DVA-C02 Exam Dumps : AWS Certified Developer - Associate

AWS Secrets Manager is purpose-built for securely storing and managing sensitive information such as API keys, tokens, and credentials. It provides automatic secret rotation , fine-grained IAM access control, encryption at rest using AWS KMS, and audit logging through AWS CloudTrail. This makes it the most secure and scalable option for managing short-lived authentication keys.

AWS Lambda extensions enable efficient secret retrieval by caching secrets locally within the execution environment. This reduces repeated calls to Secrets Manager on every invocation, improving performance and lowering costs while maintaining up-to-date credentials. AWS documentation explicitly recommends using Lambda extensions or caching logic for secrets that are frequently accessed.

Storing secrets in S3 (Option B) or environment variables (Option C) lacks built-in rotation and increases exposure risk. Parameter Store (Option D) supports encryption but does not provide native rotation for secrets without custom automation, making it less suitable for this use case.

Therefore, Secrets Manager with Lambda extensions provides the most secure, automated, and operationally efficient solution.

AWS IAM role permissions are evaluated dynamically . According to AWS documentation, when an IAM role attached to an EC2 instance is updated, the updated permissions are available to applications running on that instance without requiring a restart . The EC2 instance retrieves temporary credentials through the instance metadata service, and those credentials are refreshed automatically.

In this scenario, the least disruptive approach is to update the IAM role policy to include the required s3:GetObject permission. Once the permission is added, the application can immediately retry access to the S3 bucket without restarting, stopping, or terminating the EC2 instance.

Terminating or restarting the instance (Options A and C) introduces unnecessary downtime and operational overhead. Modifying the S3 bucket policy (Option D) is unnecessary because the problem lies with missing role permissions, not bucket access configuration.

AWS best practices strongly recommend using IAM roles for EC2 and updating permissions dynamically to avoid service interruption. Therefore, simply adding the required permission to the role is the correct and most efficient solution.