Last Attempt SAA-C03 Questions

Amazon EFS is a regional, elastic file system that “scales to petabytes” and can be accessed from “thousands of compute instances” concurrently. You can mount EFS across VPCs and across AWS accounts by providing network connectivity (e.g., VPC peering) to the EFS mount targets and allowing NFS (TCP 2049) in the mount target security group, optionally using EFS access points and a file system policy for cross-account access control. VPC peering has no hourly charge and minimal operational overhead, and EFS automatically scales as files are added—meeting the scalability and cost goals.

Option A duplicates data, incurs DataSync and extra storage costs, and adds sync lag.

Option C adds an extra Lambda hop and complexity without exposing a shared filesystem to the primary function.

Option D is impractical: Lambda layers are immutable artifacts with tight size limits (up to 50 MB compressed/250 MB uncompressed) and are not suited for dynamic, growing file sets.

AWS Secrets Manager is designed specifically to securely store and manage sensitive information such as database credentials. It integrates seamlessly with AWS services like Lambda and RDS, and it provides automatic credential rotation with minimal operational overhead.

AWS Secrets Manager: By storing the database credentials in Secrets Manager, you ensure that the credentials are securely stored, encrypted, and managed. Secrets Manager provides a built-in mechanism to automatically rotate credentials at regular intervals (e.g., every 30 days), which helps in maintaining security best practices without requiring additional manual intervention.

Lambda Integration: The Lambda function can be easily configured to retrieve the credentials from Secrets Manager using the AWS SDK, ensuring that the credentials are accessed securely at runtime.

Why Not Other Options?:

Option A (Parameter Store with Rotation): While Parameter Store can store parameters securely, Secrets Manager is more tailored for secrets management and automatic rotation, offering more features and less operational overhead.

Option C (Encrypted Lambda environment variable): Storing credentials directly in Lambda environment variables, even when encrypted, requires custom code to manage rotation, which increases operational complexity.

Option D (KMS with automatic rotation): KMS is for managing encryption keys, not for storing and rotating secrets like database credentials. This option would require more custom implementation to manage credentials securely.

AWS References:

AWS Secrets Manager- Detailed documentation on how to store, manage, and rotate secrets using AWS Secrets Manager.

Using Secrets Manager with AWS Lambda- Guidance on integrating Secrets Manager with Lambda for secure credential management.

TheAWS WAF Bot Control managed ruleis designed to automatically detect and mitigate bot traffic. This feature is particularly useful for addressing malicious traffic and conserving compute resources by filtering unnecessary requests at the ALB level.

Option A:Blocking IP addresses manually introduces significant operational overhead and is not scalable against dynamic, worldwide malicious traffic.

Option C:AWS Shield provides DDoS protection, but the scenario does not describe a DDoS attack. WAF is better suited for managing application-layer threats like bot traffic.

Option D:The AWS WAF IP reputation rule helps block traffic from known bad IPs but may not address bot traffic effectively.

AWS Documentation References:

AWS WAF Bot Control

AWS WAF Managed Rules