Pass SAA-C03 Exam Guide

A. Mutual TLS:Provides secure communication but does not integrate with AWS credential exchange.

B. AWS Signature v4:Requires direct integration with AWS and is less secure for external systems.

C. Kerberos:Not natively supported for AWS API authentication.

D. IAM Roles Anywhere:Enables AWS API access using X.509 certificates without long-term credentials.

Amazon Aurora Serverless is a cost-effective, on-demand, autoscaling configuration for Amazon Aurora. It automatically adjusts the database's capacity based on the current demand, which is ideal for workloads with variable and unpredictable usage patterns. Since the application is expected to be read-heavy with occasional writes and steady growth, Aurora Serverless can provide the necessary performance without requiring the management of database instances.

Cost-Optimization: Aurora Serverless only charges for the database capacity you use, making it a more cost-effective solution compared to always running provisioned database instances, especially for workloads with fluctuating demand.

Scalability: It automatically scales database capacity up or down based on actual usage, ensuring that you always have the right amount of resources available.

Performance: Aurora Serverless is built on the same underlying storage as Amazon Aurora, providing high performance and availability.

Why Not Other Options?:

Option A (RDS with Provisioned IOPS SSD): While Provisioned IOPS SSD ensures consistent performance, it is generally more expensive and less flexible compared to the autoscaling nature of Aurora Serverless.

Option C (DynamoDB with On-Demand Capacity): DynamoDB is a NoSQL database and may not be the best fit for applications requiring relational database features.

Option D (RDS with Magnetic Storage and Read Replicas): Magnetic storage is outdated and generally slower. While read replicas help with read-heavy workloads, the overall performance might not be optimal, and magnetic storage doesn’t provide the necessary performance.

AWS References:

Amazon Aurora Serverless- Information on how Aurora Serverless works and its use cases.

Amazon Aurora Pricing- Details on the cost-effectiveness of Aurora Serverless.

AmazonEventBridgeAPI destinations allow you to send data from AWS to external systems, like Salesforce, using HTTP APIs, including those secured with OAuth. This provides a secure and scalable solution for sending messages from the order processing application to Salesforce.

Option A and B (SNS): SNS is not ideal for OAuth-secured external APIs and lacks the necessary OAuth integration.

Option D (MSK): Amazon MSK is a Kafka-based streaming solution, which is overkill for simple message forwarding to Salesforce.

AWS References:

Amazon EventBridge API Destinations

AWS Shield Advanced provides advanced DDoS protection for AWS workloads, including EC2, CloudFront, and RDS. When integrated with CloudFront, Shield Advanced offers comprehensive detection and mitigation against large and sophisticated DDoS attacks, along with 24x7 access to the AWS DDoS Response Team (DRT). AWS WAF provides application-level protection, but for complete DDoS mitigation, Shield Advanced is the recommended solution.

Reference Extract from AWS Documentation / Study Guide:

"AWS Shield Advanced provides expanded DDoS attack protection for applications running on AWS. It offers always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency."

Source: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Official Study Guide, Security and DDoS Protection section.