AWS Certified Associate SAA-C03 Updated Exam

Understanding the Requirement: The company needs to enable communication between VPCs across multiple AWS Regions with minimal administrative effort.

Analysis of Options:

VPC Peering: Managing multiple VPC peering connections across regions is complex and difficult to scale, leading to significant administrative overhead.

AWS Direct Connect Gateways: Primarily used for creating private connections between AWS and on-premises environments, not for inter-VPC communication across regions.

AWS Transit Gateway: Simplifies VPC interconnections within a region and supports Transit Gateway peering for cross-region connectivity, reducing administrative complexity.

AWS PrivateLink: Used for accessing AWS services and third-party services over a private connection, not for inter-VPC communication.

Best Solution:

AWS Transit Gateway with Transit Gateway Peering: This option provides a scalable and efficient solution for managing VPC communications both within a single region and across multiple regions with minimal administrative overhead.

Understanding the Requirement: The company needs all EC2 instances to share up-to-date website content with minimal lag time, running behind an Application Load Balancer.

Analysis of Options:

EC2 User Data with ALB: Complex and not scalable as it requires updating each instance manually.

Amazon EFS: Provides a scalable, shared file storage solution that can be mounted by multiple EC2 instances, ensuring all instances have access to the same up-to-date content.

Amazon S3 with EC2 Sync: Involves periodic synchronization which introduces lag and complexity.

Amazon EBS Snapshots: Not suitable for dynamic and frequent updates required by a content management system.

Best Solution:

Amazon EFS: Ensures all EC2 instances have access to a consistent and up-to-date set of website assets with minimal lag time, meeting the requirements effectively.

Understanding the Requirement: Senior leadership wants a custom dashboard displaying NAT gateway costs daily, starting from the beginning of the current month.

Analysis of Options:

QuickSight with DataSync: While QuickSight is suitable for dashboards, DataSync is not designed for querying and analyzing data reports.

QuickSight with Athena: QuickSight can visualize data queried by Athena, which is designed to analyze data directly from S3.

CloudWatch with DataSync: CloudWatch is primarily for monitoring metrics, not for creating detailed cost analysis dashboards.

CloudWatch with Athena: Similarly, using CloudWatch with Athena does not align well with the requirement for a visual dashboard.

Best Solution for Visualization and Querying:

Amazon QuickSight with Athena: This combination allows for powerful data visualization and querying capabilities. QuickSight can create dynamic dashboards, while Athena efficiently queries the cost and usage report data stored in S3.

Understanding the Requirement: The company needs to process images as they are uploaded to S3 in a cost-effective manner, currently using an EC2 Spot Fleet for nightly processing.

Analysis of Options:

S3 Event Notifications to SQS and Lambda: This setup allows for event-driven processing with Lambda, which scales automatically based on the number of messages in the queue. It is cost-effective as Lambda charges are based on the compute time used.

S3 Event Notifications to SQS and EC2 Reserved Instance: Involves managing EC2 instances, which adds operational overhead and is less cost-effective.

S3 Event Notifications to SNS and ECS: More complex and potentially less cost-effective compared to using Lambda for simple processing tasks.

S3 Event Notifications to SNS: Requires additional configuration and management to process messages.

Best Solution:

S3 Event Notifications to SQS and Lambda: This option is the most cost-effective and scalable, leveraging AWS managed services with minimal operational overhead.