CLF-C02 AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Questions and Answers

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 Transit Gateway acts as a cloud router for connecting multiple VPCs and on-premises networks, simplifying network management by creating a hub-and-spoke model for routing traffic. Direct Connect provides a private connection to AWS but does not function as a central router. Amazon Connect is unrelated, and Route 53 is for DNS services, not VPC connectivity.

Under the AWS shared responsibility model, AWS is responsible for ensuring the security of the internal network in the AWS data centers, as well as the physical security of the hardware and facilities that run AWS services. AWS customers are responsible for configuring the security group rules that determine which ports are open on an EC2 Linux instance, patching the guest operating system with the latest security patches on EC2, and turning on server-side encryption for S3 buckets. Source: AWS Shared Responsibility Model

AWS SDKs Overview:

AWS Software Development Kits (SDKs) provide libraries and tools for developers to interact with AWS services programmatically.

SDKs are available for multiple programming languages, including Python, Java, JavaScript, and .NET.

How AWS SDKs Meet the Requirement:

Enable developers to integrate AWS services into their applications easily.

Include API clients, authentication helpers, and other utilities specific to AWS services.

Why Other Options Are Incorrect:

A. AWS CodePipeline:Automates CI/CD pipelines but does not provide libraries for development.

C. Amazon CloudWatch:Focuses on monitoring and logging; not a development toolset.

D. AWS CodeDeploy:Automates application deployment but does not include development libraries.

The Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace allows customers to sell unused Standard Reserved Instances to other AWS users. This enables companies to recoup some of the costs if they no longer need certain RIs. Standard RIs cannot be converted to Savings Plans, and AWS Support does not facilitate the resale of RIs directly.

AWS Trusted Advisor provides checks and recommendations across various categories, including cost optimization, security, and performance. Access to all Trusted Advisor checks is available with AWS Business Support, ensuring the company can follow AWS best practices comprehensively. The Developer Support plan offers limited Trusted Advisor checks, and AWS Health Dashboard provides insights into service health but not specific best practice recommendations.

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.

AWS Storage Gateway provides on-premises applications with low-latency access to data stored in AWS by caching frequently accessed data locally. It seamlessly integrates on-premises environments with cloud storage, enabling hybrid storage solutions. AWS DataSync is for data transfer, CloudFront is a content delivery network, and AWS Backup is for backup management, not low-latency access.

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 Elastic Beanstalk is a managed service that facilitates the deployment and management of applications in the AWS Cloud. It supports multiple programming languages and frameworks, allowing users to deploy web applications without managing the underlying infrastructure. Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles deployment, capacity provisioning, load balancing, and auto-scaling. The other services listed, like CodeGuru, Fargate, and CodeCommit, do not provide full application deployment and management capabilities.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. It supports both document and key-value data models and is designed to handle large amounts of data across multiple servers. Other options, like Amazon RDS and Aurora, are managed relational database services, and Amazon Redshift is a data warehousing service.

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 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.

AWS provides the flexibility to scale resources up or down on demand, enabling companies to test new applications without making long-term commitments. This principle allows for cost efficiency and agility during testing and development. The other options do not specifically highlight the benefits of flexible, on-demand resource scaling.

Amazon S3 offers virtually unlimited storage, allowing customers to store and retrieve any amount of data. There are no practical limits to the total volume of data that can be stored in S3, making it suitable for applications that require vast amounts of storage. The options of 10 PB, 50 PB, and 100 PB are incorrect as they do not reflect the actual scale of S3.

Rightsizing involves adjusting instance types based on actual utilization to optimize costs and performance. Changing the size and type of EC2 instances according to utilization data achieves this with minimal operational overhead. Adding instances or changing payment methods does not directly address instance resizing, and reprovisioning with larger instances may not be optimal based on actual usage.

Savings Plans offer cost savings for predictable, steady workloads over a one or three-year term, with flexibility in instance family and size, making them suitable for critical workloads on EC2 instances that will run for a long term like three years. Spot Instances are more cost-effective but not suitable forcritical, predictable workloads due to potential interruptions. Dedicated Hosts and On-Demand Instances would be more costly.

AWS Artifact Overview:

AWS Artifact is a service that provides on-demand access to AWS compliance documentation and agreements.

It includes reports such as PCI DSS, SOC, and ISO certifications.

How AWS Artifact Meets the Requirement:

The PCI DSS compliance documentation can be downloaded directly from the Artifact console.

Artifact helps customers demonstrate compliance to auditors by providing official certifications and attestations.

Why Other Options Are Incorrect:

B. AWS Organizations:Used for managing accounts, not compliance reports.

C. AWS Trusted Advisor:Offers best practice checks but does not provide compliance documentation.

D. AWS Support Center:Provides customer support and ticket management but not compliance documentation.

The AWS Cloud's global infrastructure enables rapid deployment across multiple geographic regions, allowing companies to extend applications to new markets quickly. This capability to "go global in minutes" is especially valuable for businesses looking to reach customers in new countries without building data centers. Other options, like speed and agility, are advantages but do not specifically address global deployment.

Amazon RDS provides a managed database service that supports MariaDB with minimal operational overhead. It handles routine database tasks such as backups, patching, and scaling, reducing the burden on users. Amazon Neptune and DynamoDB are not compatible with MariaDB, and Amazon S3 is not a relational database service.

Enforcing multi-factor authentication (MFA) for privileged users enhances account security by requiring a second form of authentication. It reduces the risk of unauthorized access, even if credentials are compromised. Removing the root account is not possible, and creating access keys for the root account or privileged users can increase security risks rather than reduce them.

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.

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.

Spot Instances offer the lowest cost for Amazon EC2 and are suitable for non-production workloads like development and testing where occasional unavailability is acceptable. Spot Instances take advantage of unused EC2 capacity at a reduced cost, making them ideal for environments that can tolerate interruptions. Reserved or On-Demand Instances would be more expensive for this scenario, and Dedicated Hosts are not cost-effective for non-production environments.

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 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.

Amazon Aurora (with PostgreSQL compatibility) and Amazon EC2 can both host PostgreSQL databases. Aurora is a managed database service that provides a fully compatible PostgreSQL environment with automated management. EC2 can also host PostgreSQL, but it requires more manual setup and maintenance. Amazon S3 and EFS do not host databases, and Amazon OpenSearch Service is intended for search and analytics, not relational databases.

AWS Direct Connect provides a dedicated, low-latency, and consistent network connection between on-premises data centers and AWS. This private connection minimizes latency and improves network stability compared to a public internet connection or VPN. AWS Direct Connect is ideal for applications requiring real-time data transfer with minimal latency.

AWS Systems Manager offers the capability to automate patching for Amazon EC2 instances, including Windows instances, through Patch Manager. It can automate patching tasks, schedule updates, and apply patches based on specified baselines. AWS Organizations and Control Tower focus on account management and governance, while Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is unrelated to patch management.

AWS Direct Connect provides a dedicated private network connection from on-premises data centers directly to the AWS Cloud, bypassing the public internet. This setup is ideal for reducing network costs, increasing bandwidth throughput, and providing a more consistent network experience compared to standard internet connections. Other services, such as Amazon VPC, relate to networking but do not establish a private network connection from on-premises to AWS.

AWS Snowball Edge is designed for large-scale data transfer tasks, allowing companies to transport significant amounts of data (up to petabytes) from their data centers to AWS without relying on the internet. With the ability to transfer 100 TB of data securely and efficiently, Snowball Edge is the ideal choice for this use case. AWS Snowcone is for smaller transfers, and AWS Data Exchange and DataSync are not designed for physical data transport.

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.

AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog that offers third-party software, including security solutions like intrusion detection systems, which can be deployed directly within an AWS environment. By using AWS Marketplace, companies can find, purchase, and deploy ISP intrusion detection systems or other security tools that meet their specific requirements. Other services, such as AWS Security Hub and Quick Starts, do not directly provide third-party application deployment.

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.

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 Outposts extend AWS infrastructure and services to on-premises locations, providing low-latency access to AWS resources and ensuring data residency. This service is suitable for hybrid environments that require the same AWS services and infrastructure to be available locally. Wavelength, Transit Gateway, and Ground Station do not specifically address low-latency access to on-premises resources or data residency.

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.

One of the benefits of cloud computing is that it enables customers to increase speed and agility in developing, testing, and launching applications. Cloud computing provides on-demand access to a variety of IT resources, such as compute, storage, networking, databases, and analytics, without requiring upfront investments or long-term commitments. Customers can provision and release resources in minutes, scale up and down as needed, and experiment with new technologies and features. This allows customers to accelerate their innovation cycles, deliver faster time-to-market, and respond to changing customer needs and demands

 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.

AWS Direct Connect is a service that provides a dedicated network connection from on premises to the AWS Cloud. It can reduce network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than internet-based connections. It can also provide low latency for applications that require real-time data transfer4. Amazon VPC is a service that provides a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where users can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that they define. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a service that provides a scalable and durable stream of data records for real-time data processing. Amazon OpenSearch Service is a service that provides a fully managed, scalable, and secure search and analytics solution that is compatible with Elasticsearch.

 AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a service that enables you to manage access to AWS services and resources securely. You can use IAM to perform the following actions:

Control access to AWS service APIs and to other specific resources: You can create users, groups, roles, and policies that define who can access which AWS resources and how. You can also use IAM to grant temporary access to users or applications that need to perform certain tasks on your behalf3

Protect the AWS environment using multi-factor authentication (MFA): You can enable MFA for your IAM users and root user to add an extra layer of security to your AWS account. MFA requires users to provide a unique authentication code from an approved device or SMS text message, in addition to their user name and password, when they sign in to AWS4

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 Cognito is a service that enables you to add user sign-up and sign-in features to your web and mobile applications. Amazon Cognito also supports social and enterprise identity federation, which means you can allow your users to sign in with their existing credentials from identity providers such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. Amazon Cognito integrates with OpenID Connect (OIDC) and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 protocols to facilitate the authentication and authorization process. Amazon Cognito also provides advanced security features, such as adaptive authentication, user verification, and multi-factor authentication (MFA). References: Amazon Cognito, What is Amazon Cognito?

 Amazon Aurora is a relational database service that is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL engines. It delivers up to five times the performance of MySQL and up to three times the performance of PostgreSQL. It also provides high availability, scalability, security, and durability1

The solution that achieves the goal of having Amazon EC2 instances share the same geographic area but use multiple independent underlying power sources is to use EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones in the same AWS Region. An Availability Zone is a physically isolated location within an AWS Region that has its own power, cooling, and network connectivity. An AWS Region is a geographical area that consists of two or more Availability Zones. By using multiple Availability Zones, users can increase the fault tolerance and resilience of their applications, as well as reduce latency for end users3. Using EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone, multiple AWS Regions, or the same edge location and the same AWS Region would not meet the requirement of having multiple independent power sources.

 A and B are correct because AWS CodeCommit is the AWS service that provides a fully managed source control service that hosts secure Git-based repositories1, and AWS CodeDeploy is the AWS service that automates code deployments to any instance, including Amazon EC2 instances and servers running on-premises2. These two services can be used together to store source code and update the running software when the code changes. C is incorrect because Amazon DynamoDB is the AWS service that provides a fully managed NoSQL database service that supports key-value and document data models3. It is not related to storing source code or updating software. D is incorrect because Amazon S3 is the AWS service that provides object storage through a web service interface4. It can be used to store source code, but it does not provide source control features or update software. E is incorrect because Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is the AWS service that allows users to run, scale, and secure Docker container applications. It can be used to deploy containerized software, but it does not store source code or update software.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads. Based on five pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization — the Framework provides a consistent approach for customers and partners to evaluate architectures, and implement designs that can scale over time. Operational excellence is one of the pillars of the Framework, and it focuses on running and monitoring systems to deliver business value, and continually improving processes and procedures.

Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive is the lowest-cost storage class in the cloud. It is designed for long-term data archiving that is rarely accessed. It offers a retrieval time of 12 hours and a durability of 99.999999999% (11 9’s). It is ideal for data that must be retained for 7 years or longer to meet regulatory compliance requirements.

AWS Auto Scaling is the AWS service that allows users to optimize the number of EC2 instances based on the usage pattern, as it automatically adjusts the capacity to maintain steady and predictable performance at the lowest possible cost. Spot Instances are a way to reduce the cost ofEC2 instances by bidding on unused EC2 capacity, but they are not suitable for applications that require steady and reliable performance. Reserved Instances are a way to reduce the cost of EC2 instances by committing to a certain amount of usage for a period of time, but they are not flexible to adjust to the usage pattern. AWS CloudFormation is a way to automate the creation and management of AWS resources, but it does not optimize the number of EC2 instances based on the usage pattern. These concepts are explained in the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials course3.

 The combination of AWS services that the application can use to migrate to a microservices-based application are Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) and AWS Lambda. Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service that enables customers to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. The application can use Amazon SQS to send, store, and receive messages between the microservices, ensuring that each message is processed only once and in the right order. AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that allows customers to run code without provisioning or managing servers. The application can use AWS Lambda to create and deploy microservices as functions that are triggered by events, such as messages from Amazon SQS. AWS Migration Hub, AWS AppSync, and AWS Application Migration Service are not the best services to use for migrating to a microservices-based application. AWS Migration Hub is a service that provides a single location to track the progress of application migrations across multiple AWS and partner solutions. AWS AppSync is a service that simplifies the development of GraphQL APIs for real-time and offline data synchronization. AWS Application Migration Service is a service that enables customers to migrate their on-premises applications to AWS without making any changes to the applications, servers, or databases.

AWS Organizations is a service that helps you centrally manage and govern your AWS environment. You can use AWS Organizations to create multiple accounts for different business units, and group them into organizational units (OUs) that reflect your organizational structure1. By doing so, you can separate and track costs for each business unit using the account ID as a cost allocation tag2. You can also use AWSOrganizations to apply policies and controls to your accounts, such as service control policies (SCPs) and tag policies1.

The other options are not suitable for meeting the requirements with the least operational overhead. Using a spreadsheet or a DynamoDB table to control and record costs for each business unit would require manual data entry and maintenance, which is prone to errors and inconsistencies. Using the AWS Billing console to assign owners to resources and track costs would also require manual tagging of each resource, which is time-consuming and inefficient.

1: What Is AWS Organizations? - AWS Organizations

2: Cost Tagging and Reporting with AWS Organizations | AWS Cloud Financial Management

AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is a managed service that enables you to easily encrypt your data. AWS KMS provides you with centralized control of the encryption keys used to protect your data. You can use AWS KMS to encrypt data in Amazon RDS and Amazon EBS volumes12

 The AWS service or feature that the company should use to categorize and track AWS usage cost based on business categories is cost allocation tags. Cost allocation tags are key-value pairs that users can attach to AWS resources to organize and track their AWS costs. Users can use cost allocation tags to filter and group their AWS costs by categories such as project, department, environment, or application. Users can also use cost allocation tags to generate detailed billing reports that show the costs associated with each tag3. AWS Organizations, AWS Security Hub, and AWS Cost and Usage Report are other AWS services or features that can help users with different aspects of their AWS usage, such as managing multiple accounts, monitoring security issues, or analyzing billing data, but they do not enable users to categorize and track AWS costs based on business categories.

 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.

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

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 Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy to prepare and load data for analytics. AWS Glue can discover data sources, transform data, and make it available for analysis by using data catalogs and workflows. Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud that enables customers to analyze data using standard SQL and existing business intelligence tools. Amazon Redshift can also integrate with other AWS services to visualize and transform data. Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides a simple, scalable, fully managed elastic NFS file system for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. Amazon QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered business intelligence service that makes it easy to deliver insights to everyone in an organization. Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB) is a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log owned by a central trusted authority.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) is a managed and automated service that helps you migrate your databases from your on-premises or cloud environment to AWS, either as a one-time migration or as a continuous replication. AWS DMS supports migration between 20-plus database and analytics engines, such as PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon S3. AWS DMS also provides schema conversion and validation tools, as well as monitoring and security features. AWS DMS is a cost-effective and reliable solution for database migration, as you only pay for the compute resources and additional log storage used during the migration process, and you can minimize the downtime and data loss with Multi-AZ and ongoing replication12

To migrate a PostgreSQL database from on-premises to Amazon RDS using AWS DMS, you need to perform the following steps:

Create an AWS DMS replication instance in the same AWS Region as your target Amazon RDS PostgreSQL DB instance. The replication instance is a server that runs the AWS DMS replication software and connects to your source and target endpoints. You can choose the instance type, storage, and network settings based on your migration requirements3

Create a source endpoint that points to your on-premises PostgreSQL database. You need to provide the connection details, such as the server name, port, database name, user name, and password. You also need to specify the engine name as postgres and the SSL mode as required4

Create a target endpoint that points to your Amazon RDS PostgreSQL DB instance. You need to provide the connection details, such as the server name, port, database name, user name, and password. You also need to specify the engine name as postgres and the SSL mode as verify-full.

Create a migration task that defines the migration settings and options, such as the replication instance, the source and target endpoints, the migration type (full load, full load and change data capture, or change data capture only), the table mappings, the task settings, and the task monitoring role. You can also use the AWS Schema Conversion Tool (AWS SCT) to convert your source schema to the target schema and apply it to the target endpoint before or after creating the migration task.

Start the migration task and monitor its progress and status using the AWS DMS console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS DMS API. You can also use AWS CloudFormation to automate the creation and execution of the migration task.

The other options are not suitable for migrating a PostgreSQL database from on-premises to Amazon RDS. Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool is a tool that helps you assess your readiness for cloud adoption based on six dimensions: business, people, process, platform, operations, and security. It does not perform any database migration tasks. AWS Migration Hub is a service that helps you track and manage the progress of your application migrations across multiple AWS and partner services, such as AWS DMS, AWS Application Migration Service, AWS Server Migration Service, and CloudEndure Migration. It does not perform any database migration tasks itself, but rather integrates with other migration services. AWS Application Migration Service is a service that helps you migrate your applications from your on-premises or cloud environment to AWS without making any changes to the applications, their architecture, or the migrated servers. It does not support database migration, but rather replicates your servers as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and launches them as EC2 instances on AWS.

 AWS Database Migration Service, What is AWS Database Migration Service?, Working with an AWS DMS replication instance, Creating source and target endpoints for PostgreSQL, [Creating a target endpoint for Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL], [Creating a migration task for AWS DMS], [AWS Schema Conversion Tool], [Starting a migration task for AWS DMS], [AWS CloudFormation], [Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool], [AWS Migration Hub], [AWS Application Migration Service]

Amazon Personalize is an AWS service that helps developers quickly build and deploy a custom recommendation engine with real-time personalization and user segmentation1. It uses machine learning (ML) to analyze customer data and provide relevant recommendations based on their preferences, behavior, and context.Amazon Personalize can be used for various use cases such as optimizing recommendations, targeting customers more accurately, maximizing the value of unstructured text, and promoting items using business rules1.

The other options are not suitable for providing product recommendations based on customer data. Amazon Polly is a service that converts text into lifelike speech. Amazon Comprehend is a service that uses natural language processing (NLP) toextract insights from text and documents. Amazon Rekognition is a service that uses computer vision (CV) to analyze images and videos for faces, objects, scenes, and activities.

1: Cloud Products - Amazon Web Services (AWS)

2: Recommender System – Amazon Personalize – Amazon Web Services

3: Top 25 AWS Services List 2023 - GeeksforGeeks

4: AWS to Azure services comparison - Azure Architecture Center

5: The 25+ Best AWS Cost Optimization Tools (Updated 2023) - CloudZero

6: Amazon Polly – Text-to-Speech Service - AWS

7: Natural Language Processing - Amazon Comprehend - AWS

8: Image and Video Analysis - Amazon Rekognition - AWS

 The AWS account root user is the email address that you use to sign up for AWS. The root user has complete access to all AWS services and resources in the account. The root user can perform tasks that only the root user can do, such as changing the AWS Support plan, closing the account, and restoring IAM user permissions34

 The AWS service that meets the requirements of providing a graph database service that is scalable and highly available is Amazon Neptune. Amazon Neptune is a fast, reliable, and fully managed graph database service that supports property graph and RDF graph models. Amazon Neptune is designed to store billions of relationships and query the graph with milliseconds latency. Amazon Neptune also offers high availability and durability by replicating six copies of the data across three Availability Zones and continuously backing up the data to Amazon S35. Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DynamoDB are other AWS services that provide relational or non-relational database solutions, but they do not support graph database models.

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 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 Pricing Calculator lets customers explore AWS services, and create an estimate for the cost of their use cases on AWS. AWS Pricing Calculator can also compare the costs of different AWS Regions and configurations. Cost Explorer is a tool that enables customers to visualize, understand, and manage their AWS costs and usage over time. AWS Budgets gives customers the ability to set custom budgets that alert them when their costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) their budgeted amount. AWS Purchase Order Management is a feature that allows customers to pay for their AWS invoices using purchase orders.

B is correct because AWS Enterprise Support is the AWS Support plan that provides concierge service, a designated AWS technical account manager (TAM), and technical support that is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This plan is designed for customers who run mission-critical workloads on AWS and need the highest level of support. A is incorrect because AWS Basic Support is the AWS Support plan that provides customer service and support for billing and account issues, service limit increases, and technical support for a limited set of AWS services. It does not provide concierge service, a designated TAM, or 24/7 technical support. C is incorrect because AWS Business Support is the AWS Support plan that provides customer service and support for billing and account issues, service limit increases, and technical support for all AWS services, as well as access to AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Support API. It does not provide concierge service or a designated TAM. D is incorrect because AWS Developer Support is the AWS Support plan that provides customer service and support for billing and account issues, service limit increases, and technicalsupport for all AWS services, as well as access to AWS Trusted Advisor. It does not provide concierge service, a designated TAM, or 24/7 technical support.

 Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. You can start with just a few hundred gigabytes of data and scale to a petabyte or more. This enables you to use your data to acquire new insights for your business and customers. Amazon Redshift is a relational database management system (RDBMS), so it is compatible with other RDBMS applications. You can use standard SQL to query the data.

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.

 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.

AWS Migration Hub is a service that provides a single location to track the progress of application migrations across multiple AWS and partner solutions. It allows you to choose the AWS and partner migration tools that best fit your needs, while providing visibility into the status of migrations across your portfolio of applications1. AWS Migration Hub supports migration status updates from the following tools: AWS Application Migration Service, AWS Database Migration Service, CloudEndure Migration, Server Migration Service, and Migrate for Compute Engine1.

The other options are not correct for the following reasons:

AWS Application Discovery Service is a service that helps you plan your migration projects by automatically identifying servers, applications, and dependencies in your on-premises data centers2. It does not track the progress of application migrations, but rather provides information to help you plan and scope your migrations.

AWS Application Migration Service is a service that helps you migrate and modernize applications from any source infrastructure to AWS with minimal downtime and disruption3. It is one of the migration tools that can send status updates to AWS Migration Hub, but it is not the service that provides a single location to track the progress of application migrations.

AWS Service Catalog is a service that allows you to create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS4. It does not track the progress of application migrations, but rather helps you manage the provisioning and governance of your IT services.

1: What Is AWS Migration Hub? - AWS Migration Hub

2: What Is AWS Application Discovery Service? - AWS Application Discovery Service

3: App Migration Tool - AWS Application Migration Service - AWS

4: What Is AWS Service Catalog? - AWS Service Catalog

AWS Professional Services is a team of experts that help customers achieve their desired outcomes using the AWS Cloud. One of the benefits that AWS Professional Services provides is advisory solutions for AWS adoption, which include guidance on cloud strategy, architecture, migration, and innovation2. Management of the ongoing security of user data, technical support 24 hours a day, 7days a week, and monitoring of monthly billing costs in AWS accounts are not benefits that AWSProfessional Services provides, as they are either the responsibility of the customer or the features of other AWS services or support plans3

Migration Evaluator is an AWS service that provides a customized assessment of your current on-premises environment and helps you build a data-driven business case for migration to AWS. Migration Evaluator collects and analyzes data from your on-premises servers, such as CPU, memory, disk, network, and utilization metrics, and compares them with the most cost-effective AWS alternatives. Migration Evaluator also helps you understand your existing software licenses and running costs, and provides recommendations for Bring Your Own License (BYOL) and License Included (LI) options in AWS. Migration Evaluator generates a detailed report that shows your projected running costs in the AWS Cloud, along with potential savings and benefits. You can use this report to support your decision-making and planning for cloud migration. References: Cloud Business Case & Migration Plan - Amazon Migration Evaluator - AWS, Getting started with Migration Evaluator

This is the pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework that represents the philosophy of testing failure scenarios regularly and validating the understanding of the impact of potential failures. The operational excellence pillar covers the best practices for designing, running, monitoring, and improving systems in the AWS Cloud. Testing failure scenarios is one of the ways to improve the system’s resilience, reliability, and recovery. You can learn more about the operational excellence pillar from this whitepaper or this digital course.

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 shared responsibility model describes 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 hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run AWS services. The customer is responsible for security in the cloud, which includes the customer data, applications, operating systems, and network and firewall configurations. Therefore, updating the guest operating system on Amazon EC2 instances is the customer’s responsibility2

Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is ideal for quick, ad-hoc querying but it can also handle complex analysis, including large joins, window functions, and arrays. Athena scales automatically—executing queries in parallel—so results are fast, even with large datasets and complex queries. Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service that can run complex analytic queries against structured and semi-structured data using standard SQL. However, it is not a serverless service and requires provisioning and managing clusters of nodes. AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy to prepare and load your data for analytics. However, it is not a query service and does not support standard SQL. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a service that enables you to build custom applications that process or analyze streaming data for specialized needs. However, it is not a query service and does not support standard SQL.

AWS Application Discovery Service is a service that helps you plan your migration to the AWS Cloud by collecting usage and configuration data about your on-premises servers and databases. This data includes information such as the hostname, IP address, and MAC address of each server, as well as the performance metrics, network connections, and processes running on them. You can use AWS Application Discovery Service to discover your on-premises inventory, map the dependencies between servers and applications, and estimate the cost and effort of migrating to AWS. You can also export the data to other AWS services, such as AWS Migration Hub and AWS Database Migration Service, to support your migration tasks. AWS Application Discovery Service offers two ways of performing discovery: agentless discovery and agent-based discovery. Agentless discovery uses a virtual appliance that you deploy on your VMware vCenter to collect data from your virtual machines and hosts. Agent-based discovery uses an agent that you install on each of your physical or virtual servers to collect data. You can choose the method that best suits your environment and needs. AWS DataSync is a service that helps you transfer data between your on-premises storage and AWS storage services, such as Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, and Amazon FSx for Windows File Server. AWS DataSync does not collect information about your on-premises infrastructure, but rather focuses on optimizing the data transfer speed, security, and reliability. AWS Application Migration Service is a service that helps you migrate your applications from your on-premises or cloud environment to AWS without making any changes to the applications, their architecture, or the migrated servers. AWS Application Migration Service does not collect information about your on-premises infrastructure, but rather uses a lightweight agent to replicate your servers as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and launch them as EC2 instances on AWS. AWS Database Migration Service is a service that helps you migrate your databases from your on-premises or cloud environment to AWS, either as a one-time migration or as a continuous replication. AWS Database MigrationService does not collect information about your on-premises infrastructure, but rather uses a source and a target endpoint to connect to your databases and transfer the data. References: AWS Application Discovery Service, AWS DataSync, AWS Application Migration Service, [AWS Database Migration Service]

Amazon EC2 usage is calculated by either the hour or the second based on the size of the instance, operating system, and the AWS Region where the instances are launched. Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance, from the time an instance is launched until it’s terminated or stopped. Each partial instance-hour consumed is billed per-second for Linuxinstances and as a full hour for all other instance types1. Therefore, the customer will be billed for 3 hours and 6 minutes for running an On-Demand Amazon Linux EC2 instance for 3 hours, 5 minutes, and 6 seconds. References: Understand Amazon EC2 instance-hours billing

AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) is a tool that helps organizations understand how cloud adoption transforms the way they work, and it provides structure to identify and address gaps in skills and processes. Applying the AWS CAF in your organization results in an actionable plan that helps you prepare the cloud environment, enable your staff with new skills, and migrate your applications. AWS Pricing Calculator is a tool that helps you estimate the cost of AWS services for your use cases and compare the cost of different AWS service configurations. AWS Well-Architected Framework is a tool that helps you review and improve your cloud-based architectures and better understand the business impact of your design decisions. AWS Budgets is a tool that helps you plan your service usage, service costs, and instance reservations, and track how close your plan is to your budgeted amount.

AWS performs some tasks automatically to help you manage and secure your AWS resources. One of these tasks is patching Amazon EC2 instances. AWS provides two options for patching your EC2 instances: managed instances and patch baselines. Managed instances are a group of EC2 instances or on-premises servers that you can manage using AWS Systems Manager. Patch baselines define the patches that AWS Systems Manager applies to your instances. You can use AWS Systems Manager to automate the process of patching your instances based on a schedule or a maintenance window.

The correct answer is B. Amazon Inspector.

Amazon Inspector is an automated vulnerability management service that continually scans AWS workloads for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure.Amazon Inspector automatically discovers workloads, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and Lambda functions, and scans them for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure12.

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that monitors your AWS accounts and workloads for malicious or unauthorized activity.Amazon GuardDuty does not scan for software vulnerabilities, but rather analyzes AWS CloudTrail, Amazon VPC Flow Logs, and DNS logs to detect threats such as compromised credentials, backdoors, or crypto mining3.

AWS Security Hub is a security and compliance service that aggregates and prioritizes security findings from multiple AWS services and partner solutions.AWSSecurity Hub does not scan for software vulnerabilities, but rather provides a comprehensive view of your security posture across your AWS accounts4.

AWS Shield is a managed service that protects your web applications and network resources from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.AWS Shield does not scan for software vulnerabilities, but rather provides detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks at the network and application layers5.

Security groups are the AWS service or feature that can be used to apply security rules to specific Amazon EC2 instances. Security groups are virtual firewalls that control the inbound and outbound traffic for one or more instances. Customers can create security groups and add rules that reflect the role of the instance that is associated with the security group. For example, a web server instance needs security group rules that allow inbound HTTP and HTTPS access, while a database instance needs rules that allow access for the type of database12. Security groups are stateful, meaning that the responses to allowed inbound traffic are alsoallowed, regardless of the outbound rules1. Customers can assign multiple security groups to an instance, and the rules from each security group are effectively aggregated to create one set of rules1.

Network ACLs are another AWS service or feature that can be used to control the traffic for a subnet. Network ACLs are stateless, meaning that they do not track the traffic that they allow. Therefore, customers must add rules for both inbound and outbound traffic3. Network ACLs are applied at the subnet level, not at the instance level.

AWS Trusted Advisor is an AWS service that provides best practice recommendations for security, performance, cost optimization, and fault tolerance. AWS Trusted Advisor does not apply security rules to specific Amazon EC2 instances, but it can help customers identify security gaps and improve their security posture4.

AWS WAF is an AWS service that helps protect web applications from common web exploits, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and bot attacks. AWS WAF does not apply security rules to specific Amazon EC2 instances, but it can be integrated with other AWS services, such as Amazon CloudFront, Amazon API Gateway, and Application Load Balancer.

The security best practices that should be followed are A and E.

A. Grant the developer access to only the AWS resources needed to perform the job. This is an example of the principle of least privilege, which means giving the minimum permissions necessary to achieve a task. This reduces the risk of unauthorized access, data leakage, or accidental damage to AWS resources.You canuse AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to create users, groups, roles, and policies that grant fine-grained access to AWS resources12.

E. Ensure the account password policy requires a minimum length. This is a basic security measure that helps prevent brute-force attacks or guessing of passwords. A longer password is harder to crack than a shorter one.You can use IAM to configure apassword policy that enforces a minimum password length, as well as other requirements such as complexity, expiration, and history34.

B. Share the AWS account root user credentials with the developer. This is a bad practice that should be avoided. The root user has full access to all AWS resources and services, and can perform sensitive actions such as changing billing information, closing the account, or deleting all resources. Sharing the root user credentials exposes your account to potential compromise or misuse.You should never share your root user credentials with anyone, and use them only for account administration tasks5.

C. Add the developer to the administrator’s group in IAM. This is also a bad practice that should be avoided. The administrator’s group has full access to all AWS resources and services, which is more than what a developer needs to perform their job. Adding the developer to the administrator’s group violates the principle of least privilege and increases the risk of unauthorized access, data leakage, or accidental damage to AWS resources.You should create a custom group for the developer that grants only the necessary permissions for their role12.

D. Configure a password policy that ensures the developer’s password cannot be changed. This is another bad practice that should be avoided. Preventing the developer from changing their password reduces their ability to protect their credentials and comply with security policies. For example, if the developer’s password is compromised, they cannot change it to prevent further unauthorized access. Or if the company requires periodic password rotation, they cannot update their password to meet this requirement.You should allow the developer to change their password as needed, and enforce a password policy that sets reasonable rules for password management34.

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.

 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 Business Support is the minimum recommended tier for users who have production workloads on AWS. AWS Business Support provides 24x7 access to cloud support engineers via phone, chat, or email, as well as a guaranteed response time of less than one hour for urgent issues. AWS Business Support also includes access to AWS Trusted Advisor, a tool that provides real-time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices4.

 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.

AWS Artifact is your go-to, central resource for compliance-related information that matters to you. It 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. Agreements available in AWS Artifact include the Business Associate Addendum (BAA) and the Nondisclosure Agreement (NDA). You can use AWS Artifact to download the applicable report for AWS security controls and provide it to the auditor.

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

AWS Budgets is a service that helps you plan your service usage, service costs, and instance reservations, and track how close your plan is to your budgeted amount. You can set custom budgets that alert you when you exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budgeted thresholds. You can also use AWS Budgets to set a maximum spending limit on AWS services each month and set up alerts for when you reach your spending limit. Cost Explorer is a service that enables you to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. You can use Cost Explorer to view charts and graphs that show how your costs are trending, identify areas that need further inquiry, and see the impact of your cost management actions. However, Cost Explorer does not allow you to set a maximum spending limit or alerts for your AWS services. AWS Trusted Advisor is a service that provides you real time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices, including security and performance. It can help you monitor for cost optimization opportunities, such as unused or underutilized resources, but it does not allow you to set a maximum spending limit or alerts for your AWS services. Service Quotas is a service that enables you to view and manage your quotas, also referred to as limits, from a central location. Quotas, also referred to as limits, are the maximum number of resources that you can create in your AWS account. However, Service Quotas does not allow you to set a maximum spending limit or alerts for your AWS services.

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 Inspector is the AWS service that can be used to perform vulnerability scans on AWS EC2 instances for software vulnerabilities automatically in a periodic fashion. Amazon Inspector automatically discovers EC2 instances and scans them for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure. Amazon Inspector uses AWS Systems Manager (SSM) and the SSM Agent to collect information about the software application inventory of the EC2 instances. This data is then scanned by Amazon Inspector for software vulnerabilities12. Amazon Inspector also integrates with other AWS services, such as AmazonEventBridge and AWS Security Hub, to automate discovery, expedite vulnerability routing, and shorten mean time to remediate (MTTR) vulnerabilities2.

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances are instances that use spare EC2 capacity that is available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. You can use Spot Instances for various stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications such as big data, containerized workloads, high-performance computing (HPC), and test & development workloads. Spot Instances are ideal for workloads that can be interrupted, such as batch image rendering applications1. On-Demand Instances are instances that let you pay for compute capacity by the hour or second (minimum of 60 seconds) with no long-term commitments. This frees you from the costs and complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware and transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs2. Reserved Instances are instances that provide you with a significant discount (up to 75%) compared to On-Demand Instance pricing. In exchange, you select a term and make an upfront payment to reserve a certain amount of compute capacity for that term3. Dedicated Instances are instances that run in a VPC on hardware that’s dedicated to a single customer. Your Dedicated Instances are physically isolated at the host hardware level from instances that belong to other AWS accounts4.

AWS Business Support is the most cost-effective AWS Support plan that provides chat access to a cloud support engineer 24/7. AWS Business Support also offers phone and email support, as well as a response time of less than one hour for urgent issues. AWS Business Support does not include access to infrastructure event management, which is a feature of AWS Enterprise Support. AWS Enterprise Support is more expensive and provides additional benefits, such as a technical account manager, a support concierge, and a response time of less than 15 minutes for critical issues. AWS Developer Support and AWS Basic Support do not provide chat access to a cloud support engineer. AWS Developer Support provides email support and a response time of less than 12 hours for general guidance issues. AWS Basic Support provides customer service and account support, as well as access to forums and documentation1

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. AWS Config can help you determine when an EBS volume was removed from an EC2 instance by providing a timeline of configuration changes and compliance status. AWS Trusted Advisor, Amazon Timestream, and Amazon QuickSight do not provide the same level of configuration tracking and auditing as AWS Config. Source: AWS Config

 Establishing an AWS Direct Connect connection between the VPC and the company’s on-premises network is the action that the company should take to meet the requirement of having a dedicated connection between the VPC and the company’s on-premises network. AWS Direct Connect is a service that lets you establish a dedicated network connection between your network and one of the AWS Direct Connect locations. Using AWS Direct Connect, you can create a private connection between AWS and your datacenter, office, or colocation environment, which can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than internet-based connections. Establishing a VPN connection between the VPC and the company’s on-premises network is an action that the company can take to create a secure and encrypted connection between the VPC and the company’s on-premises network, but it is not a dedicated connection, as it uses the public internet as the transport mechanism. Attaching an internet gateway to the VPC and using the AWS public endpoints for connectivity is an action that the company can take to enable communication between the VPC and the internet, but it is not a dedicated connection, as it also uses the public internet as the transport mechanism. Configuring Amazon Connect to provide connectivity between the VPC and the company’s on-premises network is not an action that the company can take, because Amazon Connect is a service that lets you set up and manage a contact center in the cloud, but it does not provide network connectivity between the VPC and the company’s on-premises network.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a set of six pillars and lenses that help cloud architects design and run workloads in the cloud. The six pillars are: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability. Each pillar has a set of design principles and best practices that guide the architectural decisions. High availability is not a separate pillar, but a quality that can be achieved by applying the principles of the reliability pillar. Going global in minutes and continuous development are not pillars of the framework, but possible benefits of using AWS services and following the framework’s recommendations. References: AWS Well-Architected - Build secure, efficient cloud applications, AWS Well-Architected Framework, The 6 Pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework

Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances are instances that let you pay for compute capacity by the hour or second (minimum of 60 seconds) with no long-term commitments. This frees you from the costs and complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware and transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs. On-Demand Instances are suitable for applications with short-term, irregular, or unpredictable workloads that cannot be interrupted, such as periodic applications that run for a few hours most days, but run for 8 hours a day for a week at the end of each month2. Amazon EC2 Standard Reserved Instances are instances that provide you with a significant discount (up to 75%) compared to On-Demand Instance pricing. In exchange, you select a term and make an upfront payment to reserve a certain amount of compute capacity for that term. Reserved Instances are suitable for applications with steady state or predictable usage that require reserved capacity3. AWS Wavelength is a service that enables developers to build applications that deliver ultra-low latency to mobile devices and users by deploying AWS compute and storage at the edge of the 5G network. Wavelength is suitable for applications that requiresingle-digit millisecond latencies, such as game and live video streaming, machine learning inference at the edge, and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR). Application Load Balancer is a service that operates at the request level (layer 7) and distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, Lambda functions, and IP addresses. Application Load Balancer is suitable for applications that need advanced routing capabilities, such as microservices or container-based architectures.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a service that allows you to deploy and manage applications on AWS without manually creating and configuring the required resources, such as EC2 instances, load balancers, security groups, databases, and more. AWS Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the provisioning, scaling, load balancing, health monitoring, and updating of your application, while giving you full control over the underlying AWS resources if needed. AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports a variety of platforms and languages, such as Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker. You can use the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, the AWS SDKs, or the AWS Elastic Beanstalk API to create and manage your applications. You can also use AWS CodeStar, AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, and AWS CodePipeline to integrate AWS Elastic Beanstalk with your development and deployment workflows12

Reducing Costs with AWS Cloud:

Capacity Adjustment (B):

Elasticity: AWS allows you to scale your resources up or down based on demand, which means you only pay for what you use. This reduces the cost of over-provisioning resources.

Auto Scaling: Automatically adjusts compute capacity based on usage, ensuring cost efficiency.

Eliminating On-Premises Costs (E):

No Infrastructure Maintenance: By using AWS, businesses do not need to invest in physical infrastructure or handle maintenance, reducing both capital and operational expenditures.

Managed Services: AWS offers managed services that reduce the need for in-house technical staff to manage and maintain infrastructure.

AWS Cloud Economics Center

AWS Benefits

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a fully managed, scalable, and serverless NFS (Network File System) file system specifically designed for use with AWS services and on-premises resources. It enables companies to create and configure file systems that can be accessed from multiple Amazon EC2instances simultaneously, making it ideal for use cases that require shared file storage for AWS compute services.

Why Amazon EFS Fits the Requirements:

Managed Service: Amazon EFS is a fully managed file storage service that simplifies the process of setting up and managing NFS file systems.

Scalability and Elasticity: EFS automatically scales to accommodate the storage needs of applications, without the need to provision or manage storage capacity.

NFS Compatibility: Amazon EFS natively supports the NFSv4 protocol, making it compatible with a wide range of applications and workloads that require NFS access.

Integration with AWS Compute Services: EFS integrates seamlessly with Amazon EC2 and other AWS services, providing a shared file storage solution across multiple instances and services within the AWS cloud environment.

Why Other Options Do Not Fit:

A. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS): While EBS provides block-level storage that can be attached to individual EC2 instances, it is not a file system, nor does it provide managed NFS file storage capabilities. EBS is designed for single-instance access rather than shared file access across multiple instances.

B. AWS Storage Gateway Tape Gateway: Tape Gateway is designed for archival purposes and allows companies to store virtual tape backups in Amazon S3 or Glacier. It does not support NFS file storage and is not intended for regular compute access.

C. Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval: Amazon S3 Glacier is optimized for data archiving and long-term storage of infrequently accessed data, but it does not provide NFS file system capabilities, nor is it suitable for high-performance access needs associated with compute services.

For more details, you can refer to theAWS Cloud Practitioner Essentialscontent, specifically the modules onStorage Serviceswhere Amazon EFS is covered as the managed NFS file storage solution offered by AWS.

AWS Direct Connectis a cloud service solution that makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS. This requires the use of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and a colocation facility to connect to the Direct Connect location. It provides a private, high-speed, low-latency connection that does not go over the public internet.

A. AWS VPN: Incorrect, as AWS VPN establishes secure connections over the internet and does not necessarily require a colocation facility.

B. Amazon Connect: Incorrect, as it is a cloud-based contact center service.

D. Internet Gateway: Incorrect, as it is a horizontally scaled, redundant, and highly available VPC component that allows communication between instances in your VPC and the internet.

AWS Cloud References:

AWS Direct Connect

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.

The correct answer is B because Amazon ElastiCache is a service that provides in-memory data storage. Amazon ElastiCache is a fully managed, scalable, and high-performance service that supports two popular open-source in-memory engines: Redis and Memcached. Amazon ElastiCache allows users to store and retrieve data from fast, low-latency, and high-throughput in-memory systems. Users can use Amazon ElastiCache to improve the performance of their applications by caching frequently accessed data, reducing database load, and enabling real-time data processing. The other options are incorrect because they are not services that provide in-memory data storage. Amazon DynamoDB is a service that provides key-value and document data storage. Amazon RDS is a service that provides relational data storage. Amazon Timestream is a service that provides time series data storage. Reference: Amazon ElastiCache FAQs

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

Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora are both managed AWS services that support the PostgreSQL database engine. Amazon RDS makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale PostgreSQL deployments on the cloud, while Amazon Aurora is a cloud-native database engine that is compatible with PostgreSQL and offers higher performance and availability. Amazon Athena is a serverless query service that does not support PostgreSQL, but can analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Amazon EC2 is a compute service that allows users to launch virtual machines, but does not provide any database management features. Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service that is not compatible with PostgreSQL, but offers fast and consistent performance at any scale. References: Hosted PostgreSQL - Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL - AWS, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL - Amazon Relational Database Service, AWS PostgreSQL: Managed or Self-Managed? - NetApp, AWS Announces Amazon Aurora Supports PostgreSQL 12 - InfoQ, Amazon Aurora vs PostgreSQL | What are the differences? - StackShare

AWS CodeDeployis a fully managed deployment service that automates software deployments to a variety of compute services such as Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and on-premises servers. CodeDeploy makes it easy to release new features, helps avoid downtime during application deployment, and handles the complexity of updating applications in a scalable and reliable manner.

Why other options are not suitable:

A. Amazon AppFlow: A service to automate data flows between AWS and SaaS applications, not for application deployment.

C. AWS PrivateLink: A service to securely access AWS services from your virtual private cloud (VPC), not related to application deployments.

D. Amazon EKS Distro: A Kubernetes distribution for running Kubernetes clusters, not specifically designed for automated deployments.

Amazon GuardDuty is a service that provides intelligent threat detection and continuous monitoring for the AWS environment. It analyzes network and account activity using machine learning and threat intelligence to identify potential security threats, such as unauthorized access, compromised credentials, malicious hosts, and reconnaissance activities. It also generates detailed and actionable findings that can be viewed on the AWS Management Console or sent to other AWS services, such as Amazon CloudWatch Events and AWS Lambda, for further analysis or remediation. Amazon GuardDuty OverviewAWS Certified Cloud Practitioner - aws.amazon.com

The correct answer is C because Amazon QuickSight is an AWS service that will provide the dashboards and charts for the insights from business data. Amazon QuickSight is a fully managed, scalable, and serverless business intelligence service that enables users to create and share interactive dashboards and charts. Amazon QuickSight can connect to various data sources, such as Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and more. Amazon QuickSight also provides users with machine learning insights, such as anomaly detection, forecasting, and natural languagenarratives. The other options are incorrect because they are not AWS services that will provide the dashboards and charts for the insights from business data. Amazon Macie is an AWS service that helps users discover, classify, and protect sensitive data stored in Amazon S3. Amazon Aurora is an AWS service that provides a relational database that is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. AWS CloudTrail is an AWS service that enables users to track user activity and API usage across their AWS account. Reference: Amazon QuickSight FAQs

 The AWS service that requires the customer to patch the guest operating system is Amazon EC2. Amazon EC2 is a service that provides scalable compute capacity in the cloud, and allows customers to launch and run virtual servers, called instances, with a variety of operating systems, configurations, and specifications. The customer is responsible for patching and updating the guest operating system and any applications that run on the EC2 instances, as part of the security in the cloud. AWS Lambda, Amazon OpenSearch Service, and Amazon ElastiCache are not services that require the customer to patch the guest operating system. AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that allows customers to run code without provisioning or managing servers. Amazon OpenSearch Service is a fully managed service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale OpenSearch clusters in the AWS Cloud. Amazon ElastiCache is a fully managed service that provides in-memory data store and cache solutions, such as Redis and Memcached. These services are managed by AWS, and AWS is responsible for patching and updating the underlying infrastructure and software.

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

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a deployable Amazon EC2 instance template that is prepackaged with software and security requirements. It provides the information required to launch an instance, which is a virtual server in the cloud. You can use an AMI to launch as many instances as you need. You can also create your own custom AMIs or use AMIs shared by other AWS users1.

 One of the advantages of AWS Cloud computing is that it minimizes variable costs by leveraging economies of scale. This means that AWS can achieve lower costs per unit of computing resources by spreading the fixed costs of building and maintaining data centers over a large number of customers. As a result, AWS can offer lower and more predictable prices to its customers, who only pay for the resources they consume. Therefore, the correct answer is B. You can learn more about AWS pricing and economies of scale

AWS Storage Gateway file gateway allows companies to use protocols such as NFS and SMB to store and retrieve objects in Amazon S3. File gateway provides a seamless integration between on-premises applications and Amazon S3, and enables low-latency access to data through local caching. File gateway also supports encryption, compression, and lifecycle management of the objects in Amazon S3. For more information, see What is AWS Storage Gateway? and File Gateway.

 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.

 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.

The correct answer is B because AWS Storage Gateway is a service that should be used by the company to meet the requirements. AWS Storage Gateway is a service that connects on-premises software applications with cloud-based storage. AWS Storage Gateway supports three types of gateways: file gateway, volume gateway, and tape gateway. The tape gateway type enables users to back up and archive data to virtual tapes in AWS without changing their existing backup workflows. Users can use their existing backup applications and tape libraries to store data on virtual tapes in Amazon S3 or Amazon S3 Glacier. The other options are incorrect because they are not services that should be used by the company to meet the requirements. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is a service that provides block-level storage volumes for Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a service that enables users to run, scale, and secure containerized applications on AWS. AWS Lambda is a service that enables users to run code without provisioning or managing servers. Reference: AWS Storage Gateway FAQs

AWS Pricing Calculator is a web-based planning tool that customers can use to create estimates for their AWS use cases. They can use it to model their solutions before building them, explore the AWS service price points, and review the calculations behind their estimates. Therefore, the correct answer is A. You can learn more about AWS Pricing Calculator and how it works.

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.

The correct answers are A and B because Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS are AWS services that the company could use for the relational databases. Amazon Aurora is a relational database that is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Amazon Aurora is a fully managed, scalable, and high-performance service that offers up to five times the throughput of standard MySQL and up to three times the throughput of standard PostgreSQL. Amazon RDS is a service that enables users to set up, operate, and scale relational databases in the cloud. Amazon RDS supports six popular database engines: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, MariaDB, and Amazon Aurora. The other options are incorrect because they are not AWS services that the company could use for the relational databases. Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a document database that is compatible with MongoDB. Amazon Neptune is a graph database that supports property graph and RDF models. Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database. Reference: Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. It supports both key-value and document data models, and allows you to create tables that can store and retrieve any amount of data, and serve any level of request traffic. You can also use DynamoDB Streams to capture data modification events in DynamoDB tables.

 Amazon Rekognition is a service that provides deep learning-based image and video analysis. One of the benefits of Amazon Rekognition is the ability to detect objects that appear in pictures, such as faces, landmarks, animals, text, and scenes. This can enable applications to perform tasks such as face recognition, face verification, face comparison, face search, celebrity recognition, emotion detection, age range estimation, gender identification, facial analysis, facial expression recognition, and more. Amazon Rekognition OverviewAWS Certified Cloud Practitioner - aws.amazon.com

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 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.

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 correct answers are B and D because making data-driven decisions to determine cloud architectural design and testing systems at production scale are AWS Cloud design principles. Making data-driven decisions to determine cloud architectural design means that users should collect and analyze data from their AWS resources and applications to optimize their performance, availability, security, and cost. Testing systems at production scale means that users should simulate real-world scenarios and load conditions to validate the functionality, reliability, and scalability of their systems. The other options are incorrect because they are not AWS Cloud design principles. Paying for compute resources in advance means that users have to invest heavily in data centers and servers before they know how they will use them. This is not a cloud design principle, but rather a traditional IT model. Emphasizing manual processes to allow for changes means that users have to rely on human intervention and coordination to perform operational tasks and updates. This is not a cloud design principle, but rather a source of inefficiency and error. Refining operational procedures infrequently means that users have to stick to the same methods andpractices without adapting to the changing needs and feedback. This is not a cloud design principle, but rather a hindrance to innovation and improvement. Reference: AWS Well-Architected Framework

 AWS CloudFormation is a service that gives developers and businesses an easy way to create a collection of related AWS and third-party resources, and provision and manage them in an orderly and predictable fashion. You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS and third-party resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application.

 The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a set of best practices and guidelines for designing and operating systems in the cloud. The framework consists of five pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization. The concept of elasticity represents a system’s ability to adapt to changes in demand by scaling resources up or down automatically. Therefore, the correct answer is B. You can learn more about the AWS Well-Architected Framework and its pillars

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.

The correct answer is B because Spot Instances enable the company to optimize costs and meet the requirements. Spot Instances are spare 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 applications that can run for any duration. The other options are incorrect because they do not enable the company to optimize costs and meet the requirements. Reserved Instances are 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 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 Instances are EC2 instances that run on hardware that is dedicated to a single customer. Dedicated Instances are suitable for workloads that require regulatory compliance or data isolation. Reference: [Amazon EC2 Instance Purchasing Options]

 Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is the AWS service that the company should use to migrate its Microsoft SQL Server database management system from on premises to the AWS Cloud. Amazon RDS is a fully managed service that provides a scalable, secure, and high-performance relational database platform. Amazon RDS supports several database engines, including Microsoft SQL Server. Amazon RDS reduces the management overhead for the database environment by taking care of tasks such as provisioning, patching, backup, recovery, andmonitoring. For more information, see What is Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)? and Amazon RDS for SQL Server.

The correct answers are A and C because patching AWS network devices and providing physical security for compute resources are tasks that are 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 tasks that are the responsibility of the customer, according to the AWS shared responsibility model. Setting user password rules, configuring security groups, and patching the operating system of an Amazon EC2 instance are all tasks that the customer has to perform to secure their AWS environment. Reference: AWS Shared Responsibility Model

The correct answers are A and B because Service Quotas console and AWS Trusted Advisor are AWS services or tools that can report on the quotas so that the company can improve the reliability of the application. Service Quotas console is an AWS tool that enables users to view and manage their quotas for AWS services from a central location. Users can use Service Quotas console to request quota increases, track quota usage, and set up alarms for approaching quota limits. AWS Trusted Advisor is an AWS service that provides real-time guidance to help users follow AWS best practices for security, performance, cost optimization, and fault tolerance. 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 can report on the quotas so that the company can improve the reliability of the application. AWS Systems Manager is an AWS service that enables users to automate operational tasks, manage configuration and compliance, and monitor system health and performance. AWS Shield is an AWS service that protects users from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. AWS Cost Explorer is an AWS tool that enables users to visualize, understand, and manage their AWS costs and usage. Reference: Service Quotas, AWS Trusted Advisor FAQs

The correct answers are D and E because AWS offers high availability and AWS provides economies of scale are benefits that a company receives when it moves an on-premises production workload to AWS. High availability means that AWS has a global infrastructure that allows customers to deploy their applications and data across multiple regions and availability zones. This increases the fault tolerance and resilience of their applications and reduces the impact of failures. Economies of scale means that AWS can achieve lower variable costs than customers can get on their own. This allows customers to pay only for the resources they use and scale up or down as needed. The other options are incorrect because they are not benefits that a company receives when it moves an on-premises production workload to AWS. AWS trains the company’s staff on the use of all the AWS services is not a benefit that a company receives when it moves an on-premises production workload to AWS. AWS does provide various learning resources and training courses for customers, but it does nottrain the company’s staff on the use of all the AWS services. AWS manages all security in the cloud is not a benefit that a company receives when it moves an on-premises production workload to AWS. AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, but the customer is responsible for the security in the cloud. AWS offers free support from technical account managers (TAMs) is not a benefit that a company receives when it moves an on-premises production workload to AWS. AWS does offer support from TAMs, but only for customers who have the AWS Enterprise Support plan, which is not free. Reference: What is Cloud Computing?, [AWS Shared Responsibility Model], [AWS Support Plans]

The solution that meets the requirement of the company that runs a database on Amazon Aurora in the us-east-1 Region and has a disaster recovery requirement that the database be available inanother Region with minimal disruption to the database operations is to deploy Aurora cross-Region read replicas. Aurora cross-Region read replicas are secondary Aurora clusters that are created in a different AWS Region from the primary Aurora cluster, and are kept in sync with the primary cluster using physical replication. The company can use Aurora cross-Region read replicas to improve the availability and durability of the database, as well as to reduce the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) in case of a regional disaster. Performing an Aurora Multi-AZ deployment, creating Amazon EBS volume snapshots for Aurora and copying them to another Region, and deploying Aurora Replicas are not the best solutions for this requirement. An Aurora Multi-AZ deployment is a configuration that creates one or more Aurora Replicas within the same AWS Region as the primary Aurora cluster, and provides automatic failover in case of an Availability Zone outage. However, this does not provide cross-Region disaster recovery. Creating Amazon EBS volume snapshots for Aurora and copying them to another Region is a manual process that requires stopping the database, creating the snapshots, copying them to the target Region, and restoring them to a new Aurora cluster. This process can cause significant downtime and data loss. Deploying Aurora Replicas is a configuration that creates one or more secondary Aurora clusters within the same AWS Region as the primary Aurora cluster, and provides read scaling and high availability. However, this does not provide cross-Region disaster recovery.

VPC peering and AWS Transit Gateway are two AWS services or features that give users the ability to create a network connection between two VPCs. VPC peering is a networking connection between two VPCs that enables you to route traffic between them privately. You can create a VPC peering connection between your own VPCs, with a VPC in another AWS account, or with a VPC in a different AWS Region. Traffic between peered VPCs never traverses the public internet. VPC peering does not support transitive peering relationships, which means that if VPC A is peered with VPC B, and VPC B is peered with VPC C, then VPC A and VPC C are not automatically peered789. AWS Transit Gateway is a networking service that acts as a regional router for your VPCs and on-premises networks. You can attach up to 5,000 VPCs and VPN connections to a single transit gateway and route traffic between them. AWS Transit Gateway simplifies the management and scalability of your network architecture, as you only need to create and manage a single connection from the central transit gateway to each connected network. AWS Transit Gateway supports transitive routing, which means that any network thatis attached to the transit gateway can communicate with any other network that is attached to the same transit gateway . References: 7: VPC peering - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, 8: Connect VPCs using VPC peering - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, 9: Amazon VPC-to-Amazon VPC connectivity options - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, : [AWS Transit Gateway - Amazon Web Services], : [Connect VPCs using AWS Transit Gateway - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud], : [AWS Transit Gateway: Simplify Your Network Architecture]

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.

 Amazon QuickSight Q is a natural language query feature that lets you ask questions about your data using everyday language and get answers in seconds. You can type questions such as “What are the total sales by region?” or “How did marketing campaign A perform?” and get answers in the form of relevant visualizations, such as charts or tables. You can also use Q to drill down into details, filter data, or perform calculations. Q uses machine learning to understand your data and your intent, and provides suggestions and feedback to help you refine your questions.

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is a fully managed file server that supports Microsoft workloads and file systems, including the SMB protocol. It provides features such as user quotas, end-user file restore, and Microsoft Active Directory integration. Amazon EFS is a fully managed file system that supports the NFS protocol, not SMB. Amazon FSx for Lustre is a fully managed file system that supports high-performance computing workloads, not Microsoft workloads. Amazon EBS is a block storage service that does not provide a file system or SMB support. References: Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Amazon FSx for Lustre, Amazon EFS, Amazon EBS

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 …

When you run a NoSQL database on Amazon EC2 instances, you are responsible for managing the database layer and the guest operating system of the instances. This means that you need to perform tasks such as updating the operating system, maintaining high availability, and configuring the security group firewall. AWS is responsible for managing the physical infrastructure that hosts the EC2 instances. This means that AWS ensures that the hardware and firmware of the servers, routers, switches, and other devices are updated and secure. AWS also handles the power, cooling, networking, and security of the data centers12. References: CLF-C02: Which task is responsibility of AWS to run NoSQL database on …, Best Practices for Hosting NoSQL Databases on Amazon EC2

ANetwork ACL (Access Control List)is a stateless firewall that controls inbound and outbound traffic at the subnet level within a VPC. It provides an additional layer of security to the VPC by allowing or denying traffic to and from a subnet based on defined rules.

A. Security group: Incorrect, as security groups act as a firewall at the instance level, not the subnet level.

C. Elastic network interface: Incorrect, as it is a virtual network interface that you can attach to an instance, not a firewall feature.

D. AWS WAF: Incorrect, as it is a web application firewall that protects web applications from common exploits, not for subnet-level protection.

AWS Cloud References:

Network ACLs

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 Workspaces is a service that provides fully managed, secure, and reliable virtual desktops for your employees. You can access your personal Windows environment on various devices, such as Android, iOS, Fire, Mac, PC, Chromebook, and Linux. You can choose from different bundles of CPU, memory, storage, and software options to suit your needs. You can also integrate AWS Workspaces with your existing Active Directory, VPN, and security policies. AWS Workspaces helps you reduce the cost and complexity of managing your desktop infrastructure, while enhancing the productivity and security of your remote workers456. References: 4: Amazon WorkSpaces Client Download, 5: VDI Desktops - Amazon WorkSpaces Family - AWS, 6: Amazon WorkSpaces

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

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

AWS Budgets is a service that allows you to set custom budgets for your AWS costs and usage, and receive alerts via email or Amazon SNS notifications if you exceed or are forecasted to exceed your budgeted amount1. You can create budgets based on different dimensions, such as service, linked account, tag, or purchase option, and define various types of alerts, such as actual, forecasted, or RI utilization alerts2. You can also configure custom actions to automatically execute remediation tasks or workflows when a budget threshold is breached3. AWS Budgets is the only service among the options that can send alerts to customers if custom spending thresholds are exceeded. The other options are not AWS services that provide this functionality.

A Network Access Control List (ACL) is a stateless network filtering mechanism provided by AWS for controlling traffic in and out of subnets within a VPC. Unlike security groups, which are stateful, network ACLs are stateless. This means that they do not automatically allow responses to inbound traffic unlessexplicitly specified. Network ACLs allow you to set rules for both inbound and outbound traffic, making them suitable for stateless filtering. Security groups, on the other hand, are stateful, while AWS WAF is primarily for web application-level security. AWS PrivateLink is used for privately connecting VPCs to AWS services without using an internet gateway. Therefore, for stateless network filtering, Network ACL is the correct choice.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that lets you send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available1. Amazon SQS is designed to provide a simpleand reliable way for customers to decouple and connect components (microservices) together using queues2. Queues are an important mechanism for providing fault tolerance and scalability in distributed systems, and help decouple different parts of your application3. The other options are not AWS services that are used specifically for sending messages between applications

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.

AVPC (Virtual Private Cloud)in AWS is a logically isolated network that you define in the AWS Cloud. Within a VPC, you can create subnets, route tables, network gateways, and more.

D. Internet Gateway: An internet gateway is a component that allows communication between resources in a VPC and the internet.

E. Subnet: A subnet is a range of IP addresses in your VPC. Subnets can be public or private and are essential for organizing resources within a VPC.

Why other options are not suitable:

A. Amazon API Gateway: Used for creating and managing APIs, not a direct component of a VPC.

B. Amazon S3 buckets and objects: Amazon S3 is a storage service; its resources are globally accessible and not confined to a VPC.

C. AWS Storage Gateway: A hybrid cloud storage service, not a core component of a VPC.

Amazon SageMakeris a fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. It offers integrated Jupyter notebooks for data exploration, pre-built algorithms, and automatic model tuning to optimize hyperparameters.

Why other options are not suitable:

A. Amazon Personalize: A managed machine learning service that provides personalized recommendations, but does not offer the full suite of ML tools for building, training, and deploying models.

B. Amazon Comprehend: A natural language processing (NLP) service, not a general-purpose ML model building and deployment service.

C. Amazon Forecast: A managed service specifically for creating accurate forecasts using machine learning, not for general-purpose ML model development.

AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect web applications from common web exploits, such as SQL injection attacks. It allows customers to create custom rules that block malicious requests. AWS Shield is a managed service that protects against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, not SQL injection attacks. Network ACLs and security groups are network-level security features that filter traffic based on IP addresses and ports, not web requests or SQL queries. References: [AWS WAF], [AWS Shield], [Network ACLs], [Security groups]

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.

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

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

 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 QuickSightis a scalable, serverless, machine learning-powered business intelligence (BI) service built for the cloud. It allows users to create and publish interactive dashboards with insights powered by machine learning, such as anomaly detection and forecasting. This makes it the best option for creating interactive BI dashboards that require machine learning insights.

A. AWS Glue Studio: Incorrect, as it is an ETL (extract, transform, load) tool for preparing and transforming data, not for creating BI dashboards.

C. Amazon Redshift: Incorrect, as it is a data warehousing service that can be used with BI tools but is not specifically designed for creating and publishing dashboards.

D. Amazon Athena: Incorrect, as it is an interactive query service for analyzing data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL, not for creating BI dashboards.

AWS Cloud References:

Amazon QuickSight

According to theAWS Shared Responsibility Model, AWS is responsible for protecting the infrastructure that runs all of the services offered in the AWS Cloud, including Amazon S3. This infrastructure includes hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run AWS services.

A. Configure an S3 Lifecycle policy: Incorrect, as configuring S3 Lifecycle policies to manage object lifecycle (e.g., transitioning objects to different storage classes or deleting them after a certain period) is the customer's responsibility.

B. Activate S3 Versioning: Incorrect, as enabling S3 Versioning is a customer responsibility for managing data protection.

C. Configure S3 bucket policies: Incorrect, as setting and managing S3 bucket policies to control access is the customer's responsibility.

AWS Cloud References:

AWS Shared Responsibility Model

Amazon S3

Spot Instances provide a cost-effective option for running Amazon EC2 instances for workloads that can tolerate interruptions. They allow you to use unused EC2 capacity in the AWS Cloud at a discounted price, making them suitable for applications that are flexible in terms of start and stop times. On-Demand Instances are more expensive and do not provide discounts for short-term, interruptible workloads, while Reserved and Dedicated Instances are for long-term or specific hardware needs.

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

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 all of the services offered in the AWS Cloud, such as the global network, the hardware, the software, and the facilities. The customer is responsible for properly configuring the security of the provided service, such as the guest operating system, the application software, the data, and the network traffic. For abstracted services, such as Amazon RDS, AWS operates the infrastructure layer, the operating system, and the database software, while the customer is responsible for managing their data, classifying their assets, and using IAM tools to apply the appropriate permissions12.

Therefore, the tasks that are the customer’s responsibility are:

Perform client-side data encryption: The customer is responsible for encrypting their data before sending it to AWS, and decrypting it after receiving it from AWS. This ensures that the data is protected in transit and at rest. AWS provides various encryption options, such as AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), AWS CloudHSM, and AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)3.

Configure IAM credentials: The customer is responsible for creating and managing IAM users, groups, roles, and policies that control the access to AWS resources and services. IAM credentials include user names, passwords, access keys, and permissions4.

The tasks that are not the customer’s responsibility are:

Establish the global infrastructure: AWS is responsible for building and maintaining the global network of regions, availability zones, and edge locations that provide low latency, high availability, and fault tolerance for the AWS Cloud5.

Secure edge locations: AWS is responsible for protecting the physical security of the edge locations, which are sites that deliver cached content to end users with improved performance6.

Patch Amazon RDS DB instances: AWS is responsible for applying patches and updates to the operating system and the database software of the Amazon RDS DB instances, which are managed relational database service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and Amazon Aurora. References:

Shared Responsibility Model - Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Shared responsibility model - Amazon Web Services: Risk and Compliance

Encryption - Amazon Web Services (AWS)

What Is IAM? - AWS Identity and Access Management

Global Infrastructure - Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon CloudFront Features - Content Delivery Network (CDN)

[What Is Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)? - Amazon Relational Database Service]

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 Global Accelerator is a service that improves network performance by sending traffic through the AWS worldwide network infrastructure. It uses the AWS global network to direct TCP or UDP traffic to a healthy application endpoint in the closest AWS Region to the client. This provides improvements in terms of latency, throughput, and jitter. Global Accelerator also introduces features such as TCP termination at the edge, jumbo frame support, and large receive side window and TCP buffers to optimize data transfer12. Route table, AWS Transit Gateway, and Amazon VPC are not services or features that improve network performance by sending traffic through the AWS worldwide network infrastructure. Route table is a resource that defines how traffic is routed within a VPC3. AWS Transit Gateway is a service that enables you to connect your VPCs and on-premises networks to a single gateway4. Amazon VPC is a service that lets you provision a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define5. References: Achieve up to 60% better performance for internet traffic with AWS Global Accelerator, Improving Performance on AWS and Hybrid Networks, Route tables, AWS Transit Gateway, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Amazon CloudFront and AWS Global Accelerator are two AWS services that make use of global edge locations. Edge locations are AWS sites that are deployed worldwide in major cities and places with a high population. Edge locations are used to cache data and reduce latency for end-user access1.

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency and high transfer speeds. Amazon CloudFront uses a global network of over 200 edge locations and 13 regional edge caches to cache your content closer to your viewers, improving performance and reducing costs23.

AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service that improves the availability and performance of your applications with local or global users. AWS Global Accelerator uses the AWS global network to route user traffic to the optimal endpoint based on health, performance, and policies. AWS Global Accelerator uses over 100 edge locations to bring your application endpoints closer to your users, reducing networkhops and improving user experience45. References: 1: AWS for the Edge - Amazon Web Services (AWS), 2: Content Delivery Network (CDN) - Amazon CloudFront - AWS, 3: Amazon CloudFront Documentation, 4: AWS Global Accelerator - Amazon Web Services, 5: AWS Global Accelerator Documentation

AWS Cost Explorer provides a visualization of historical AWS spending patterns and allows users to project future costs based on past usage. It offers advanced filtering and grouping features, enabling users to analyze costs and usage at a granular level. The AWS Cost and Usage Report provides detailed AWS cost and usage data but does not offer visualization or future cost projections. AWS Budgets is used for setting custom cost and usage budgets and receiving alerts. Amazon CloudWatch is for monitoring AWS resources and applications, not for cost management.

Global reach is a cloud computing advantage that a company can apply when it uses AWS Regions to increase application availability to users in different countries. Global reach refers tothe ability to deploy applications and services in multiple geographic locations around the world, and to serve customers with low latency and high performance. AWS has the largest and most reliable global infrastructure of any cloud provider, with 25 Regions and 81 Availability Zones across the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa, and the Middle East123. By using AWS Regions, a company can choose the best location for its application based on customer proximity, compliance requirements, and disaster recovery strategies23. References: 1: AWS Global Infrastructure - Amazon Web Services (AWS), 2: Regions and Availability Zones - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, 3: AWS Infrastructure: Regions and Availability Zones Explained

AWS Organizationsis a service that helps users centrally manage and govern multiple AWS accounts. With AWS Organizations, a company can consolidate billing and receive a single bill for all AWS accounts under an organization, making it easier for the finance team to track costs.

Why other options are not suitable:

B. AWS Trusted Advisor: Provides real-time guidance to help optimize AWS resources, not for consolidated billing.

C. Cost Explorer: A tool for visualizing and managing AWS costs and usage, but it does not consolidate billing.

D. AWS Budgets: Allows setting custom budgets and alerts but does not consolidate billing across accounts.

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) is a tool that helps organizations plan and execute their cloud transformation journey. The AWS CAF defines four phases of the cloud transformation journey: Envision, Align, Launch, and Scale. Each phase has a specific purpose and outcome1:

Envision: This phase helps you define your vision, goals, and expected outcomes for your cloud transformation. It also helps you identify and prioritize transformation opportunities across four domains: business, people, governance, and platform2.

Align: This phase helps you identify capability gaps across six perspectives: business, people, governance, platform, security, and operations. It also helps you create strategies for improving your cloud readiness, ensure stakeholder alignment, and facilitate relevant organizational change management activities3.

Launch: This phase helps you deliver pilot initiatives in production and demonstrate incremental business value. It also helps you learn from pilots and adjust your approach before scaling to full production4.

Scale: This phase helps you expand production pilots and business value to desired scale and ensure that the business benefits associated with your cloud investments are realized and sustained.

The options A and B are the correct AWS CAF cloud transformation journey recommendations, as they are part of the four phases defined by the AWS CAF. The options C, D, and E are not AWS CAFcloud transformation journey recommendations, as they are not part of the four phases defined by the AWS CAF

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.

The ability to scale resources up and down based on application load is tied to the advantage of "Stop guessing capacity." This feature allows users to scale resources automatically to match the demand, thereby avoiding over-provisioning or under-provisioning of resources. "Go global in minutes," "Benefit from massive economies of scale," and "Trade fixed expense for variable expense" are other advantages of cloud computing, but they do not specifically address scaling resources up and down based on load.

AWS Management Console is a web application that allows you to manage and monitor your AWS Cloud resources through a user-friendly interface. You can use the AWS Management Console to access and experiment with over 150 AWS services, view and modify your account and billing information, get in-console help from AWS Support, and customize your dashboard with widgets that display key metrics and information for your applications567. You can also use the AWS Management Console to launch and configure AWS resources using wizards andtemplates, without writing any code5. References: 5: Manage AWS Resources - AWS Management Console - AWS, 6: Getting Started with the AWS Management Console, 7: Manage AWS Resources - AWS Management Console Features - AWS

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a 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 also enables you to follow the principle of least privilege, which means granting only the permissions that are necessary to perform a task1. References: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) - AWS Documentation

On-Demand Instances are the most flexible and cost-effective pricing model for short-term, experimental, or unpredictable workloads on AWS. On-Demand Instances let you pay only for the resources you use, without any long-term commitments or upfront fees. You can easily start and stop instances as needed, and scale up or down depending on your demand.

Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and Dedicated Hosts are all pricing models that require a commitment for a certain amount of usage or capacity for a one- or three-year term. These pricing models offer lower prices than On-Demand Instances, but they are not suitable for workloads that only run for 3 to 6 months or have variable usage patterns. Savings Plans and Reserved Instances also offer flexibility to change instance types, sizes, or regions within the same family or pool, while Dedicated Hosts are physical servers that can only run specific instance types.

VPC Flow Logs is a feature that enables you to capture information about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in your VPC. Flow log data can be published to the following locations: Amazon CloudWatch Logs, Amazon S3, or Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. You can use VPC Flow Logs to monitor network traffic, diagnose security issues, troubleshoot connectivity problems, and perform network forensics1. References:

Logging IP traffic using VPC Flow Logs - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

An IAM credential report is a feature of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) that allows you to view and download a report that lists all IAM users in your account and the status of their various credentials, such as passwords, access keys, and MFA devices. You can use this reportto audit the security status of your IAM users and ensure that they follow the best practices for credential management1. References: 1: AWS Documentation - IAM User Guide - Getting credential reports for your AWS account

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

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 collections of EC2 instances, called Auto Scaling groups, and specify the minimum and maximum number of instances in each group. You can also define scaling policies that adjust the number of instances based on the demand on your application. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps you improve the performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency of your EC2workloads123. References: 1: VDI Desktops - Amazon WorkSpaces Family - AWS, 2: What is Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling? - Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, 3: Discover Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Unit | Salesforce Trailhead

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?

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

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

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

AWS Software Development Kit (SDK) is a set of platform-specific building tools for developers. It allows developers to access AWS services from application code using familiar programming languages. It provides pre-built components and libraries that can be incorporated into applications, as well as tools to debug, monitor, and optimize performance2. References: What is SDK? - SDK Explained - AWS

 Amazon Neptune is a fully managed graph database service on AWS. A graph database is a type of database that stores and queries data as a network of nodes and edges, representing entities and relationships. Graph databases are useful for applications that deal with highly connected data, such as social networks, recommendation engines, fraud detection, and knowledge graphs45. Amazon Neptune is a fast, reliable, and scalable graph database service that supports two popular graph models: property graphs and RDF. Amazon Neptune also supports two open standards for querying graphs: Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and SPARQL. Amazon Neptune handles the heavy lifting of managing the database, such as provisioning, patching, backup, recovery, encryption, and replication456. References: 4: Managed Graph Database - Amazon Neptune - AWS, 5: Amazon Neptune – A Fully Managed Graph Database Service, 6: Working with AWS Neptune. Neptune is a fully-managed graph … - Medium

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.

AWS Cost Exploreris a tool that enables you to view and analyze your costs and usage. It provides an easy-to-use interface to visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time. Cost Explorer allows the company to monitor ongoing costs, set budget alerts, and analyze cost drivers, which is ideal for keeping the cost of running an ecommerce website within a specific budget.

B. AWS SDKs: Incorrect, as they are software development kits that allow integration with AWS services but do not provide cost monitoring or management capabilities.

C. EC2 Image Builder: Incorrect, as it is a service for automating the creation of virtual machine images, not for monitoring costs.

D. AWS CloudFormation: Incorrect, as it is used for provisioning and managing infrastructure as code, not for cost monitoring.

AWS Cloud References:

AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage service that provides on-premises access to virtually unlimited cloud storage. You can use AWS Storage Gateway to simplify storage management and reduce costs for key hybrid cloud storage use cases. One of these use cases is tape-based backup, which allows you to store data backups on virtual tapes in the AWS Cloud. You can use the Tape Gateway feature of AWS Storage Gateway to extend your existing physical tape library to the AWS Cloud. Tape Gateway provides a virtual tape infrastructure that scales seamlessly with your backup needs and eliminates the operational burden of provisioning, scaling, and maintaining a physical tape infrastructure123. References: 1: CloudStorage Appliances, Hybrid Device - AWS Storage Gateway - AWS, 2: AWS Storage Gateway Documentation, 3: AWS Storage Gateway Features | Amazon Web Services

AWS WAF is a web application firewall service that helps protect web applications from common web exploits that could affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. AWS WAF gives you control over which traffic to allow or block to your web applications by definingcustomizable web security rules. You can use AWS WAF to create rules that block common attack patterns, such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting, and rules that filter out specific traffic patterns you define1. AWS WAF also integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon CloudFront, Amazon API Gateway, AWS AppSync, and AWS Load Balancer, to provide a comprehensive defense against web attacks2. Therefore, AWS WAF meets the requirements of the social media company, compared to the other options.

The other options are not suitable for the social media company’s requirements, because:

Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS. Amazon Inspector automatically assesses applications for exposure, vulnerabilities, and deviations from best practices. However, Amazon Inspector does not provide a web application firewall service that can block malicious web requests3.

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. Amazon GuardDuty analyzes and processes the following data sources: VPC Flow Logs, AWS CloudTrail event logs, and DNS logs. However, Amazon GuardDuty does not provide a web application firewall service that can block malicious web requests4.

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that provides data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. Amazon CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, and visualizes it using automated dashboards, alarms, and notifications. However, Amazon CloudWatch does not provide a web application firewall service that can block malicious web requests.

What Is AWS WAF? - AWS WAF, AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Shield Advanced

AWS WAF Features - AWS WAF, AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Shield Advanced

What Is Amazon Inspector? - Amazon Inspector

What Is Amazon GuardDuty? - Amazon GuardDuty

[What Is Amazon CloudWatch? - Amazon CloudWatch]

Spot Instances are a type of EC2 instance that let you bid on unused compute capacity, which AWS offers at a discount of up to 90% compared to On-Demand prices1. Spot Instances are suitable for fault-tolerant, stateless, or flexible applications that can handle interruptions2. Spot Instances can be interrupted with a two-minute warning when EC2 needs the capacity back3. The other options are not pricing models that will interrupt a running EC2 instance if capacity becomes temporarily unavailable

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 Trusted Advisor is the service that can meet these requirements. AWS Trusted Advisor is a service that helps you optimize your AWS environment by providing recommendations based on AWS best practices. Trusted Advisor continuously evaluates your AWS resources and services across five categories: cost optimization, performance, service limits, fault tolerance, and security. You can view the recommendations on the Trusted Advisor console or access them programmatically using the Trusted Advisor API. You can also set up notifications and alerts for any changes in the status of your checks. Trusted Advisor can help you improve your AWS environment by reducing costs, enhancing performance, increasing security, and ensuring reliability12. The other services are not designed to provide best practice recommendations in five categories. AWS Shield is a service that protects your AWS resources from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. AWS WAF is a service that helps you protect your web applications from common web exploits. AWS Service Catalog is a service that enables you to create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS34 . References: AWS Trusted Advisor, Achieve operational excellence with AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Shield, AWS WAF, [AWS Service Catalog]

The architecture concept of the AWS Cloud that meets the requirements of the company that wants to migrate to the AWS Cloud and needs the ability to acquire and release resources as needed is elasticity. Elasticity means that AWS customers can quickly and easily provision and scale up or down AWS resources as their demand changes, without any upfront costs or long-term commitments. AWS provides various tools and services that enable customers to achieve elasticity, such as Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS CloudFormation. Elasticity helps customers optimize their performance, availability, and cost efficiency. Availability, reliability, and durability are other architecture concepts of the AWS Cloud, but they are not directly related to the ability to acquire and release resources as needed. Availability means that AWS customers can access their AWS resources and applications whenever and wherever they need them. Reliability means that AWS customers can depend on their AWS resources and applications to functioncorrectly and consistently. Durability means that AWS customers can preserve their data and objects for long periods of time without loss or corruption12

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing you with a unified view of AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS and on-premises servers

Adding a department tag to each resource and configuring cost allocation tags is an action that can help you accomplish the goal of billing each department for its resource usage with the least operational overhead. Tags are simple labels consisting of a key and an optional value that you can assign to AWS resources. You can use tags to organize your resources and track your AWS costs ona detailed level. Cost allocation tags enable you to track your AWS costs on a detailed level. After you activate cost allocation tags, AWS uses the cost allocation tags to organize your resource costs on your cost allocation report, to make it easier for you to categorize and track your AWS costs2. Moving each department resource to its own VPC or its own AWS account is an action that can help you isolate and control the resources for each department, but it would incur more operational overhead than using tags. Using AWS Organizations to get a billing report for each department is an action that can help you consolidate billing and payment across multiple AWS accounts, but it would not help you bill each department for its resource usage within a single VPC.

 Patch management and configuration management are controls that are the responsibility of both AWS and AWS customers, according to the AWS shared responsibility model. Patch management is the process of applying updates to software and applications to fix vulnerabilities, bugs, or performance issues. Configuration management is the process of defining and maintaining the settings and parameters of systems and applications to ensure their consistency and reliability. AWS is responsible for patching and configuring the software and services that it manages, such as the AWS global infrastructure, the hypervisor, and the AWS managed services. The customer is responsible for patching and configuring the software and services that they manage, such as the guest operating system, the applications, and the AWS customer-managed services. Physical and environmental controls are the responsibility of AWS, according to the AWS shared responsibility model. Physical and environmental controls are the measures that protect the physical security and availability of the AWS global infrastructure, such as power, cooling, fire suppression, and access control. AWS is responsible for maintaining these controls and ensuring the resilience and reliability of the AWS Cloud. Account structures are the responsibility of the customer, according to the AWS shared responsibility model. Account structures are the ways that customers organize and manage their AWS accounts and resources, such as using AWS Organizations, IAM users and roles, resource tagging, and billing preferences. The customer is responsible for creating and configuring these structures and ensuring the security and governance of their AWS environment. Choice of the AWS Region where data is stored is the responsibility of the customer, according to the AWS sharedresponsibility model. AWS Regions are geographic areas that consist of multiple isolated Availability Zones. Customers can choose which AWS Region to store their data and run their applications, depending on their latency, compliance, and cost requirements. The customer is responsible for selecting the appropriate AWS Region and ensuring the data sovereignty and regulatory compliance of their data.

 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

AWS Budgets gives you the ability 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 define2.

The correct answers are A and D because network infrastructure and virtualization of infrastructure and physical security of hardware are AWS responsibilities 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 not AWS responsibilities according to the AWS shared responsibility model. Security of application data, guest operatingsystems, and credentials and policies are customer responsibilities according to the AWS shared responsibility model. Reference: [AWS Shared Responsibility Model]

Amazon Athena is the AWS service that the developer should use to write a simple query that can read all of the .csv files stored in an Amazon S3 bucket and generate a summary report. Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that allows users to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Amazon Athena does not require any server setup or management, and users only pay for the queries they run. Amazon Athena can handle various data formats, including .csv, and can integrate with other AWS services such as Amazon QuickSight for data visualization

 The correct answer is B because AWS CloudTrail is an AWS service that a cloud engineer can use to view API calls to AWS services. AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables customers to track user activity and API usage across their 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. Customers can use AWS CloudTrail to audit, monitor, and troubleshoot their AWS resources and actions. The other options are incorrect because they are not AWS services that a cloud engineer can use to view API calls to AWS services. Amazon CloudWatch is an AWS service that enables customers to collect, analyze, and visualize metrics, logs, and events from their AWS resources and applications. AWS Config is an AWS service that enables customers to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of their AWS resources. AWS Artifact is an AWS service that provides customers with on-demand access to AWS compliance reports and select online agreements. Reference: AWS CloudTrail FAQs

 AWS Regions are geographic areas around the world where AWS has clusters of data centers. Each AWS Region consists of multiple, isolated, and physically separate AZ’s within a geographic area. By hosting the customer’s data in a specific AWS Region, the company can meet the requirement of hosting the data in the customer’s country. AWS Shield is a service that 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. Amazon S3 Object Lock is afeature that allows you to store objects using a write-once-read-many (WORM) model. You can use it to prevent an object from being deleted or overwritten for a fixed amount of time or indefinitely. Placement groups are logical grouping of instances within a single Availability Zone. Placement groups enable applications to participate in a low-latency, 10 Gbps network. None of these services or infrastructure components can help the company host the customer’s data in a different country.

 Cost Explorer is an AWS service or tool that can be used to forecast AWS spending. It allows users to analyze their AWS costs and usage using interactive graphs and tables. It also provides features such as filtering, grouping, and forecasting to help users plan their future spending. Amazon DevPay is an AWS service that allows developers to sell applications that are built on AWS services. It handles the billing and metering for the customers of the applications and collects payments from them. It is not a tool for forecasting AWS spending. AWS Organizations is an AWS service that allows users to centrally manage and govern their AWS accounts. It provides features such as creating groups of accounts, applying policies, and automating account creation. It is not a tool for forecasting AWS spending. AWS Trusted Advisor is an AWS service that provides best practices and recommendations to optimize the performance, security, and cost of AWS resources. It can helpusers identify opportunities to reduce their AWS costs, but it is not a tool for forecasting AWS spending

The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a set of best practices and guidelines for designing and operating systems in the cloud. The framework consists of five pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization. The operational excellence pillar focuses on the ability to run workloads effectively, gain insight into operations, and continuously improve supporting processes and procedures. Therefore, the correct answer is C. You can learn more about the AWS Well-Architected Framework and its pillars.

The AWS shared responsibility model describes how AWS and the customer share responsibility for security and compliance of the AWS environment. AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, which includes the physical security of AWS facilities, the infrastructure, hardware, software, and networking that run AWS services. The customer is responsible for security in the cloud, which includes the configuration of security groups, the encryption of customer data on AWS, the management of AWS Lambda infrastructure, and the management of network throughput of each AWS Region. One of the customer responsibilities is to ensure that Amazon EBS volumes are backed up.

 AWS Organizations helps to centrally manage billing and allow controlled access to resources across AWS accounts. AWS Organizations is a service that enables the user to consolidate multiple AWS accounts into an organization that can be managed as a single unit. AWS Organizations allows the user to create groups of accounts and apply policies to them, such as service control policies (SCPs) that specify the services and actions that users and roles can access in the accounts. AWS Organizations also enables the user to use consolidated billing, which combines the usage and charges from all the accounts in the organization into a single bill.

AWS WAF is the AWS service that the company should use to configure rules to identify threats and protect applications from malicious network access. AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps to filter, monitor, and block malicious web requests based on customizable rules. AWS WAF can be integrated with other AWS services, such as Amazon CloudFront, Amazon API Gateway, and Application Load Balancer. For more information, see What is AWS WAF? and How AWS WAF Works.

Amazon RDS is the AWS service that will meet the requirements of migrating a relational database server to the AWS Cloud and minimizing administrative overhead of database maintenance tasks. Amazon RDS is a fully managed relational database service that handles routine database tasks, such as provisioning, patching, backup, recovery, failure detection, and repair. Amazon RDS supports several database engines, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and Amazon Aurora5.

AWS WAF is the AWS service or feature that offers HTTP attack protection to users running public-facing web applications. AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps users protect their web applications from common web exploits, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and bot attacks. Users can create custom rules to define the web traffic that they want to allow, block, or count. Users can also use AWS Managed Rules, which are pre-configured rules that are curated and maintained by AWS or AWS Marketplace Sellers. AWS WAF can be integrated with other AWS services, such as Amazon CloudFront, Amazon API Gateway, and Application Load Balancer, to provide comprehensive security for web applications. [AWS WAF Overview] AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner - aws.amazon.com

Designing for automatic failover to healthy resources is an AWS best practice when designing AWS workloads to be operational even when there are component failures. This means that you should architect your system to handle the loss of one or more components without impacting the availability or performance of your application. You can use various AWS services and features to achieve this, such as Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudFormation, and AWS CloudFormation4.

 The correct answer is C because Amazon Cognito provides identity federation and user authentication for web and mobile applications. Amazon Cognito allows users to sign in with their social media, email, or online shopping accounts. The other options are incorrect because they do not provide identity federation or user authentication. AWS IAM Identity Center (AWS Single Sign-On) is a service that enables users to access multiple AWS accounts and applications with a single sign-on experience. AWS Config is a service that enables users to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of their AWS resources. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a service that enables users to manage access to AWS resources using users, groups, roles, and policies. Reference: Amazon Cognito FAQs

The correct answer is B because placing the EC2 instances in two separate Availability Zones within the same AWS Region is the best way to meet the requirement. 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 increase the fault tolerance and resilience of their applications. Availability Zones within the same AWS Region are connected with low-latency, high-throughput, and highly redundant networking. The other options are incorrect because they are not the best ways to meet the requirement. Placing the EC2 instances in two separate AWS Regions connected with a VPC peering connection is not the best way to meet the requirement because AWS Regions are geographically dispersed and may have higher communication latency between them than Availability Zones within the same AWS Region. VPC peering connection is a networking connection between two VPCs that enables users to route traffic between them using private IP addresses. Placing one EC2 instance on premises and the other in an AWS Region, and then connecting them by using an AWS VPN connection is not the best way to meet the requirement because on-premises and AWS Region are geographically dispersed and may have higher communication latency between them than Availability Zones within the same AWS Region. AWS VPN connection is a secure and encrypted connection between a user’s network and their VPC. Placing both EC2 instances in a placement group for dedicated bandwidth is not the best way to meet the requirement because a placement group is a logical grouping of instances within a single Availability Zone that enables users to launch instances with specific performance characteristics. A placement group does not ensure that the instances are in separate data centers, and it does not provide low-latency communication between instances in different AvailabilityZones. Reference: [Regions, Availability Zones, and Local Zones], [VPC Peering], [AWS VPN], [Placement Groups]

The company should use the AWS Billing console to access a report about the estimated environmental impact of the company’s AWS usage. The AWS Billing console provides customers with various tools and reports to manage and monitor their AWS costs and usage. One of the reports available in the AWS Billing console is the AWS Sustainability Dashboard, which shows the estimated carbon footprint and energy mix of the customer’s AWS usage. The company can use this dashboard to measure and improve the sustainability of their cloud workloads. AWS Organizations, IAM policy, and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) are not services or features that can provide a report about the estimated environmental impact of the company’s AWS usage. AWS Organizations is a service that enables customers to centrally manage and govern their AWS accounts. IAM policy is a document that defines the permissions for an IAM identity (user, group, or role) or an AWS resource. Amazon SNS is a fully managed pub/sub messaging service that enables customers to send messages to subscribers or other AWS services.

Rightsizing is the cloud concept that this analysis demonstrates. Rightsizing is the process of optimizing the performance and cost of your AWS resources by selecting the most appropriate type, size, and configuration based on your workload requirements and usage patterns. Rightsizing can help you achieve potential cost savings by reducing the over-provisioning or under-utilization of your resources. You can use various AWS tools and services, such as AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Compute Optimizer, and AWS Trusted Advisor, to analyze your resource utilization and performance metrics, and receive recommendations for rightsizing.

 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

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

The correct answer is A because Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value database that provides sub-millisecond latency on a large scale. Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, serverless, and scalable NoSQL database service that supports both key-value and document data models. The other options are incorrect because they are not key-value databases. Amazon Aurora is a relational database that is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a document database that is compatible with MongoDB. Amazon Neptune is a graph database that supports property graph and RDF models. Reference: Amazon DynamoDB FAQs

 Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a service that provides fully managed relational database engines. Amazon RDS supports several database engines, including Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, SQL Server, and Amazon Aurora. Amazon RDS can be used to migrate an application that includes an Oracle database to AWS without rewriting the application, as long as the application is compatible with the Oracle version and edition supported by Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS can also provide benefits such as high availability, scalability, security, backup and restore, and performance optimization. [Amazon RDS Overview] AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner - aws.amazon.com

Amazon Redshift is the service that meets the requirements of using standard SQL to query and combine exabytes of structured and semi-structured data across a data warehouse, operational database, and data lake. Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service that allows you to run complex analytic queries using standard SQL and your existing business intelligence tools. Amazon Redshift also supports Redshift Spectrum, a feature that allows you to directly query and join data stored in Amazon S3 using the same SQL syntax. Amazon Redshift can scale up or down to handle any volume of data and deliver fast query performance5

 The AWS account root user is the first sign-in identity that is available when an AWS account is created. It has complete access to all AWS services and resources in the account. The root user email address and password are the same credentials that are used to sign in to the AWS Management Console4. The root user should be used only to perform a few account and servicemanagement tasks. For day-to-day tasks, it is recommended to use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users or roles instead.

Using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to break down a monolithic architecture into microservices is an example of a loosely coupled architecture. A loosely coupled architecture is one where the components are independent and can communicate with each other through well-defined interfaces. This allows for greater scalability, flexibility, and resilience. A tightly coupled architecture is one where the components are interdependent and rely on each other for functionality. This can lead to increased complexity, fragility, and difficulty in changing or scaling the system. Amazon ECS OverviewAWS Well-Architected Framework

 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.

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.

AWS Outposts is a service that offers fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with AWS-designed hardware that allow you to run your workloads on premises and seamlessly connect to AWS services in the cloud. AWS Outposts is ideal for workloads that require low latency, local data processing, or local data storage. With AWS Outposts, you can use the same AWS APIs, tools, and infrastructure across on premises and the cloud to deliver a truly consistent hybrid experience5. Availability Zones are isolated locations within each AWS Region that are engineered to be fault-tolerant and provide high availability. AWS Local Zones are extensions of AWS Regions that are placed closer to large population, industry, and IT centers where no AWS Region exists today. AWS Wavelength is a service that enables developers to build applications that deliver ultra-low latency to mobile devices and users by deploying AWS compute and storage at the edge of the 5G network. None of these services or features can help you host a critical application with minimum latency at a remote site that has a slow internet connection.

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 Budgets allows organizations to set custom cost and usage budgets and receive notifications when they exceed predefined thresholds. This feature helps the finance department monitor spending and manage budget forecasts effectively. AWS Cost and Usage Reports and Cost Explorer provide detailed billing data but do not include budget notifications. Consolidated billing in AWS Organizations is useful for aggregating billing across accounts but does not provide budget alerts.