Amazon Web Services SAA-C03 Based on Real Exam Environment

AWS CloudTrail Lakeis a fully managed service that allows the collection, storage, and querying ofCloudTrail eventsfor both AWS and non-AWS services. CloudTrail Lake can be customized to collect logs from various sources, ensuring a centralized audit solution. It also supports long-term storage, so logs can be retained for 7 years, meeting the compliance requirement.

Option A (Data Lake): Setting up a data lake in S3 introduces unnecessary operational complexity compared to CloudTrail Lake.

Option C (Ingest non-AWS services into CloudTrail): CloudTrail Lake is better suited for this task with less operational overhead.

Option D (CloudWatch Logs): While CloudWatch can store logs, CloudTrail Lake is specifically designed for API auditing and storage.

AWS References:

AWS CloudTrail Lake

For maximum resiliency and fault tolerance in a mission-critical scenario, AWS recommends redundant Direct Connect connections from multiple data centers to multiple AWS Direct Connect locations.

This protects against:

Data center failure

Device failure

Location outages

“For workloads that require high availability, we recommend that you use multiple Direct Connect connections at multiple Direct Connect locations.”

— AWS Direct Connect Resiliency Recommendations

Option C follows AWS maximum resiliency model.

The issue described in the question, where incoming traffic seems to favor one EC2 instance, is often caused by session affinity (also known as sticky sessions) being enabled on the Application Load Balancer (ALB). When session affinity is enabled, the ALB routes requests from the same client to the same EC2 instance. This can cause an imbalance in traffic distribution, leading to performance bottlenecks on certain instances while others remain underutilized.

To resolve this issue, disabling session affinity ensures that the ALB distributes incoming traffic evenly across all EC2 instances, allowing better load distribution and reducing latency. The ALB will rely on its round-robin or least outstanding requests algorithm (depending on the configuration) to distribute traffic more evenly across instances.

Option B (Network Load Balancer): The NLB is designed for Layer 4 (TCP) traffic and low latency use cases, but it is not needed here as the problem is with load balancing logic at the application layer (Layer 7). The ALB is more appropriate for HTTP/HTTPS traffic.

Option C (Increase EC2 Instances): Adding more EC2 instances does not solve the root issue of uneven traffic distribution.

Option D (Health Check Frequency): Adjusting health check frequency won't address the imbalance caused by session affinity.

AWS References:

Application Load Balancer Sticky Sessions