaranteed and can be interrupted by AWS at any time if the demand for capacity increases or your bid price is lower than the current Spot price3.

On-Demand Instances are a pricing model that allows you to pay for compute capacity by the hour or second with no long-term commitments. On-Demand Instances aresuitable for short-term, spiky, or unpredictable workloads that cannot be interrupted, or for applications that are being developed or tested on EC2 for the first time. However, On-Demand Instances are the most expensive option among the four pricing models4.

Dedicated Hosts are physical EC2 servers fully dedicated for your use. Dedicated Hosts can help you reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses, such as Windows Server, SQL Server, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Dedicated Hosts can be purchased On-Demand or as part of Savings Plans. Dedicated Hosts are suitable for workloads that need to run on dedicated physical servers or have strict licensing requirements. However, Dedicated Hosts are not the lowest cost option among the four pricing models.

Edge locations are sites that Amazon CloudFront uses to cache copies of your content for faster delivery to users at any location. You can use Amazon CloudFront to deliver your entire website, including dynamic, static, streaming, and interactive content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance3. Edge locations can also host AWS Lambda functions to perform compute operations for your web application as close to end users as possible4.

Amazon EC2 is the AWS service that the company should use to meet its requirements of retaining full control of patch management for the guest operating systems that host its applications. Amazon EC2 is a service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Users can launch virtual servers, called instances, that run various operating systems, such as Linux, Windows, macOS, and more. Users have full administrative access to their instances and can install and configure any software, including patches and updates, on their instances. Users are responsible for managing the security and maintenance of their instances, including patching the guest operating system and applications. Users can also use AWS Systems Manager to automate and simplify the patching process for their EC2 instances. AWS Systems Manager is a service that helps users manage their AWS and on-premises resources atscale. Users can use AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager to scan their instances for missing patches, define patch baselines and maintenance windows, and apply patches automatically or manually across their instances. Users can also use AWS Systems Manager to monitor the patch compliance status and patching history of their instances. References: What is Amazon EC2?, AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is the AWS service that allows customers to deploy applications in the AWS Cloud as quickly as possible. AWS Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, and auto-scaling to application health monitoring. Customers can upload their code and Elastic Beanstalk will take care of the rest1. AWS Elastic Beanstalk also minimizes the complexity that is related to the management of AWS resources. Customers can retain full control of the underlying AWS resources powering their applications and adjust the settings to suittheir needs1. Customers can also use the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or APIs to manage their applications1.

AWS Config is the AWS service that enables customers to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of their AWS resources. AWS Config continuously monitors and records the configuration changes of the resources and evaluates them against desired configurations or best practices2. AWS Config does not help customers deploy applications in the AWS Cloud as quickly as possible or minimize the complexity that is related to the management of AWS resources.

Amazon EC2 is the AWS service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Customers can launch virtual servers called instances and choose from various configurations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources3. Amazon EC2 does not automatically handle the deployment or management of AWS resources for customers. Customers have to manually provision, configure, monitor, and scale their instances and other related resources.

Amazon Personalize is the AWS service that enables customers to create personalized recommendations for their users based on their behavior and preferences. Amazon Personalize uses machine learning to analyze data and deliver real-time recommendations4. Amazon Personalize does not help customers deploy applications in the AWS Cloud as quickly as possible or minimize the complexity that is related to the management of AWS resources.

Pay-as-you-go pricing is one of the main benefits of AWS. With pay-as-you-go pricing, you pay only for what you use, when you use it. There are no long-term contracts, termination fees, or complex licensing. You replace upfront expenses with lower variable costs and pay only for the resources you consume.

Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy to use intelligent search service powered by machine learning. It enables users to easily find the content they are looking for, even when it is scattered across multiple locations and content repositories within their organization. Amazon Kendra supports natural language queries, and can search fortext in documents stored in Amazon S3, as well as other sources such as SharePoint, OneDrive, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and more1.

Amazon Rekognition is a computer vision service that makes it easy to add image and video analysis to applications. It can detect objects, faces, text, scenes, activities, and emotions in images and videos. However, it is not designed for searching for text in documents stored in Amazon S32.

Amazon Polly is a text-to-speech service that turns text into lifelike speech. It can create audio versions of books, articles, podcasts, and more. However, it is not designed for searching for text in documents stored in Amazon S33.

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces using voice and text. It can create chatbots that can interact with users using natural language. However, it is not designed for searching for text in documents stored in Amazon S34.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a service that enables you to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS Cloud without worrying about the infrastructure that runs those applications. You simply upload your application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and application health monitoring. Elastic Beanstalk supports several platform configurations for Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker web applications that can run on familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS. You can also use Elastic Beanstalk to launch a virtual machine (VM) and MySQL database on AWS with theleast operational effort. Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that enables you to easily run, scale, and secure Docker containerized applications on AWS. However, it requires more operational effort than Elastic Beanstalk, as you need to define your application architecture and the specifications of the containers that run it. Amazon Lightsail is an easy-to-use cloud platform that offers everything you need to build an application or website, plus a cost-effective, monthly plan. It is designed for developers who have little or no prior cloud experience and want to launch and manage applications on AWS with minimal complexity. However, it does not support MySQL databases, and it requires more operational effort than Elastic Beanstalk, as you need to configure your VM and database settings. Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It allows you to launch a virtual machine (VM) and MySQL database on AWS, but it requires the most operational effort, as you need to provision, monitor, and manage your EC2 instances and database.

According to the AWS shared responsibility model, the customer is responsible for security in the cloud, which includes the tasks of managing data encryption and granting least privilege access to IAM users. Data encryption is the process of transforming data into an unreadable format that canonly be accessed with a key or a password. The customer must decide whether to encrypt their data at rest (when it is stored on AWS) or in transit (when it is moving between AWS and the customer or between AWS services). The customer must also choose the encryption method, algorithm, and key management solution that best suit their needs. AWS provides various services and features that support data encryption, such as AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), and AWS Encryption SDK5 IAM users are entities that represent the people or applications that interact with AWS resources and services. The customer must grant the IAM users the minimum permissions that they need to perform their tasks, and avoid giving them unnecessary or excessive access. This is known as the principle of least privilege, and it helps reduce the risk of unauthorized or malicious actions. The customer can use IAM policies, roles, groups, and permissions boundaries to manage the access of IAM users.

Server-side encryption is an encryption option that Amazon S3 provides to encrypt data at rest in Amazon S3. With server-side encryption, Amazon S3 encrypts an object before saving it to disk in its data centers and decrypts it when you download the objects. You have three server-side encryption options to choose from: SSE-S3, SSE-C, and SSE-KMS. SSE-S3 uses keys that are managed by Amazon S3. SSE-C allows you to manage your own encryption keys. SSE-KMS uses keys that are managed by AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)5.

The AWS Cloud benefit that describes the ability to acquire resources as they are needed and release resources when they are no longer needed is elasticity. Elasticity means that users can quickly add and remove resources to match the demand of their applications, and only pay for what they use. Elasticity enables users to handle unpredictable workloads, reduce costs, and improve performance1. Economies of scale, agility, and security are other benefits of the AWS Cloud, but they do not describe the specific ability of acquiring and releasing resources on demand.

Volume-based discounts are an AWS offering or benefit that can help the company optimize costs based on the amount of storage that the company uses. Volume-based discounts are discounts that AWS provides for some storage services, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS, when the company stores a large amount of data. The more data the company stores, the lower the price per GB. For example, Amazon S3 offers six storage classes, each with a different price per GB. The price per GB decreases as the amount of data stored in each storage class increases

 One of the cost efficiency principles related to the AWS Cloud is to right-size services based on capacity requirements. This means choosing the most appropriate type and size of AWS resources to meet the performance and scalability needs of the applications, while avoiding over-provisioning or under-provisioning. By right-sizing services, users can optimize the costs and benefits of using the AWS Cloud1

The AWS best practice that ensures the most cost-effective architecture for the workload is rightsizing. Rightsizing means selecting the most appropriate instance type or resourceconfiguration that matches the needs of the workload. Rightsizing can help optimize performance and reduce costs by avoiding over-provisioning or under-provisioning of resources1. Loose coupling, caching, and redundancy are other AWS best practices that can improve the scalability, availability, and performance of the workload, but they do not necessarily ensure the most cost-effective architecture.

Amazon RDS is a managed database service that handles most of the common database administration tasks, such as hardware provisioning, server maintenance, backup and recovery, patching, scaling, and replication. However, Amazon RDS does not optimize the application that interacts with the database. The company is stillresponsible for tuning the performance, security, and availability of the application according to its business requirements and best practices12.

 The AWS Cloud offers many benefits, such as:

Trade variable expenses for capital expenses: You can pay only for the resources you use, instead of investing in fixed costs upfront. This reduces the risk and complexity of planning and managing your IT infrastructure4

Deploy globally in minutes: You can leverage the global infrastructure of AWS to deploy your applications and data in multiple regions and availability zones. This enables you to reach your customers faster, improve performance, and increase reliability5

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) people perspective capabilities are the organizational skills and processes that enable effective cloud adoption.According to the AWS CAF people perspective whitepaper1, there are seven capabilities in this perspective, two of which are:

Organizational alignment: This capability helps you align your organizational structure, roles, and responsibilities to support your cloud transformation goals and objectives.It involves assessing your current and desired state ofalignment, identifying gaps and misalignments, and designing and implementing changes to optimize your cloud performance1.

Organization design: This capability helps you design and evolve your organization to enable agility, innovation, and collaboration in the cloud.It involvesdefining your cloud operating model, identifying the skills and competencies needed for cloud roles, and creating career paths and development plans for your cloud workforce1.

The other options are not capabilities in the AWS CAF people perspective.Portfolio management, risk management, and modern application development are capabilities in the AWS CAF business perspective, governance perspective, and platform perspective respectively2.

1: AWS Cloud Adoption Framework: People Perspective - AWS Cloud Adoption Framework: People Perspective

2: AWS Cloud Adoption Framework - AWS Cloud Adoption Framework

Scaling horizontally across multiple Availability Zones is a way to adopt a highly available architecture, as it increases the fault tolerance and resilience of the application. Scaling vertically to a larger EC2 instance size is a way to improve the performance of the application, but it does not improve the availability. Purchasing an EC2 Dedicated Instance is a way to isolate the instance from other AWS customers, but it does not improve the availability. Changing the EC2 instance family to a compute optimized instance is a way to optimize the instance type for the workload, but it does not improve the availability. These concepts are explained in the AWS Well-Architected Framework2.

Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances are the AWS service or resource that the company should use for its iOS application development and build activities, as they enable users to run macOS on AWS and access a broad and growing set of AWS services. AWS CodeCommit is a service that provides a fully managed source control service that hosts secure Git-based repositories. AWS Amplify is a set of tools and services that enable developers to build full-stack web and mobile applications using AWS. AWS App Runner is a service that makes it easy for developers to quickly deploy containerized web applications and APIs. These concepts are explained in the AWS Developer Tools page4.

 AWS offers different support plans to meet the needs of different customers. The AWS Enterprise Support plan is the highest level of support that provides customers with concierge-like service, where the main focus is helping them achieve their outcomes and find success in the cloud. One of the benefits of the AWS Enterprise Support plan is that customers get designated support from an AWS technical account manager (TAM), who provides consultative architectural and operational guidance based on their applications and use cases. Therefore, the correct answer is B. You can learn more about AWS support plans and their benefits .

 The correct answer is C because VPC Flow Logs is an AWS service or feature that captures information about the network traffic to and from an Amazon EC2 instance. VPC Flow Logs is a feature that enables customers to capture information about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in their VPC. VPC Flow Logs can help customers to monitor and troubleshoot connectivity issues, such as traffic not reaching an instance or traffic being rejected by a security group. The other options are incorrect because they are not AWS services or features that capture information about the network traffic to and from an Amazon EC2 instance. VPC Reachability Analyzer is an AWS service or feature that enables customers to perform connectivity testing between resources in their VPC and identify configuration issues that prevent connectivity. Amazon Athena is an AWS service that enables customers to query data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. AWS X-Ray is an AWS service that enables customers to analyze and debug distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. Reference: VPC Flow Logs

Amazon Aurora is a fully managed MySQL-compatible database that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases. Amazon Aurora is part of the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) family, which means it inherits the benefits of a fully managed service, such as automated backups, patches, scaling, monitoring, and security. Amazon Aurora also offers up to five times the throughput of standard MySQL, as well as high availability, durability, and fault tolerance with up to 15 read replicas, cross-Region replication, and self-healing storage. Amazon Aurora is compatible with the latest versions of MySQL, as well as PostgreSQL, and supports various features and integrations that enhance its functionality and usability123

 Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, AWS — Amazon Aurora Overview

One of the key advantages of cloud computing is the ability totrade fixed expenses (like data centers and physical servers) for variable expenses. With AWS, companies pay only for the compute power, storage, and other resources they use, rather than investing heavily in on-premises infrastructure upfront. This reduces capital expenditure and helps lower overall costs.

Why other options are not suitable:

A. Go global in minutes: Refers to the ability to quickly deploy applications around the world, but does not directly reduce upfront costs.

B. Increase speed and agility: Refers to the ability to quickly scale and deploy resources, but is not directly related to cost reduction.

C. Benefit from massive economies of scale: Refers to AWS's ability to lower costs by leveraging its scale, but the primary advantage for reducing upfront costs is moving from fixed to variable expenses.

AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to customer premises. By providing local access to AWS managed infrastructure, AWS Outposts enables customers to build and run applications on premises using the same programming interfaces as in AWS Regions, while using local compute and storage resources for lower latency and local data processing needs. An Outpost is a pool of AWS compute and storage capacity deployed at a customer site. AWS operates, monitors, and manages this capacity as part of an AWS Region. You can create subnets on your Outpost and specify them when you create AWS resources such as EC2 instances, EBS volumes, ECS clusters, and RDS instances. Instances in Outpost subnets communicate with other instances in the AWS Region using private IP addresses, all within the same VPC. Outposts solutions allow you to extend and run native AWS services on premises, and isavailable in a variety of form factors, from 1U and 2U Outposts servers to 42U Outposts racks, and multiple rack deployments. With AWS Outposts, you can run some AWS services locally and connect to a broad range of services available in the local AWS Region2. AWS Outposts is a hybrid cloud deployment model that uses AWS Outposts as part of the application deployment infrastructure. Hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment that uses a mix of on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud services with orchestration between the platforms. Hybrid cloud provides businesses with greater flexibility, more deployment options, and optimized costs. By using AWS Outposts, customers can benefit from the fully managed infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools of AWS on premises, while still having access to the full range of AWS services available in the Region for a truly consistent hybrid experience3. References: On-Premises Private Cloud - AWS Outposts Family - AWS, What is AWS Outposts? - AWS Outposts

Rehosting ("lift and shift") is a migration strategy where applications are moved to the cloud with minimal changes, making it the least effort-intensive method for applications incompatible with the cloud. Repurchasing involves moving to a different product, often a SaaS solution, which can also minimize migration effort by avoiding the need for application-level changes. Retiring, replatforming, and refactoring require significant effort either in terms of analyzing and shutting down the application, making changes to the underlying platform, or redesigning the application architecture, respectively.

AWS Trusted Advisoris a service that provides real-time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices. It offers checks in five categories: cost optimization, performance, security, fault tolerance, and service limits. By continuously monitoring the AWS environment, AWS Trusted Advisor helps ensure that additional developments, integrations, changes, and growth do not jeopardize the optimized infrastructure by providing ongoing optimization and security recommendations.

B. AWS Health Dashboard: Incorrect, as it provides personalized view of service health and status updates but does not offer continuous optimization and security advice.

C. Amazon Connect: Incorrect, as it is a contact center service, not related to infrastructure optimization or security.

D. AWS Systems Manager: Incorrect, as it provides operational insights and management for AWS resources but is not specifically focused on ongoing optimization and security checks.

AWS Cloud References:

AWS Trusted Advisor

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service that helps you securely control access to AWS resources. You can use IAM to create and manage AWS users and groups, and use permissions to allow and deny their access to AWS resources. IAM is always provided at nocharge12. References: 1: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) - Amazon Web Services (AWS), 2: Which aws service is always provided at no charge? - Brainly.in

AWS Storage Gatewayis a hybrid cloud storage service that provides on-premises access to virtually unlimited cloud storage. TheFile Gatewayconfiguration allows for on-premises applications to store data in Amazon S3 using NFS and SMB protocols, while keeping frequently accessed data cached locally. This meets the company's requirement for cloud-based storage that is locally cached.

B. AWS Snowcone: Incorrect, as it is a portable edge computing and storage device, not a storage service that provides local caching for cloud storage.

C. AWS Backup: Incorrect, as it is a centralized backup service to automate data protection across AWS services but does not provide local caching.

D. Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS): Incorrect, as it provides scalable file storage for use with Amazon EC2 but does not offer local caching for on-premises storage needs.

AWS Cloud References:

AWS Storage Gateway

 Elasticity in the AWS Cloud refers to the ability to acquire resources as you need them and release resources when you no longer need them. In the cloud, you want to do this automatically1. This means that you can rightsized resources as demand shifts, and you can easily procure resources when they are needed. Elasticity is not related to how quickly an Amazon EC2 instance can be restarted, the maximum amount of RAM an Amazon EC2 instance can use, or the pay-as-you-go billing model. These are aspects of scalability, performance, and cost, respectively2.

For more information on elasticity, you can refer to the following sources:

Elasticity - AWS Well-Architected Framework

Elastic - Reactive Systems on AWS

What is the difference between scalability and elasticity?

Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances are ideal for unpredictable workloads that do not require a long-term commitment. This option allows users to pay for compute capacity by the hour or second, with no long-term commitments. It is suitable for short-term, spiky, or unpredictable workloads that cannot be interrupted and require flexibility. Option A is better suited for Reserved Instances, Option B is ideal for Spot Instances, and Option D is more suited for Reserved Instances due to cost optimization for long-term use.

"There is no long-term commitment required when you purchase On-Demand Instances. You pay only for the seconds that your On-Demand Instances are in the running state, with a 60-second minimum. The price per second for a running On-Demand Instance is fixed, and is listed on the Amazon EC2 Pricing, On-Demand Pricing page. We recommend that you use On-Demand Instances for applications with short-term, irregular workloads that cannot be interrupted."https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-on-demand-instances.html

The correct answer is B and C. EC2 Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots are two AWS services that provide disaster recovery solutions for Amazon EC2 instances.

EC2 AMIs are preconfigured templates that contain the software configuration and data required to launch an EC2 instance. You can create AMIs from your running EC2 instances and use them to launch new instances in the same or different AWS Regions. This way, you can quickly recover your EC2 instances in case of a disaster that affects your primary Region or Availability Zone1.

Amazon EBS snapshots are incremental backups of your Amazon EBS volumes. You can create snapshots of your volumes and store them in Amazon S3, which is a highly durable and scalable storage service. You can use snapshots to restore your volumes to a previous point in time or to create new volumes from snapshots. Snapshots can also be copied across AWS Regions, enabling you to recover your data in another Region in case of a disaster2.

The other options are not directly related to disaster recovery for EC2 instances:

EC2 Reserved Instances are a pricing model that allows you to reserve EC2 capacity for a specific period of time and receive a discount on the hourly charge. Reserved Instances do not provide any disaster recovery benefits, as they are only a billing option3.

AWS Shield is a managed service that protects your AWS resources from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. AWS Shield provides basic protection for all AWS customers at no additional charge, and advanced protection for customers who need higher levels of detection and mitigation. AWS Shield does not provide any disaster recovery benefits, as it is only a security service4.

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that monitors your AWS account and workloads for malicious or unauthorized activity. Amazon GuardDuty analyzes various data sources, such as AWS CloudTrail, Amazon VPC Flow Logs, and DNS logs, to identify potential threats and alert you via Amazon CloudWatch Events or AWS Lambda. Amazon GuardDuty does not provide any disaster recovery benefits, as it is only a monitoring service5.

One of the primary advantages of the AWS Cloud is the ability to provision resources on demand. Users no longer need to over-provision or guess the capacity needed for infrastructure, which helps optimizecosts and improve agility. AWS handles infrastructure scaling dynamically based on the actual usage. Options B, C, and D are incorrect as users do not maintain sole ownership of IT hardware or control of underlying infrastructure, and while they do maintain some control over the operating system in some cases, it is not an advantage specific to the cloud.

 Basing the selection of Amazon EC2 instance types on past utilization patterns is a way to right size the AWS resources and optimize the performance and cost. Using Amazon S3 Lifecycle policies to move objects that users access infrequently to lower-cost storage tiers is another way to reduce the storage costs and align them with the business value of the data. These two actions are recommended by the AWS Cost Optimization Pillar1. Switching from Amazon RDS to Amazon DynamoDB is not necessarily a cost-saving action, as it depends on the use case and the data model. Using Multi-AZ deployments for Amazon RDS is a way to improve the availability and durability of the database, but it also increases the cost. Replacing existing Amazon EC2 instanceswith AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a way to simplify the deployment and management of the application, but it does not affect the cost of the underlying EC2 instances.

Best practices for using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) include:

B. Create individual IAM users: Each user should have their own IAM credentials to ensure accountability, control, and traceability. Sharing credentials can lead to security risks and difficulty in auditing.

E. Use groups to assign permissions to IAM users: Assigning permissions through IAM groups simplifies permission management. You can assign the necessary permissions to the group, and then add or remove users from the group as needed, rather than managing permissions for each user individually.

Why other options are not suitable:

A. Share access keys: Sharing access keys is a security risk and violates AWS security best practices. Each user should have their own credentials.

C. Use inline policies instead of customer-managed policies: Customer-managed policies are preferred over inline policies because they offer better control, reusability, and versioning.

D. Grant maximum privileges to IAM users: Granting the least privilege necessary is a best practice to reduce the risk of accidental or malicious actions.

Understanding Availability Zones (AZs): An Availability Zone is a distinct location within an AWS region that is engineered to be isolated from failures in other AZs.

Characteristics of Availability Zones:

Data Centers: Each AZ consists of one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity.

High Availability: AZs are designed for high availability, providing low-latency network connections to other zones in the same region.

Fault Isolation: They provide fault isolation and are used to deploy applications and services to ensure high availability and reliability.

Use Cases for Availability Zones:

Multi-AZ Deployments: For services like RDS, deploying in multiple AZs ensures fault tolerance.

Disaster Recovery: Setting up resources in multiple AZs helps in quick recovery from failures.

Load Balancing: Distributing traffic across AZs using Elastic Load Balancing ensures optimal performance and availability.

AWS Global Infrastructure

Understanding AWS Regions and Availability Zones

Cost allocation tags are an AWS feature that allows for detailed tracking of cloud costs by tagging resources. These tags can be customized to represent departments, projects, or cost centers, enabling organizations to allocate and monitor expenses accurately. By using cost allocation tags, companies can create reports that break down costs by tag, providing granular insights into their cloud spending. This feature is critical for achieving detailed cost management and is a core part of AWS’s billing and cost management offerings.

According to the AWS shared responsibility model, customers are responsible for managing their data, applications, operating systems, security groups, and other aspects of their AWS environment. This includes installing updates and security patches of the guest operating system and any application software or utilities installed by the customer on the instances. AWS is responsible for protecting the infrastructure that runs all of the services offered in the AWS Cloud, such as data centers, hardware, software, networking, and facilities. This includes the physical connectivity among Availability Zones, the network switch maintenance, and the hardware updates and firmware patches. Therefore, option D is the correct answer, and options A, B, and C are AWS responsibilities, not customer responsibilities. References: : AWS Well-Architected Framework - Elasticity; : Reactive Systems on AWS - Elastic

Elasticity is a characteristic of the AWS Cloud that helps users eliminate underutilized CPU capacity. Elasticity refers to the ability to dynamically provision and de-provision computing resources as per demand, ensuring that the application or service always has the required resources to operate efficiently. Elasticity helps users optimize performance and costs, as theyonly pay for the resources they use and avoid wasting resources when the demand is low345. References: 3: Which characteristic of the aws cloud helps users eliminate …, 4: AWS Elastic Load Balancing and Application Load Balancer, 5: Which characteristic of the AWS Cloud helps users eliminate …

Consolidated billing is a feature of AWS Organizations that enables customers to consolidate billing and payment for multiple AWS accounts. With consolidated billing, customers can group multiple AWS accounts under one payer account, making it easier to manage billing and track costs across multiple accounts. Consolidated billing also offers benefits such as volume discounts, Reserved Instance discounts, and Savings Plans discounts. Consolidated billing is offered at no additional cost.

Multiple AWS accounts is a feature of AWS Organizations that enables customers to create and manage multiple AWS accounts from a central location. With multiple AWS accounts, customers can isolate workloads for different departments, projects, or environments, and apply granular access controls and policies to each account. Multiple AWS accounts also helps customers improve security, compliance, and governance of their AWS resources56. References: 5: Consolidated billing for AWS Organizations - AWS Billing, 6: Understanding Consolidated Bills - AWS Billing, 7: AWS Consolidated Billing: Tutorial & Best Practices, 8: Simplifying Your Bills With Consolidated Billing on AWS - Aimably, 9: AWS Consolidated Billing - W3Schools

Understanding Amazon Snowball Edge: Amazon Snowball Edge is a data migration and edge computing device that helps in transferring large amounts of data to and from AWS.

No-Cost Activities:

Transfer into S3: AWS does not charge for transferring data from the Snowball Edge device into Amazon S3. This is part of the service to facilitate easy data migration into the AWS cloud.

Other Costs: The use of the Snowball Edge appliance for up to 10 days is included in the service fee. However, any usage beyond the 10-day period may incur additional costs.

How to Utilize Snowball Edge:

Order the Device: Use the AWS Management Console to order a Snowball Edge device.

Load Data: Transfer your data onto the Snowball Edge appliance.

Ship Back: Ship the device back to AWS, where the data will be uploaded to Amazon S3 at no additional cost.

Amazon Snowball Edge Pricing

Amazon Snowball Edge Documentation

AWS Snow Family is a group of devices that transport data in and out of AWS. AWS Snow Family devices are physical devices that can transfer up to exabytes of data. One exabyte is 1 000 000 000 000 megabytes. AWS Snow Family devices are designed for use in remote locations where internet connectivity is limited or unavailable. You can use these devices to collect and process data at the edge, and then ship them back to AWS for data upload. AWS Snow Family consists of three types of devices: AWS Snowcone, AWS Snowball, and AWS Snowmobile1234. References: 1: Edge Computing Devices, Secure Data Transfer - AWS Snow Family - AWS, 2: AWS Snow Family Documentation, 3: AWS Snow Family - W3Schools, 4: AWS Snow Family: Data Storage, Migration, and Computation

All Upfront Reserved Instances offer the most cost-effective solution for a workload that will run continuously for one year without interruption. By paying upfront, the user receives the maximum discount over the On-Demand pricing model. Partial Upfront Reserved Instances and Dedicated Instances are more expensive than All Upfront Reserved Instances. On-Demand Instances are not cost-effective for continuous long-term workloads due to their higher hourly rates.

AWS Direct Connect is a service that establishes a dedicated network connection between your on-premises network and one or more AWS Regions. AWS Direct Connect can be used to create a private connection between an on-premises workload and an AWS Cloud workload, bypassing the public internet and reducing network costs, latency, and bandwidth issues. AWS Direct Connect can also provide increased security and reliability for your hybrid cloud applications and data transfers. References:

AWS Direct Connect

What is AWS Direct Connect?

AWS Direct Connect User Guide

AWS Trusted Advisor is a tool that helps customers optimize their AWS environment by providing real-time guidance in five key areas: cost optimization, performance, security, fault tolerance, and service limits. However, the availability of the full set of Trusted Advisor checks depends on the AWS Support plan chosen.

AWS Developer Support: This plan provides access to only seven core Trusted Advisor checks. It is designed for developers experimenting or testing in AWS and does not offer the full set of Trusted Advisor checks.

AWS Business Support: This plan is the lowest-cost support plan that provides access to thefull set of AWS Trusted Advisor checks. Business Support is intended for production workloads, providing a broader range of checks, 24x7 access to Cloud Support Engineers, and more extensive support features.

AWS Enterprise On-Ramp Support: This plan offers access to all Trusted Advisor checks as well but is more expensive than the Business Support plan. It is designed for customers running production workloads and needing additional technical support but does not require the full level of engagement that comes with Enterprise Support.

AWS Enterprise Support: This is the most comprehensive and highest-cost support plan, providing access to all Trusted Advisor checks and a full range of AWS Support resources, including a Technical Account Manager (TAM), account management, concierge support, and more.

Conclusion:

The correct answer isB. AWS Business Support, as it provides access to the full set of AWS Trusted Advisor checks at thelowest cost. AWS Developer Support does not offer the complete checks, and both AWS Enterprise On-Ramp and AWS Enterprise Support are higher-cost plans that also provide the full checks.

AWS Cloud References:

AWS Support Plans

AWS Trusted Advisor

AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that makes it easy to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources for analytics, machine learning, and application development. You can use various data integration engines, such as ETL, ELT, batch, and streaming, and manage your data in a centralized data catalog. AWS Glue is designed specifically for extract, transform, and load (ETL) data, whereas the other options are not.

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)provides scalable computing capacity in the AWS Cloud, allowing customers to run virtual servers (instances) with different configurations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity. This flexibility is ideal for applications that require specific infrastructure configurations, such as custom marketing and order-processing applications.

A. AWS Lambda: Incorrect, as it is a serverless compute service that automatically manages the computing resources needed to run code but does not offer the flexibility of choosing different instance types.

B. Amazon Cognito: Incorrect, as it is used for user authentication and authorization, not for deploying applications.

C. Amazon Athena: Incorrect, as it is an interactive query service for analyzing data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL.

AWS Cloud References:

Amazon EC2

Reserved Instances and Savings Plans are the most cost-effective purchasing options for a compute workload that is steady, predictable, and uninterruptible. Reserved Instances provide a significant discount compared to On-Demand Instances, and Savings Plans offer flexible and consistent savings on EC2 usage. Both options require a commitment to a consistent amount of usage, in USD per hour, for a term of 1 or 3 years. On-Demand Instances are suitable for short-term, irregular, or unpredictable workloads, but they are more expensive than Reserved Instances or Savings Plans. Spot Instances are the cheapest option, but they are not suitable for uninterruptible workloads, as they can be reclaimed by AWS at any time. Dedicated Hosts and Dedicated Instances are designed for compliance and licensing requirements, not for cost optimization. They are more expensive than the other options, as they run on single-tenant hardware. References: Instance purchasing options, Amazon EC2 Pricing, 4 Ways to Purchase Amazon EC2 Instances

AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is designed to integrate with various AWS services to encrypt data at rest. It provides a secure and highly available service to create, control, and manage encryption keys used to encrypt your data. AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) is for managing SSL/TLS certificates, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is for managing user access and permissions, and AWS Security Hub is for security monitoring and compliance, but none of these services provide data encryption at rest like AWS KMS.QUESTION NO: 298

A company has an AWS Business Support plan. The company needs to gain access to the AWS DDoS Response Team (DRT) to help mitigate DDoS events.

Which AWS service or resource must the company use to meet these requirements?

A. AWS Shield Standard

B. AWS Enterprise Support

C. AWS WAF

D. AWS Shield Advanced

Answer: D

AWS Shield Advanced provides enhanced protection against DDoS attacks and includes access to the AWS DDoS Response Team (DRT) to help mitigate complex DDoS events. AWS Shield Standard offers basic DDoS protection, which is included with AWS services, but does not provide access to the DRT. AWS WAF is a web application firewall, and AWS Enterprise Support is a premium support plan but does not specifically provide DDoS mitigation services or access to the DRT.

AWS Artifact is your go-to, central resource for compliance-related information that matters to you. It provides on-demand access to AWS’s security and compliance reports and select online agreements. Reports available in AWS Artifact include our Service Organization Control (SOC) reports, Payment Card Industry (PCI) attestation of compliance, and certifications from accreditation bodies across geographies and compliance verticals that validate the implementation and operating effectiveness of AWS security controls. Agreements available in AWS Artifact include the Business Associate Addendum (BAA) and the Nondisclosure Agreement (NDA). AWS Artifact helps you answer the most frequently asked security and compliance questions that AWS receives from its users. References: Compliance FAQ, Compliance Solutions Guide

AWS Technical Account Managers (TAMs) are available to customers who subscribe to either theAWS Enterprise On-RamporAWS Enterprise Supportplans. TAMs provide proactive guidance and ongoing support, assisting with architecture reviews, operational performance improvements, and business reviews. TheBasicandDeveloperSupport plans do not include access to TAMs, and whileBusiness Supportoffers enhanced technical support, it does not include TAMs either.

The concept of granting access only to the resources needed to perform a task is known as least privilege access. This is a security best practice in IAM that helps to reduce the risk of unauthorized or malicious actions. By applying least privilege access, you can limit the permissions of your IAM users, groups, and roles to the minimum required for their specific tasks. You can also use conditions, permissions boundaries, and IAM Access Analyzer to further restrict and verify access. References: Security best practices in IAM, Policies and permissions in IAM, Use IAM policies to grant the least privileges required to access Amazon RDS resources, How to Design a Least Privilege Architecture in AWS, 12 Azure & AWS IAM Security Best Practices

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) is a cloud service that makes it possible to migrate relational databases, data warehouses, NoSQL databases, and other types of data stores. You can use AWS DMS to migrate your data into the AWS Cloud or between combinations of cloud and on-premises setups. With AWS DMS, you can discover your source data stores, convert your source schemas, and migrate your data. AWS DMS supports migration between 20-plus database and analytics engines, such as Oracle to Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition, MySQL to Amazon Relational Database (RDS) for MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition, MongoDB to Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility), Oracle to Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). You can perform one-time migrations or replicate ongoing changes to keep sources and targets in sync. AWS DMS automatically manages the deployment, management, and monitoring of all hardware and software needed for your migration. AWS DMS is a highly resilient, secure cloud service that provides database discovery, schema conversion, data migration, and ongoing replication to and from a wide range of databases and analytics systems12. References:

Database Migration - AWS Database Migration Service - AWS

What is AWS Database Migration Service? - AWS Database Migration Service

The People perspective in the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) serves as a bridge between technology and business, accelerating the cloud journey to help organizations more rapidly evolve to a culture of continuous growth, learning, and where change becomes business-as-normal, with focus on culture, organizational structure, leadership, and workforce1. References: People Perspective - AWS Cloud Adoption Framework

AWS CloudShell is the service that provides command line access to AWS tools and resources directly from a web browser. AWS CloudShell is a browser-based shell that makes it easy to securely manage, explore, and interact with your AWS resources. It comes pre-authenticated with your console credentials and common development and administration tools are pre-installed, so no local installation or configuration is required. You can open AWS CloudShell from the AWS Management Console with a single click and start running commands and scripts using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), Git, or SDKs. AWS CloudShell also provides persistent home directories with 1 GB of storage per AWS Region12. The other services do not provide command line access to AWS tools and resources directly from a web browser. AWS CloudHSM is a service that helps you meet corporate, contractual and regulatory compliance requirements for data security by using dedicated Hardware Security Module (HSM) appliances within the AWS Cloud3. Amazon WorkSpaces is aservice that provides a fully managed, secure Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution that runs on AWS4. AWS Cloud Map is a service that makes it easy for your applications to discover and connect to each other usinglogical names and attributes5. References: AWS CloudShell, AWS CloudShell – Command-Line Access to AWS Resources, AWS CloudHSM, Amazon WorkSpaces, AWS Cloud Map

AWS Application Composer is a service that allows users to visually design and build serverless applications. Users can drag and drop components, such as AWS Lambda functions, Amazon API Gateway endpoints, Amazon DynamoDB tables, and Amazon S3 buckets, to create aserverless application architecture. Users can also configure the properties, permissions, and dependencies of each component, and deploy the application to their AWS account with a few clicks. AWS Application Composer simplifies the design and configuration of serverless applications, and reduces the need to write code or use AWS CloudFormation templates. References: AWS Application Composer, AWS releases Application Composer to make serverless ‘easier’ but initial scope is limited

AWS Organizationsis a no-cost service that helps you centrally manage and govern your environment as you grow and scale your AWS resources. With AWS Organizations, you can create new AWS accounts, invite existing accounts to join your organization, and apply policies to groups of accounts for governance. While some features within AWS services incur additional costs, using AWS Organizations itself does not add any direct costs.

A. Amazon SageMaker: Incorrect, as it is a fully managed service for building, training, and deploying machine learning models, and it is not free.

B. AWS Config: Incorrect, as while it offers some free-tier usage, it generally incurs charges for recording and evaluating configuration changes.

D. Amazon CloudWatch: Incorrect, as certain CloudWatch metrics, custom metrics, and alarms have associated costs beyond the free tier.

AWS Cloud References:

AWS Organizations

AWS serverless computing is a way of building and running applications without thinking about servers. AWS manages the infrastructure for you, so you don’t have to provision, scale, patch, or monitor servers. You only pay for the compute time you consume, and you can focus on your application logic instead of managing servers12. References: Serverless Computing – Amazon Web Services, AWS Serverless Computing, Benefits, Architecture and Use-cases - XenonStack

According to the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, while the customer is responsible for the security in the cloud. This means that AWS is responsible for protecting the infrastructure that runs AWS services, such as DynamoDB, while the customer is responsible for properly configuring the security of the provided service. For abstracted services, such as DynamoDB, the customer is primarily responsible for managing their data, classifying their assets, and using IAM tools to apply the appropriatepermissions12. Therefore, the customer is responsible for controlling the access to DynamoDB tables, such as by creating IAM policies, roles, and users, and using encryption and authentication mechanisms3. References:

Shared Responsibility Model - Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Security and compliance in Amazon DynamoDB - Amazon DynamoDB

What is Shared Responsibility Model? - Check Point Software

A network ACL (NACL) is an optional layer of security for your VPC that acts as a firewall for controlling traffic in and out of one or more subnets. You can create a network ACL and associate it with a subnet to apply rules that allow or deny traffic to or from the subnet. Network ACLs are stateless, meaning that they evaluate the source and destination IP addresses for both inbound and outbound traffic. You can also use network ACLs to block IP address ranges that are known to be malicious12.

The other options are not AWS services or tools that can be used to set up a firewall to control traffic going into and coming out of an Amazon VPC subnet. Security groups are another layer of security for your VPC that act as a firewall for your EC2 instances. Security groups are stateful, meaning that they automatically allow return traffic for allowed inbound traffic. Security groups can only filter traffic based on protocols, ports, and source or destination IP addresses, not on IP ranges3. AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications from common web exploits. AWS WAF can filter web requests based on rules that you define, such as IP addresses, HTTP headers, HTTP body, or URI strings. AWS WAF does not apply to non-web traffic or to traffic within a VPC4. AWS Firewall Manager is a service that helps you centrally configure and manage firewall rules across your accounts and resources in AWS Organizations. You can use Firewall Manager to apply AWS WAF rules, AWS Network Firewall policies, and Amazon VPC security groups across your AWS accounts. AWS Firewall Manager does not provide a firewall service itself, but rather helps you manage other firewall services

According to the AWS shared responsibility model, the customer is responsible for the security in the cloud, which includes configuring firewalls and networks. AWS provides security groups and network access control lists (NACLs) as firewall features that customers can use to control the traffic to andfrom their AWS resources. Customers are also responsible for managing their own virtual private clouds (VPCs), subnets, route tables, internet gateways, and other network components. AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, which includes the physical security of the facilities, thehost operating system and virtualization layer, and the AWS global network infrastructure12. References:

Shared Responsibility Model - Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Shared responsibility model - Amazon Web Services: Risk and Compliance

AWS Outposts is an AWS offering that brings AWS infrastructure and services to a customer's on-premises location. It allows companies to run AWS services locally while meeting any regulatory or compliance requirements to keep data or applications on-premises. Dedicated Instances are EC2 instances that run on hardware dedicated to a single customer but are still within AWS data centers. Amazon CloudFront is a CDN service, and AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers, neither of which meets the requirement for running an application on-premises.

According to the AWS shared responsibility model, AWS is responsible for protecting the infrastructure that runs all ofthe services offered in the AWS Cloud, such as data centers, hardware, software, networking, and facilities1. This includes the configuration of infrastructure devices, such as routers, switches, firewalls, and load balancers2. Customers are responsible for managing their data, applications, operating systems, security groups, and other aspects of their AWS environment1. Therefore, options A, B, and D are customer responsibilities, not AWS responsibilities. References: 1: AWS Well-Architected Framework - Elasticity; 2: Reactive Systems on AWS - Elastic

AWS Artifact is a service provided by AWS that offers on-demand access to AWS compliance reports, including the Payment Card Industry (PCI) reports. It is the primary tool for retrieving compliance reports such as Service Organization Control (SOC) reports, ISO certifications, and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) reports.

To obtain these reports:

The company should log into the AWS Management Console and navigate to AWS Artifact.

From there, they can select and download the necessary compliance reports.

Why other options are not suitable:

A. Contact AWS Support: AWS Support is not needed to obtain these reports; they are readily available through AWS Artifact.

C. Download reports from AWS Security Hub: AWS Security Hub is a service that provides a comprehensive view of security alerts and compliance status, but it does not host or provide compliance reports like PCI DSS.

D. Contact an AWS technical account manager (TAM): While a TAM may assist in various AWS-related queries, they are not required to obtain PCI reports. AWS Artifact is designed for this purpose.

Understanding AWS Compute Optimizer: AWS Compute Optimizer is a service that analyzes the configuration and utilization metrics of your AWS resources. It provides recommendations to help you select the optimal configurations for your workloads.

Why AWS Compute Optimizer for Rightsizing:

Resource Recommendations: It provides specific recommendations to rightsize your EC2 instances by suggesting instance types that match your actual usage patterns.

Cost Efficiency: By optimizing instance sizes, you can reduce costs associated with over-provisioned resources.

Performance Improvement: Ensures that you are using instances that provide the required performance without over-allocating resources.

How to Implement AWS Compute Optimizer:

Enable AWS Compute Optimizer: In the AWS Management Console, navigate to AWS Compute Optimizer and enable it for your account.

Review Recommendations: After a period of monitoring, review the recommendations provided for your EC2 instances.

Implement Changes: Follow the suggestions to resize or change instance types based on the recommendations, ensuring you balance cost savings with performance needs.

AWS Compute Optimizer

AWS CodeStar is a service that enables you to quickly develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS. It provides a unified user interface for managing your application lifecycle, including code repositories, build pipelines, deployments, and project dashboards. AWS CodeStar also integrates with other AWS services, such as AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, and AWS CodePipeline, to create a complete CI/CD pipeline for your application12. References:

AWS CodeStar

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Guide

AWS Transit Gatewayis a network transit hub that customers can use to connect their Amazon VPCs and on-premises networks to a central hub. This service simplifies network management and reduces operational overhead by enabling a single gateway for managing multiple network connections. It facilitates seamless integration and routing between VPCs and on-premises networks.

A. Virtual private gateway: Incorrect, as it is used to connect a single VPC to an on-premises network through a VPN connection.

C. Internet gateway: Incorrect, as it provides internet access for instances in a VPC but does not connect multiple networks.

D. Customer gateway: Incorrect, as it represents the on-premises device or software application that connects to AWS, but it does not provide a central hub.

AWS Cloud References:

AWS Transit Gateway

Amazon EC2 Spot Instancesoffer spare AWS compute capacity at a significantly reduced cost compared to On-Demand Instances. Spot Instances are ideal for fault-tolerant and flexibleworkloads that can tolerate interruptions, such as batch jobs, data processing, or large-scale computations. These instances may be interrupted by AWS if there is a demand for capacity, but they provide the best cost optimization for workloads that can handle such interruptions.

Why other options are not suitable:

A. Amazon Macie: A data security and privacy service, not relevant to running batch jobs.

B. Amazon Neptune: A graph database service, not relevant to compute optimization.

D. Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances: Provide flexible compute capacity but at a higher cost than Spot Instances, which are more suitable for cost optimization.

Amazon CloudWatch alarm is an AWS service or feature that can initiate an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling action based on CPU utilization. Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that collects and tracks metrics, logs, events, and alarms for your AWS resources and applications. Amazon CloudWatch alarms are actions that you can configure to send notifications or automatically make changes to the resources you are monitoring based on rules that you define67.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is a service that helps you maintain application availability and allows you to automatically add or remove EC2 instances according to definable conditions. You can create dynamic scaling policies that track a specific CloudWatch metric, such as CPU utilization, and define what action to take when the associated CloudWatch alarm is in ALARM. When the policy is in effect, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling adjusts the group’s desired capacity up or down when the threshold of an alarm is breached89. References: 6: Cloud Monitoring - Amazon CloudWatch - AWS, 7: Amazon CloudWatch Documentation, 8: Dynamic scaling for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, 9: Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Documentation

TheAWS Pricing Calculatoris a web-based tool that allows customers to estimate their monthly AWS costs by configuring and projecting the costs of different AWS services. The calculator is specifically designed to help customers plan their AWS spending based on their specific architecture and usage patterns. The other options are not correct because:

B. Calculate historical AWS costs: This is incorrect as the AWS Pricing Calculator does not track or calculate historical costs. For historical costs, AWS Cost Explorer is used.

C. Provide in-depth information about AWS pricing strategies: While the AWS Pricing Calculator provides cost estimations, it does not provide detailed insights into AWS pricing strategies.

D. Provide users with access to their monthly bills: This is incorrect; AWS Billing and Cost Management provides access to actual billing information.

AWS Cloud References:

AWS Pricing Calculator

Understanding IAM Roles: IAM (Identity and Access Management) roles in AWS are designed to delegate access permissions without sharing long-term security credentials. This means applications and services can use temporary security credentials, which enhances security.

Why IAM Roles are Best Practice:

Least Privilege Principle: By using IAM roles, you can ensure that applications only have the minimum permissions they need to function, reducing the risk of unauthorized access.

Temporary Credentials: Roles provide temporary security credentials, which reduce the risk if they are compromised compared to long-term access keys.

Automated Rotation: Temporary credentials automatically expire and are rotated, which means you don’t have to manage the rotation manually.

How to Implement IAM Roles:

Create an IAM Role: In the AWS Management Console, navigate to IAM, and create a new role. Choose the type of trusted entity (e.g., EC2, Lambda).

Attach Policies: Attach the necessary policies to the role that define the permissions for accessing the S3 bucket.

Assign Role to Service: Attach the IAM role to your EC2 instances, Lambda functions, or other AWS services that need to access the S3 bucket.

Use AWS SDKs: When accessing S3 from your application, use the AWS SDKs to automatically assume the IAM role and obtain temporary credentials.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

IAM Roles

AWS Organizations is the AWS service or feature that allows users to create new AWS accounts, group multiple accounts to organize workflows, and apply policies to groups of accounts. AWS Organizations enables users to centrally manage and govern their AWS environment across multiple accounts. Users can create organizational units (OUs) to group accounts based on their business needs, such as by function, project, or region. Users can also apply service control policies (SCPs) toOUs or individual accounts to define the permissions and restrictions for the AWS services and resources that they can access. AWS Organizations also offers features such as consolidated billing, account creation automation, and trusted access12. References:

AWS Organizations

What is AWS Organizations?

Amazon Redshiftis a fully managed data warehouse service that enables users to analyze large amounts of data quickly and cost-effectively. It is designed specifically for online analytical processing (OLAP) and is optimized for complex queries against large datasets. Amazon Redshift uses columnar storage, data compression, and massively parallel processing (MPP) to handle petabyte-scale data warehouse environments.

A. Amazon RDS: Incorrect, as it is a managed relational database service for online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads, not specifically designed for data warehousing.

B. Amazon DynamoDB: Incorrect, as it is a NoSQL database service for fast and flexible data storage, not a data warehouse.

D. Amazon Aurora: Incorrect, as it is a MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database designed for high performance and availability for OLTP workloads, not data warehousing.

AWS Cloud References:

Amazon Redshift

Under theAWS Shared Responsibility Model, AWS manages securityofthe cloud (such as physical infrastructure and virtualization), while customers are responsible for securityinthe cloud. This means that customers are responsible for:

B. Encrypt data and maintain data integrity: Correct, as customers are responsible for securing their data, including encryption and maintaining its integrity.

D. Maintain identity and access management controls: Correct, as customers are responsible for managing access to their AWS resources, including creating and managing IAM users, roles, and permissions.

A. Secure the virtualization layer: Incorrect, as AWS is responsible for securing the underlying virtualization layer.

C. Patch the Amazon RDS operating system: Incorrect, as AWS handles patching and maintenance of the managed service’s underlying infrastructure.

E. Secure Availability Zones: Incorrect, as AWS is responsible for securing the physical infrastructure, including Availability Zones.

AWS Cloud References:

AWS Shared Responsibility Model

AWS App Runneris a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to quickly deploy containerized web applications and APIs at scale. It can automatically build container images from source code or directly from a container registry, and then deploy the application without requiring deep container knowledge or expertise.

AWS App Runner meets the requirements of:

Automatically creating container images from source code.

Managing the deployment of the containerized application with minimal operational overhead.

Why other options are not suitable:

A. AWS Elastic Beanstalk: While it simplifies deploying and scaling web applications, it does not automatically create container images from source code.

B. Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS): ECS is a container orchestration service that requires more manual setup for creating and managing container images and deployments.

D. Amazon EC2: This service provides virtual servers but does not offer managed container image creation or deployment.

Amazon Aurora Serverless is an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition. It is a fully managed service that automatically scales up and down based on the application’s actual needs. Amazon Aurora Serverless is suitable for applications that have infrequent, intermittent, or unpredictable database workloads, and that do not require the full power and range of options provided by provisioned Aurora clusters. Amazon Aurora Serverless eliminates the need to provision and manage database instances, and reduces the management overhead associated with database administration tasks such as scaling, patching, backup, and recovery. References: Amazon Aurora Serverless, Choosing between Aurora Serverless and provisioned Aurora DB clusters, [AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials: Module 4 - Databases in the Cloud]

Moving to the AWS Cloud offers several advantages, including increased speed and agility, which allows users to experiment, innovate, and iterate faster by using the global AWS infrastructure. Additionally, AWS offers massive economies of scale due to its large customer base, leading to lower pay-as-you-go prices. AWS does not assume all responsibilities for the security of infrastructure and applications; it follows a shared responsibility model. Also, not all AWS services can be implemented in seconds, and physical hardware cannot be moved from a user’s data center to the AWS Cloud.

TheAWS Developer Forumsare always free to use, regardless of the user's AWS Support plan. They provide a platform for users to ask questions, share knowledge, and collaborate with the AWS community.

A. AWS Developer Support: Incorrect, as it is a paid support plan option.

C. Programmatic case management: Incorrect, as this feature is available only with certain AWS Support plans (Business and Enterprise).

D. AWS Technical Account Manager (TAM): Incorrect, as a TAM is provided only under the AWS Enterprise Support plan, which is a paid support option.

AWS Cloud References:

AWS Support Plans

Amazon AppStream 2.0 and Amazon WorkSpaces are AWS services that can be used to provide managed Windows virtual desktops and applications to remote employees over secure network connections. Amazon AppStream 2.0 is a fully managed application streaming service that allows users to access Windows desktop applications from any device, without installing or managing any software. Amazon AppStream 2.0 delivers applications over an encrypted connection and isolates them from the underlying infrastructure, ensuring security and compliance1. Amazon WorkSpaces is a fully managed desktop virtualization service that allows users to access Windows or Linux desktops from any device, with a consistent user experience. Amazon WorkSpaces provides persistent, cloud-based virtual desktops that can be customized and scaled according to the user’s needs. Amazon WorkSpaces also offers encryption, backup, and monitoring features to ensure security and reliability2. References:

Amazon AppStream 2.0

Amazon WorkSpaces

According to theAWS Shared Responsibility Model, AWS is responsible for the security "of" the cloud (such as protecting the infrastructure, including hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run AWS Cloud services). In contrast, customers are responsible for security "in" the cloud. This includes configuring and using AWS services securely.

D. Use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) according to the principle of least privilegeis a customer's responsibility. Customers must manage their credentials, control access to resources, and ensure that IAM policies follow the principle of least privilege, which means granting only the permissions necessary to perform a task.

Why other options are not suitable:

A. Patch the Amazon DynamoDB operating system: AWS is responsible for managing and patching the infrastructure for managed services like DynamoDB.

B. Secure Amazon CloudFront edge locations by allowing physical access according to the principle of least privilege: AWS handles physical security of its edge locations.

C. Protect the hardware that runs AWS services: AWS is responsible for protecting the physical hardware that runs AWS services.

AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, and operational and risk auditing of an AWS account. It logs, continuously monitors, and retains account activity related to actions across an AWS infrastructure.

For auditing purposes:

CloudTrail records AWS API calls made in the account, including details about who made the request, the services used, the actions performed, and the response elements returned by AWS.

This information is critical for understanding user activity, detecting anomalous behavior, and performing security analysis and compliance auditing.

Why other options are not suitable:

A. AWS Config: AWS Config provides a detailed view of the configuration of AWS resources, including how resources are related and their compliance with internal policies, but it does not provide a comprehensive audit trail of user actions.

B. Amazon Rekognition: A service for image and video analysis, not relevant to auditing AWS account activity.

D. Amazon SNS: A notification service for sending alerts and messages, not used for auditing purposes.