CLF-C02 Questions and Answers

A VPC endpoint enables private connections between an Amazon VPC and AWS services, like Amazon S3, without requiring internet access. This allows secure access to S3 from an EC2 instance within the same VPC, reducing latency and improving security. VPN connections and NAT gateways do not eliminate internet traffic, and an internet gateway would expose the VPC to the public internet.

AWS Config enables users to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of AWS resources. It provides information that can be used by external auditors to ensure compliance with various regulatory requirements by tracking changes and maintaining configuration history. Amazon Cognito, FSx, and Inspector do not provide detailed configuration tracking for audit purposes.

Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval is optimized for storing infrequently accessed data at a very low cost, making it suitable for data archiving and long-term backups. It provides flexible retrieval options for archived data. Other services like FSx for Lustre, EBS, and EFS are more suited for frequently accessed data and higher-performance use cases, not archival storage.

AWS provides the flexibility to scale resources up or down on demand, enabling companies to test new applications without making long-term commitments. This principle allows for cost efficiency and agility during testing and development. The other options do not specifically highlight the benefits of flexible, on-demand resource scaling.

AWS Application Discovery Service helps companies gather information about on-premises data centers to support migration planning. It collects data on system configuration, resource utilization, and network dependencies, providing essential insights for migration. AWS DataSync and Storage Gateway are used for data transfer, while AWS DMS is for database migration specifically.

Amazon EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events) allows users to respond to changes in the state of AWS resources. It can be configured to invoke an AWS Lambda function when an EC2 instance enters the “stopping” state, providing a serverless way to automate responses to changes in EC2 instance states. AWS Config, SNS, and CloudFormation do not provide direct triggering for specific instance state changes.

The AWS Architecture Center provides examples, best practices, and architectural blueprints for various AWS Cloud solutions. It includes whitepapers, reference architectures, and detailed diagrams to help users design secure, scalable, and reliable applications on AWS. Other services like AWS Marketplace, Service Catalog, and Trusted Advisor do not offer solution design examples.

Amazon EventBridge Overview:

EventBridge is a serverless event bus that enables applications to react to changes in AWS resources.

It supports routing events such as EC2 state changes to various targets, including AWS Step Functions.

How EventBridge Meets the Requirement:

EventBridge can capture the EC2 instance state change event and trigger the execution of a Step Functions workflow.

The integration is seamless and supports workflows triggered by multiple event sources.

Why Other Options Are Incorrect:

A. Amazon SageMaker:Used for building, training, and deploying machine learning models; not related to event triggers.

B. Amazon Connect:A cloud-based contact center service; unrelated to event triggers.

D. AWS Fargate:A compute engine for containers; does not manage events or invoke workflows.

AWS IAM Identity Center (formerly AWS Single Sign-On) provides centralized management of user access to multiple AWS accounts within an organization in AWS Organizations. It allows users to log in once and gain access to all assigned accounts without managing separate logins for each account. Amazon Cognito is generally used for application-level user management and authentication, not for managing access across AWS accounts.

AWS Direct Connect provides a dedicated private network connection from on-premises data centers directly to the AWS Cloud, bypassing the public internet. This setup is ideal for reducing network costs, increasing bandwidth throughput, and providing a more consistent network experience compared to standard internet connections. Other services, such as Amazon VPC, relate to networking but do not establish a private network connection from on-premises to AWS.

One of the main advantages of cloud computing is the ability to trade fixed capital expenditures for variable operating expenses. By moving to the AWS Cloud, the company pays only for the resources it uses on a per-usage basis, reducing the need for large upfront investments in data center infrastructure. This benefit allows for more flexible and cost-effective spending based on actual usage. Other options, such as increased speed and agility or global reach, are also cloud benefits but do not specifically address the shift from fixed to variable expenses.

The Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace allows customers to sell unused Standard Reserved Instances to other AWS users. This enables companies to recoup some of the costs if they no longer need certain RIs. Standard RIs cannot be converted to Savings Plans, and AWS Support does not facilitate the resale of RIs directly.

AWS Outposts extend AWS infrastructure and services to on-premises locations, providing low-latency access to AWS resources and ensuring data residency. This service is suitable for hybrid environments that require the same AWS services and infrastructure to be available locally. Wavelength, Transit Gateway, and Ground Station do not specifically address low-latency access to on-premises resources or data residency.

AWS Direct Connect provides a dedicated, low-latency, and consistent network connection between on-premises data centers and AWS. This private connection minimizes latency and improves network stability compared to a public internet connection or VPN. AWS Direct Connect is ideal for applications requiring real-time data transfer with minimal latency.

The AWS Management Console provides a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) that allows users to manage AWS services. It is user-friendly and accessible, enabling users to control and configure resources without needing to interact with AWS through code or command-line interfaces. AWS CLI and SDKs are command-line and programming tools, respectively, and do not offer a graphical interface.

SSH keys provide secure login for Linux-based Amazon EC2 instances by establishing a secure connection over SSH (Secure Shell), protecting login credentials from interception. VPNs and encryption enhance security in other contexts, but SSH keys are the standard approach for accessing Linux EC2 instances. Amazon Route 53 is unrelated to EC2 instance access.

Savings Plans offer cost savings for predictable, steady workloads over a one or three-year term, with flexibility in instance family and size, making them suitable for critical workloads on EC2 instances that will run for a long term like three years. Spot Instances are more cost-effective but not suitable forcritical, predictable workloads due to potential interruptions. Dedicated Hosts and On-Demand Instances would be more costly.

AWS Budgets allows organizations to set custom cost and usage budgets and receive notifications when they exceed predefined thresholds. This feature helps the finance department monitor spending and manage budget forecasts effectively. AWS Cost and Usage Reports and Cost Explorer provide detailed billing data but do not include budget notifications. Consolidated billing in AWS Organizations is useful for aggregating billing across accounts but does not provide budget alerts.

AWS Enterprise Support provides strategic planning assistance, infrastructure event management, and real-time support, which are necessary for business-critical applications. Trusted Advisor and APN do not offer direct strategic support, and while AWS Professional Services can assist with complex solutions, Enterprise Support specifically includes ongoing operational support and event management.

AWS DataSync is designed for large-scale data transfers, especially involving large datasets with millions of files from on-premises to AWS. It provides fast and efficient transfer capabilities, and supports a one-time migration. AWS DMS is specific to databases, while Migration Hub is for tracking migrations, and Application Migration Service is for continuous replication rather than one-time file migrations.

For a reporting application that runs only periodically, On-Demand Instances are the most cost-effective choice because they allow the company to pay only for the compute capacity used, without long-term commitments. Reserved Instances are less flexible due to the need for upfront payment or long-term contracts, which would not be cost-effective given the application’s intermittent usage. On-Demand Capacity Reservations would also be more costly, as they hold capacity regardless of usage.

AWS Snowball Edge offers configurations that are either storage-optimized or compute-optimized, providing flexibility for different data migration and processing needs. It supports local processing and data transfer to AWS, catering to scenarios that require heavy storage or compute resources. AWS Snowcone and DataSync do not offer these optimizations, and Storage Gateway focuses on hybrid cloud storage.

Application Load Balancer (ALB) integrates with AWS WAF to deploy and manage WAF rules for incoming traffic. ALB can route HTTP and HTTPS traffic and apply WAF rules to protect applications from common web exploits. Network Load Balancer does not support AWS WAF, and Trusted Advisor does not deploy WAF rules.

Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, ensuring better application availability and fault tolerance. While ELB scales to meet traffic demands, it does not inherently scale compute resources themselves, span multiple regions, or balance traffic between internet gateways.

AWS Artifact provides on-demand access to AWS compliance reports and security documentation. It is a self-service portal where customers can download documents like SOC reports, ISO certifications, and other compliance-related materials necessary for meeting regulatory requirements. AWS Config and Trusted Advisor offer security assessments and compliance monitoring, but they do not provide direct access to compliance reports.

AWS CloudFormation allows users to define and deploy infrastructure as code, creating highly repeatable and consistent configurations across environments. It uses templates to automate the provisioning and management of resources. CodeDeploy focuses on application deployment, and Systems Manager offers operational management, but neither provides templated infrastructure deployment at the same level as CloudFormation.

AWS recommends using tags to organize resources effectively and to activate cost allocation tags to enable detailed tracking of costs by categories such as department, environment, and application. This approach provides the granularity needed for tracking and managing AWS costs accurately. AWS Cost Management and Billing tools provide insights but do not inherently categorize costs without tags.

Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) supports SQL Server and other relational databases while handling administrative tasks such as backups, patching, monitoring, and scaling. This allows the company to migrate its SQL Server database without managing the infrastructure manually. Amazon EC2for SQL Server would require more administrative overhead, as the company would be responsible for the maintenance. Amazon DynamoDB and Aurora do not support SQL Server directly.

Cost Explorer enables visualization and analysis of AWS costs and usage over specific time periods. It provides detailed reports, trends, and forecasts for cost management. Consolidated billing and AWS Organizations are useful for billing management across accounts, while AWS Budgets helps set spending thresholds but does not provide visualization tools for cost and usage.

The architecture concept of the AWS Cloud that meets the requirements of the company that wants to migrate to the AWS Cloud and needs the ability to acquire and release resources as needed is elasticity. Elasticity means that AWS customers can quickly and easily provision and scale up or down AWS resources as their demand changes, without any upfront costs or long-term commitments. AWS provides various tools and services that enable customers to achieve elasticity, such as Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS CloudFormation. Elasticity helps customers optimize their performance, availability, and cost efficiency. Availability, reliability, and durability are other architecture concepts of the AWS Cloud, but they are not directly related to the ability to acquire and release resources as needed. Availability means that AWS customers can access their AWS resources and applications whenever and wherever they need them. Reliability means that AWS customers can depend on their AWS resources and applications to functioncorrectly and consistently. Durability means that AWS customers can preserve their data and objects for long periods of time without loss or corruption12

 AWS Health API is available to a company that has an AWS Business Support plan. The AWS Health API provides programmatic access to the AWS Health information that is presented in the AWS Personal Health Dashboard. The AWS Health API can help users get timely and personalized information about events that can affect the availability and performance of their AWS resources, such as scheduled maintenance, network issues, or service disruptions. The AWS Health API can also integrate with other AWS services, such as Amazon CloudWatch Events and AWS Lambda, to enable automated actions and notifications. AWS Health API OverviewAWS Support Plans

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) that uses edge locations to cache content closer to users, reducing latency and improving performance. It supports the delivery of web content, such as videos and images, by caching copies at edge locations around the world. Amazon Kinesis, SQS, and Route 53 do not utilize edge locations for content caching.

Rightsizing all the EC2 instances that are used in the deployment is the best way to run the workload in the most cost-effective way. Rightsizing means choosing the optimal instance type and size for the workload based on the performance and capacity requirements. Rightsizing helps to avoid over-provisioning or under-provisioning of the EC2 instances, which can result in wasted resources or poor performance. Rightsizing also helps to take advantage of the different pricing models and features that AWS offers, such as On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot Instances, and Auto Scaling. For more information, see Rightsizing Your Instances and [Cost Optimization with AWS].

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Overview:

ACM simplifies the process of provisioning, managing, and deploying SSL/TLS certificates.

These certificates are used to secure HTTPS connections, ensuring encrypted communication between clients and servers.

How ACM Meets the Goal:

Provides free public SSL/TLS certificates.

Automates certificate renewals and deployment with services like Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon CloudFront.

Reduces the operational overhead of managing SSL/TLS certificates.

Why Other Options Are Incorrect:

A. AWS WAF:Focuses on application-layer protection (e.g., SQL injection, cross-site scripting) but does not handle SSL/TLS encryption.

B. AWS Shield:Provides protection against DDoS attacks, not encryption.

C. Amazon VPC:Used for networking and security at the infrastructure level but does not manage SSL/TLS certificates.

The AWS service that is designed to help users orchestrate a workflow process for a set of AWS Lambda functions is AWS Step Functions. AWS Step Functions is a service that helps userscoordinate multiple AWS services into serverless workflows that can be triggered by events, such as messages, API calls, or schedules. AWS Step Functions allows users to create and visualize complex workflows that can include branching, parallel execution, error handling, retries, and timeouts. AWS Step Functions can integrate with AWS Lambda to orchestrate a sequence of Lambda functions that perform different tasks or logic. Amazon DynamoDB, AWS CodePipeline, and AWS Batch are not the best services to use for orchestrating a workflow process for a set of AWS Lambda functions. Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and consistent performance, scalability, and flexibility. AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps users automate the release process of their applications. AWS Batch is a fully managed service that helps users run batch computing workloads on the AWS Cloud.

AWS Fargate and Amazon S3 are both serverless services. Fargate allows users to run containers without managing the underlying infrastructure, while S3 provides object storage without the need for provisioning or managing servers. Amazon EC2, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka, and Amazon EMR involve server management to varying degrees and are not serverless by nature.

AWS Secrets Manager is an AWS service that can be used to securely store and encrypt passwords for a database. It allows users to manage secrets, such as database credentials, API keys, and tokens, in a centralized and secure way. It also provides features such as automatic rotation, fine-grained access control, and auditing. AWS Shield is an AWS service that provides protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks for AWS resources and services. It does not store or encrypt passwords for a database. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is an AWS service that allows users to manage access to AWS resources and services. It can be used to create users, groups, roles, and policies that control who can do what in AWS. It does not store or encrypt passwords for a database. Amazon Cognito is an AWS service that provides user identity and data synchronization for web and mobile applications. It can be used to authenticate and authorize users, manage user profiles, and sync user data across devices. It does not store or encrypt passwords for a database.

 The correct answer is C because AWS Trusted Advisor is an AWS service or tool that provides users with the ability to monitor AWS service quotas. AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that provides users with real-time guidance to help them provision their resources following AWS best practices. One of the categories of checks that AWS Trusted Advisor performs is service limits, which monitors the usage of each AWS service and alerts users when they are close to reaching the default limit. The other options are incorrect because they are not AWS services or tools that provide users with the ability to monitor AWS service quotas. AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables users to track user activity and API usage across their AWS account. AWS Cost and Usage Reports is a tool that enables users to access comprehensive information about their AWS costs and usage. AWS Budgets is a tool that enables users to plan their service usage, costs, and reservations. Reference: [AWS Trusted Advisor FAQs]

 Pay-as-you-go pricing is the feature of the AWS Cloud that gives users the ability to pay based on current needs rather than forecasted needs. Pay-as-you-go pricing means that users only pay for theAWS services and resources they use, without any upfront or long-term commitments. This allows users to scale up or down their usage depending on their changing business requirements, and avoid paying for idle or unused capacity. Pay-as-you-go pricing also enables users to benefit from the economies of scale and lower costs of AWS as they grow their business5

Creating an IAM role with the required permissions and attaching the role to the EC2 instance is the most operationally efficient solution to delegate permissions. An IAM role is an entity that defines a set of permissions for making AWS service requests. An IAM role can be assumed by an EC2 instance to access other AWS resources, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB, without having to store any credentials on the instance. This solution is more secure and scalable than using IAM users and their access keys. For more information, see [IAM Roles for Amazon EC2] and [Using an IAM Role to Grant Permissions to Applications Running on Amazon EC2 Instances].

Adding a department tag to each resource and configuring cost allocation tags is an action that can help you accomplish the goal of billing each department for its resource usage with the least operational overhead. Tags are simple labels consisting of a key and an optional value that you can assign to AWS resources. You can use tags to organize your resources and track your AWS costs ona detailed level. Cost allocation tags enable you to track your AWS costs on a detailed level. After you activate cost allocation tags, AWS uses the cost allocation tags to organize your resource costs on your cost allocation report, to make it easier for you to categorize and track your AWS costs2. Moving each department resource to its own VPC or its own AWS account is an action that can help you isolate and control the resources for each department, but it would incur more operational overhead than using tags. Using AWS Organizations to get a billing report for each department is an action that can help you consolidate billing and payment across multiple AWS accounts, but it would not help you bill each department for its resource usage within a single VPC.

AWS Storage Gateway file gateway allows companies to use protocols such as NFS and SMB to store and retrieve objects in Amazon S3. File gateway provides a seamless integration between on-premises applications and Amazon S3, and enables low-latency access to data through local caching. File gateway also supports encryption, compression, and lifecycle management of the objects in Amazon S3. For more information, see What is AWS Storage Gateway? and File Gateway.

 EFS Standard-Infrequent Access (EFS Standard-IA) is the storage class that meets the requirements of storing data across multiple Availability Zones in an AWS Region, that will not be accessed regularly but must be immediately retrievable, most cost-effectively. EFS Standard-IA is designed for files that are accessed less frequently, but still require the same high performance, low latency, and high availability as EFS Standard. EFS Standard-IA has a lower storage cost than EFS Standard, but charges a small additional fee for each access. EFS One Zone and EFS One Zone-IA store data in a single Availability Zone, which reduces the availability and durability compared to EFS Standard and EFS Standard-IA.

 Amazon S3 offers unlimited storage for any amount of data. You can store as many objects as you want, and each object can be as large as 5 terabytes. You pay only for the storage space that you actually use, and there are no minimum commitments or upfront fees. Amazon S3 also provides high durability, availability, scalability, and security for your data.

 AWS Organizations is a service that helps you centrally manage and govern your environment as you grow and scale your AWS resources. You can use AWS Organizations to create groups of accounts and apply policies to them. You can also use AWS Organizations to consolidate billing for multiple accounts. Therefore, the correct answer is B. You can learn more about AWS Organizations and its features .

The company should deploy the EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones to design a highly available application. Availability Zones are isolated locations within an AWS Region that are engineered to be fault-tolerant and operate independently of each other. By deploying the EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones, the company can ensure that their application can withstand the failure of an entire Availability Zone and continue to operate with minimal disruption. Deploying the EC2 instances across multiple edge locations, VPCs, or AWS accounts will not provide the same level of availability and fault tolerance as Availability Zones. Edge locations are part of the Amazon CloudFront service, which is a content delivery network (CDN) that caches and serves webcontent to users. VPCs are virtual networks that isolate the AWS resources within an AWS Region. AWS accounts are the primary units of ownership and access control for AWS resources12

The pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework that is supported by the goals of protecting AWS Cloud information, systems, and assets while performing risk assessment and mitigation tasks is security. Security is the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies. The security pillar covers topics such as identity and access management, data protection, infrastructure protection, detective controls, incident response, and compliance

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. It supports both key-value and document data models, and allows you to create tables that can store and retrieve any amount of data, and serve any level of request traffic. You can also use DynamoDB Streams to capture data modification events in DynamoDB tables.

AWS Outposts is a service that offers fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with AWS-designed hardware that allow you to run your workloads on premises and seamlessly connect to AWS services in the cloud. AWS Outposts is ideal for workloads that require low latency, local data processing, or local data storage. With AWS Outposts, you can use the same AWS APIs, tools, and infrastructure across on premises and the cloud to deliver a truly consistent hybrid experience5. Availability Zones are isolated locations within each AWS Region that are engineered to be fault-tolerant and provide high availability. AWS Local Zones are extensions of AWS Regions that are placed closer to large population, industry, and IT centers where no AWS Region exists today. AWS Wavelength is a service that enables developers to build applications that deliver ultra-low latency to mobile devices and users by deploying AWS compute and storage at the edge of the 5G network. None of these services or features can help you host a critical application with minimum latency at a remote site that has a slow internet connection.

 The AWS account root user is the first sign-in identity that is available when an AWS account is created. It has complete access to all AWS services and resources in the account. The root user email address and password are the same credentials that are used to sign in to the AWS Management Console4. The root user should be used only to perform a few account and servicemanagement tasks. For day-to-day tasks, it is recommended to use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users or roles instead.

 Create annotated documentation is the design principle that is included in the operational excellence pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. According to the AWS Well-Architected Framework whitepaper, creating annotated documentation means "documenting your workload so that the team understands the architecture, how to operate the workload, and how the workload delivers value to customers."3 Anticipate failure, ensure performance efficiency, and optimize costs are design principles that belong to other pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, such as reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization.

 The correct answer is C because AWS Outposts is an AWS service that enables the company to meet the requirements. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility. AWS Outposts allows customers to run their workloads on the same hardware and software that AWS uses in its cloud, while maintaining local access and control. The other options are incorrect because they are not AWS services that enable the company to meet the requirements. AWS Device Farm is an AWS service that enables customers to test their mobile and web applications on real devices in the AWS Cloud. AWS Fargate is an AWS service that enables customers to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters. AWS Ground Station is an AWS service that enables customers to communicate with satellites and downlink data from orbit. Reference: AWS Outposts FAQs

 AWS offers different support plans to meet the needs of different customers. The AWS Enterprise Support plan is the highest level of support that provides customers with concierge-like service, where the main focus is helping them achieve their outcomes and find success in the cloud. One of the benefits of the AWS Enterprise Support plan is that customers get designated support from an AWS technical account manager (TAM), who provides consultative architectural and operational guidance based on their applications and use cases. Therefore, the correct answer is B. You can learn more about AWS support plans and their benefits .

 The correct answer is D because AWS Security Hub is a service that aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes security alerts and findings from multiple AWS services, such as Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Macie, AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS IAM Access Analyzer. The other options are incorrect because they are not services that aggregate security alerts and findings from multiple AWS services. Amazon Detective is a service that helps users analyze and visualize security data to investigate and remediate potential issues. Amazon Inspector is a service that helps users find security vulnerabilities and deviations from best practices in their Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon Macie is a service that helps users discover, classify, and protect sensitive data stored in Amazon S3. Reference: AWS Security Hub FAQs

Outbound data transfers without acceleration and compute resources that are currently in use are the factors that affect costs in the AWS Cloud. Outbound data transfers without acceleration refer to the amount of data that is transferred from AWS to the internet, without using any service that can optimize the speed and cost of the data transfer, such as AWS Global Accelerator or Amazon CloudFront. Outbound data transfers are charged at different rates depending on the source and destination AWS Regions, and the volume of data transferred. Compute resources that are currently in use refer to the AWS services and resources that provide computing capacity, such as Amazon EC2 instances, AWS Lambda functions, or Amazon ECS tasks. Compute resources are charged based on the type, size, and configuration of the resources, and the duration and frequency of their usage.

AWS Organizations enables consolidated billing across multiple AWS accounts and allows for centralized management of security and compliance policies. It provides account grouping and centralized payment management, making it the optimal choice for a company requiring consolidated billing and centralized governance. AWS Cost and Usage Report only provides billing information, and AWS Config and Security Hub offer monitoring and security insights but do not handle billing consolidation.

The correct answers are A and C because patching AWS network devices and providing physical security for compute resources are tasks that are the responsibility of AWS, according to the AWS shared responsibility model. The AWS shared responsibility model is a framework that defines the division of responsibilities between AWS and the customer for security and compliance. AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, which includes the global infrastructure, such as the regions, availability zones, and edge locations; the hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run the AWS services; and the virtualization layer that separates the customer instances and storage. The customer is responsible for the security in the cloud, which includes the customer data, the guest operating systems, the applications, the identity and access management, the firewall configuration, and the encryption. The other options are incorrect because they are tasks that are the responsibility of the customer, according to the AWS shared responsibility model. Setting user password rules, configuring security groups, and patching the operating system of an Amazon EC2 instance are all tasks that the customer has to perform to secure their AWS environment. Reference: AWS Shared Responsibility Model

 The most cost-effective EC2 instance purchasing option for the company that needs to host a web server on Amazon EC2 instances for at least 1 year and cannot tolerate interruption is Partial Upfront Reserved Instances. Reserved Instances are a pricing model that offer significant discounts compared to On-Demand Instances in exchange for a commitment to use a specific amount of compute capacity for a fixed period of time (1 or 3 years). Partial Upfront Reserved Instances require customers to pay a portion of the total cost upfront, and the remaining cost in monthly installments over the term. This option offers a lower effective hourly rate than No Upfront Reserved Instances, which require no upfront payment but have higher monthly payments. On-Demand Instances and Spot Instances are not the best options for the company. On-Demand Instances are a pricing model that offer the most flexibility and no long-term commitment, but have the highest hourly rate. Spot Instances are a pricing model that offer the lowest cost, but are subject to interruption based on supply and demand34

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is the AWS service or tool that can help the company launch the number of EC2 instances that will be needed to handle the workload. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling automatically adjusts the capacity of the EC2 instances based on the demand and the predefined scaling policies. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling also helps to improve availability and reduce costs by scaling in and out as needed. For more information, see What is Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling? and [Getting Started with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling].

Customers share responsibility with AWS for security and compliance of AWS accounts and resources. This is part of the AWS shared responsibility model, which defines the division of responsibilities between AWS and the customer for security and compliance. AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, which includes the physical and environmental controls of the AWS global infrastructure, such as power, cooling, fire suppression, and physical access. The customer is responsible for the security in the cloud, which includes the configuration and management of the AWS resources and applications, such as identity and access management, encryption, firewall, and backup. For more information, see AWS Shared Responsibility Model and AWS Cloud Security.

 Resource elasticity is an AWS value proposition that describes a user’s ability to scale infrastructure based on demand. Resource elasticity means that the user can provision or deprovision resources quickly and easily, without any upfront commitment or long-term contract. Resource elasticity can help the user optimize the cost and performance of the application, as well as respond to changing business needs and customer expectations. Resource elasticity can be achieved by using services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ECS, and AWS Lambda. [AWS Cloud Value Framework] AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner - aws.amazon.com

ACLs are an AWS service or feature that the developer can use to restrict read and write access to the S3 bucket. ACLs are access control lists that grant basic permissions to other AWS accounts or predefined groups. They can be used to grant read or write access to an S3 bucket or an object3. Security groups are virtual firewalls that control the inbound and outbound traffic for Amazon EC2 instances. They are not a service or feature that can be used to restrict access to an S3 bucket. Amazon CloudWatch is a service that provides monitoring and observability for AWS resources and applications. It can be used to collect and analyze metrics, logs, events, and alarms. It is not a service or feature that can be used to restrict access to an S3 bucket. AWS CloudTrail is a service that provides governance, compliance, and audit for AWS accounts and resources. It can be used to track and record the API calls and user activity in AWS. It is not a service or feature that can be used to restrict access to an S3 bucket.

 AWS CloudFormation is a service that gives developers and businesses an easy way to create a collection of related AWS and third-party resources, and provision and manage them in an orderly and predictable fashion. You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS and third-party resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application.

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable DNS web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost-effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating domain names into the numeric IP addresses that computers use to connect to each other2. Amazon Route 53 also offers other features such as health checks, traffic management, domain name registration, and DNSSEC3.

Amazon RDS and Amazon EC2 are two AWS services that you can use to host and run a MySQL database. Amazon RDS is a service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. You can use Amazon RDS to launch a MySQL database instance and let Amazon RDS manage common database tasks such as backups, patching, scaling, and replication6. Amazon EC2 is a service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. You can use Amazon EC2 to launch a virtual server and install MySQL software on it. You have complete control over your database configuration, but you are responsible for managing and maintaining the database software and the underlying infrastructure7. Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. Amazon S3 is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ. None of these services can help you host and run a MySQL database.

 Cost Explorer is an AWS service or tool that can be used to forecast AWS spending. It allows users to analyze their AWS costs and usage using interactive graphs and tables. It also provides features such as filtering, grouping, and forecasting to help users plan their future spending. Amazon DevPay is an AWS service that allows developers to sell applications that are built on AWS services. It handles the billing and metering for the customers of the applications and collects payments from them. It is not a tool for forecasting AWS spending. AWS Organizations is an AWS service that allows users to centrally manage and govern their AWS accounts. It provides features such as creating groups of accounts, applying policies, and automating account creation. It is not a tool for forecasting AWS spending. AWS Trusted Advisor is an AWS service that provides best practices and recommendations to optimize the performance, security, and cost of AWS resources. It can helpusers identify opportunities to reduce their AWS costs, but it is not a tool for forecasting AWS spending

Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an AWS Region that are engineered to be isolated from failures. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security, and is connected to other Availability Zones in the same Region by a low-latency network. Therefore, the correct answers are A and D. You can learn more about Availability Zones and their characteristics

Amazon RDS supports six database engines: Amazon Aurora, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server. Apache Cassandra, MongoDB, and Neo4j are not compatible with Amazon RDS. Therefore, the correct answer is D. You can learn more about Amazon RDS and its supported database engines

 Amazon Personalize is a fully managed machine learning service that customers can use to generate personalized recommendations for their users. It can also generate user segments based on the users’ affinity for certain items or item metadata. Amazon Personalize uses the customers’ data to train and deploy custom recommendation models that can be integrated into their applications. Therefore, the correct answer is B. You can learn more about Amazon Personalize and its use case.

 One of the cost efficiency principles related to the AWS Cloud is to right-size services based on capacity requirements. This means choosing the most appropriate type and size of AWS resources to meet the performance and scalability needs of the applications, while avoiding over-provisioning or under-provisioning. By right-sizing services, users can optimize the costs and benefits of using the AWS Cloud1

The correct answer to the question is B because providing user access with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a customer responsibility according to the AWS shared responsibilitymodel. The AWS shared responsibility model is a framework that defines the division of responsibilities between AWS and the customer for security and compliance. AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, which includes the global infrastructure, such as the regions, availability zones, and edge locations; the hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run the AWS services; and the virtualization layer that separates the customer instances and storage. The customer is responsible for the security in the cloud, which includes the customer data, the guest operating systems, the applications, the identity and access management, the firewall configuration, and the encryption. IAM is an AWS service that enables customers to manage access and permissions to AWS resources and services. Customers are responsible for creating and managing IAM users, groups, roles, and policies, and ensuring that they follow the principle of least privilege. Reference: AWS Shared Responsibility Model

Amazon ElastiCache is a service that offers fully managed in-memory data store and cache services that deliver sub-millisecond response times to applications. You can use Amazon ElastiCache to improve the performance of your applications by retrieving data from fast, managed, in-memory data stores, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases. Amazon Aurora is a relational database service that combines the performance and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Amazon RDS is a service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. None of these services are in-memory data store services.

Amazon RDS is the AWS service that will meet the requirements of using a managed service to simplify the setup, operation, and scaling of a MySQL database in the AWS Cloud. Amazon RDS is a relational database service that supports MySQL and other popular database engines. Amazon RDS handles routine database tasks such as provisioning, patching, backup, recovery, and scaling. Amazon RDS also offers high availability, security, and compatibility features3

The company follows the AWS Cloud design principle of ensuring traceability by using AWS CloudTrail. AWS CloudTrail is a service that records the API calls and events made by or on behalf of the AWS account. The company can use AWS CloudTrail to monitor, audit, and analyze the activity and changes in their AWS resources and applications. AWS CloudTrail helps the company to achieve compliance, security, governance, and operational efficiency. Recovering automatically, performing operations as code, and measuring efficiency are other AWS Cloud design principles, but they are not directly related to using AWS CloudTrail. Recovering automatically means that the company can design their cloud workloads to handle failures gracefully and resume normal operations without manual intervention. Performing operations as code means that the company can automate the creation, configuration, and management of their cloud resources using scripts or templates. Measuring efficiency means that the company can monitor and optimize the performance and utilization of their cloud resources and applications34

AWS is responsible for decommissioning end-of-life underlying storage devices that are used to host data on AWS. AWS follows strict and audited data destruction processes to ensure that customer data is not exposed to unauthorized individuals or devices when an AWS storage device reaches the end of its useful life. AWS uses techniques detailed in DoD 5220.22-M (“National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual”) or NIST 800-88 (“Guidelines for Media Sanitization”) to destroy data as part of the decommissioning process3.

 AWS Regions are geographic areas around the world where AWS has clusters of data centers. Each AWS Region consists of multiple, isolated, and physically separate AZ’s within a geographic area. By hosting the customer’s data in a specific AWS Region, the company can meet the requirement of hosting the data in the customer’s country. AWS Shield is a service that provides always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency, so there is no need to engage AWS Support to benefit from DDoS protection. Amazon S3 Object Lock is afeature that allows you to store objects using a write-once-read-many (WORM) model. You can use it to prevent an object from being deleted or overwritten for a fixed amount of time or indefinitely. Placement groups are logical grouping of instances within a single Availability Zone. Placement groups enable applications to participate in a low-latency, 10 Gbps network. None of these services or infrastructure components can help the company host the customer’s data in a different country.

AWS Secrets Manager is the AWS service where database credentials should be stored for maximum security. AWS Secrets Manager helps to protect the secrets, such as database credentials, passwords, API keys, and tokens, that are used to access applications, services, and resources. AWS Secrets Manager enables secure storage, encryption, rotation, and retrieval of the secrets. AWS Secrets Manager also integrates with other AWS services, such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), and AWS Lambda. For more information, see [What is AWS Secrets Manager?] and [Getting Started with AWS Secrets Manager].

Security of the cloud refers to the security of the cloud infrastructure that runs all the AWS services. This includes the hardware, software, networking, and facilities that AWS operates and manages. AWS is responsible for protecting the security of the cloud as part of the AWS shared responsibility model. Availability of AWS services such as Amazon EC2 refers to the ability of the services to be up and running and to meet the expected performance. Availability is part of the reliability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework and is a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer . Implementation of password policies for IAM users refers to the security of the customer data and applications in the cloud. This includes the configuration and management of IAM user permissions, encryption keys, security group rules, network ACLs, and other aspects of access management. The customer is responsible for protecting the security in the cloud as part of the AWS shared responsibility model. Security of customer environments by using AWS Network Firewall partners refers to the security of the customer data and applications in the cloud. AWS Network Firewall is a managed service that provides network protection for Amazon VPCs. It allows customers to use AWS Marketplace partners to implement firewall rules and policies. The customer is responsible for protecting the security in the cloud as part of the AWS shared responsibility model .

 AWS Abuse team is the AWS group or team that the company should notify if it suspects that its AWS resources are being used for illegal activities. AWS Abuse team is a dedicated team that handles reports of abuse, such as spam, phishing, malware, denial-of-service attacks, and unauthorized access, involving AWS resources. The company can contact the AWS Abuse team byfilling out the [Report Abuse of AWS Resources form] or sending an email to abuse@amazonaws.com. The company should provide as much information as possible, such as the source and destination IP addresses, timestamps, log files, and screenshots, to help the AWS Abuse team investigate and take appropriate actions. For more information, see [Reporting Abuse] and [AWS Acceptable Use Policy].

 Amazon Redshift Serverless is the AWS service that will meet the requirements of the company that wants to move its data warehouse application to the AWS Cloud and run and scale its analyticsservices without needing to provision and manage data warehouse clusters. Amazon Redshift Serverless is a new feature of Amazon Redshift, which is a fully managed data warehouse service that allows customers to run complex queries and analytics on large volumes of structured and semi-structured data. Amazon Redshift Serverless automatically scales the compute and storage resources based on the workload demand, and customers only pay for the resources they consume. Amazon Redshift Serverless also simplifies the management and maintenance of the data warehouse, as customers do not need to worry about choosing the right cluster size, resizing the cluster, or distributing the data across the nodes. Amazon Redshift provisioned data warehouse, Amazon Athena, and Amazon S3 are not the best services to meet the requirements of the company. Amazon Redshift provisioned data warehouse requires customers to choose the number and type of nodes for their cluster, and manually resize the cluster if their workload changes. Amazon Athena is a serverless query service that allows customers to analyze data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL, but it is not a data warehouse service that can store and organize the data. Amazon S3 is a scalable object storage service that can store any amount and type of data, but it is not a data warehouse service that can run complex queries and analytics on the data.

 Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is the AWS service that the company should use to migrate its Microsoft SQL Server database management system from on premises to the AWS Cloud. Amazon RDS is a fully managed service that provides a scalable, secure, and high-performance relational database platform. Amazon RDS supports several database engines, including Microsoft SQL Server. Amazon RDS reduces the management overhead for the database environment by taking care of tasks such as provisioning, patching, backup, recovery, andmonitoring. For more information, see What is Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)? and Amazon RDS for SQL Server.

The company should use the AWS Billing console to access a report about the estimated environmental impact of the company’s AWS usage. The AWS Billing console provides customers with various tools and reports to manage and monitor their AWS costs and usage. One of the reports available in the AWS Billing console is the AWS Sustainability Dashboard, which shows the estimated carbon footprint and energy mix of the customer’s AWS usage. The company can use this dashboard to measure and improve the sustainability of their cloud workloads. AWS Organizations, IAM policy, and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) are not services or features that can provide a report about the estimated environmental impact of the company’s AWS usage. AWS Organizations is a service that enables customers to centrally manage and govern their AWS accounts. IAM policy is a document that defines the permissions for an IAM identity (user, group, or role) or an AWS resource. Amazon SNS is a fully managed pub/sub messaging service that enables customers to send messages to subscribers or other AWS services.

Cost optimization is the pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework that aligns with the requirements of not relying on elaborate forecasting and paying only for the resources that are used. The cost optimization pillar focuses on the ability of a system to deliver business value at the lowest price point. Cost optimization involves using the right AWS services and resources for the workload, measuring and monitoring the cost and usage, and continuously improving the cost efficiency. Cost optimization also leverages the benefits of the AWS Cloud, such as pay-as-you-go pricing, elasticity, and scalability. For more information, see [Cost Optimization Pillar] and [Cost Optimization].

 Patch management and configuration management are controls that are the responsibility of both AWS and AWS customers, according to the AWS shared responsibility model. Patch management is the process of applying updates to software and applications to fix vulnerabilities, bugs, or performance issues. Configuration management is the process of defining and maintaining the settings and parameters of systems and applications to ensure their consistency and reliability. AWS is responsible for patching and configuring the software and services that it manages, such as the AWS global infrastructure, the hypervisor, and the AWS managed services. The customer is responsible for patching and configuring the software and services that they manage, such as the guest operating system, the applications, and the AWS customer-managed services. Physical and environmental controls are the responsibility of AWS, according to the AWS shared responsibility model. Physical and environmental controls are the measures that protect the physical security and availability of the AWS global infrastructure, such as power, cooling, fire suppression, and access control. AWS is responsible for maintaining these controls and ensuring the resilience and reliability of the AWS Cloud. Account structures are the responsibility of the customer, according to the AWS shared responsibility model. Account structures are the ways that customers organize and manage their AWS accounts and resources, such as using AWS Organizations, IAM users and roles, resource tagging, and billing preferences. The customer is responsible for creating and configuring these structures and ensuring the security and governance of their AWS environment. Choice of the AWS Region where data is stored is the responsibility of the customer, according to the AWS sharedresponsibility model. AWS Regions are geographic areas that consist of multiple isolated Availability Zones. Customers can choose which AWS Region to store their data and run their applications, depending on their latency, compliance, and cost requirements. The customer is responsible for selecting the appropriate AWS Region and ensuring the data sovereignty and regulatory compliance of their data.

 The correct answer is C because AWS CloudHSM is an AWS service that enables the security engineer to meet the requirements. AWS CloudHSM is a service that provides customers with dedicated hardware security modules (HSMs) to create, control, and manage their own cryptographic keys in the AWS Cloud. AWS CloudHSM allows customers to meet strict regulatory compliance requirements for data security, such as FIPS 140-2 Level 3, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA. The other options are incorrect because they are not AWS services that enable the security engineer to meet the requirements. AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is a service that provides customers with a fully managed, scalable, and integrated key management system to create and control encryption keys for AWS services and applications. AWS KMS does not provide customers with single-tenant or dedicated HSMs. AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) is a service that provides customers with a simple and secure way to provision, manage, and deploy public and private Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates for use with AWS services and internal connected resources. ACM does not provide customers with HSMs or cryptographic keys. AWS Systems Manager is a service that provides customers with a unified user interface to view operational data from multiple AWS services and automate operational tasks across their AWS resources. AWS Systems Manager does not provide customers with HSMs or cryptographic keys. Reference: AWS CloudHSM FAQs

The correct answers to the questions are B and E because reliability and operational excellence are pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a set of best practices and guidelines for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud. The AWS Well-Architected Framework consists of five pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization. Each pillar has a set of design principles that describe the characteristics of a well-architected system. Reliability is the pillar that focuses on the ability of a system to recover from failures and meet business and customer demand. Operational excellence is the pillar that focuses on the ability of a system to run and monitor processes that support business outcomes and continually improve. The other options are incorrect because they are not pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. Availability, scalability, and responsive design are important aspects of cloud architecture, but they are not separate pillars in the framework. Availability and scalability are related to the reliability and performance efficiency pillars, while responsive design is related to the customer experience and user interface. Reference: AWS Well-Architected Framework

 A and B are correct because AWS CodeCommit is the AWS service that provides a fully managed source control service that hosts secure Git-based repositories1, and AWS CodeDeploy is the AWS service that automates code deployments to any instance, including Amazon EC2 instances and servers running on-premises2. These two services can be used together to store source code and update the running software when the code changes. C is incorrect because Amazon DynamoDB is the AWS service that provides a fully managed NoSQL database service that supports key-value and document data models3. It is not related to storing source code or updating software. D is incorrect because Amazon S3 is the AWS service that provides object storage through a web service interface4. It can be used to store source code, but it does not provide source control features or update software. E is incorrect because Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is the AWS service that allows users to run, scale, and secure Docker container applications. It can be used to deploy containerized software, but it does not store source code or update software.

 Amazon ElastiCache is a fully managed in-memory data store and cache service that delivers sub-millisecond response times to applications. You can use ElastiCache as a primary data store for your applications, or as a cache to improve the performance of your existing databases. ElastiCache supports two popular open-source in-memory engines: Redis and Memcached5.

Amazon EC2 usage is calculated by either the hour or the second based on the size of the instance, operating system, and the AWS Region where the instances are launched. Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance, from the time an instance is launched until it’s terminated or stopped. Each partial instance-hour consumed is billed per-second for Linuxinstances and as a full hour for all other instance types1. Therefore, the customer will be billed for 3 hours and 6 minutes for running an On-Demand Amazon Linux EC2 instance for 3 hours, 5 minutes, and 6 seconds. References: Understand Amazon EC2 instance-hours billing

Hardware and infrastructure is the option that AWS is responsible for under the AWS shared responsibility model. The AWS shared responsibility model describes how AWS and customers share responsibilities for security and compliance in the cloud. AWS is responsible for security of the cloud, which means protecting the infrastructure that runs all the services offered in the AWS Cloud. This infrastructure is composed of the hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run AWS Cloud services. Customers are responsible for security in the cloud, which means taking care of the security of their own applications, data, and operating systems. This includes network and firewall configuration, client-side data encryption, management of user permissions, and more.

 Amazon CloudWatch is a service that provides monitoring and observability for AWS resources and applications. Users can create custom dashboards to collect and visualize metrics, logs, alarms, and events from different sources5. AWS X-Ray is a service that provides distributed tracing and analysis for applications. AWS Systems Manager is a service that provides operational management for AWS resources and applications. AWS CloudTrail is a service that provides governance, compliance, and auditing for AWS account activity.

 The AWS service that will meet the requirements of the company that needs to host a highly available application in the AWS Cloud that runs infrequently for short periods of time with the least amount of operational overhead is AWS Lambda. AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that allows customers to run code without provisioning or managing servers. The company can use AWS Lambda to create and deploy their application as functions that are triggered by events, such as API calls, messages, or schedules. AWS Lambda automatically scales the compute resources based on the demand, and customers only pay for the compute time they consume. AWS Lambda also simplifies the management and maintenance of the application, as customers do not need to worry about the underlying infrastructure, security, or availability. Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, and Amazon Aurora are not the best services to use for this purpose. Amazon EC2 is a service that provides scalable compute capacity in the cloud, and allows customers to launch and run virtual servers, called instances, with a variety of operating systems, configurations, and specifications. Amazon EC2 requires customers to provision and manage the instances, and pay for the instance hours they use, regardless of the application usage. AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that allows customers to run containerized applications without managing servers or clusters. AWS Fargate requires customers to specify the amount of CPU and memory resources for each container, and pay for the resources they allocate, regardless of the application usage. Amazon Aurora is a fully managed relational database service that provides high performance, availability, and compatibility. Amazon Aurora is not a compute service, and it is not suitable for hosting an application that runs infrequently for short periods of time12

Architecture optimization is the best practice for cost governance that this example shows. Architecture optimization is the process of designing and implementing AWS solutions that are efficient, scalable, and cost-effective. By using specific AWS services to improve efficiency and reduce cost, the company is following the architecture optimization best practice. Some of the techniques for architecture optimization include using the right size and type of resources, leveraging elasticity and scalability, choosing the most suitable storage class, and using serverless and managed services2.

 Amazon CloudFront is the AWS service that offers a global content delivery network (CDN) that helps companies securely deliver websites, videos, applications, and APIs at high speeds with low latency. Amazon CloudFront is a web service that speeds up distribution of static and dynamic web content, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and image files, to users. Amazon CloudFront uses a global network of edge locations, located near users’ geographic locations, to cache and serve content with high availability and performance. Amazon CloudFront also provides features such as AWS Shield for DDoS protection, AWS Certificate Manager for SSL/TLS encryption, AWS WAF for web application firewall, and AWS Lambda@Edge for customizing content delivery with serverless code. Amazon EC2, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS CloudFormation are not services that offer a global CDN. Amazon EC2 is a service that provides scalable compute capacity in the cloud. Amazon CloudWatch is a service that provides monitoring and observability for AWS resources andapplications. AWS CloudFormation is a service that provides a common language to model and provision AWS resources and their dependencies.

 The perspective of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) that connects technology and business is governance. The governance perspective focuses on the alignment of the IT strategy and processes with the business strategy and goals, as well as the management of the IT budget, risk, and compliance. The governance perspective capabilities are portfolio management, business performance management, and IT governance. The governance perspective helps organizations ensure that their cloud adoption delivers the expected business value and outcomes, and that their cloud solutions are secure, reliable, and compliant. Operations, people, and security are other perspectives of the AWS CAF, but they do not directly connect technology and business. The operations perspective focuses on the management and monitoring of the cloud resources and applications, as well as the automation and optimization of the operational processes. The people perspective focuses on the development and empowerment of the human resources, as well as the transformation of the organizational culture and structure. The security perspective focuses on the protection of the information assets and systems in the cloud, as well as the implementation of the security policies and controls.

 The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a set of best practices and guidelines for designing and operating systems in the cloud. The framework consists of five pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization. The concept of elasticity represents a system’s ability to adapt to changes in demand by scaling resources up or down automatically. Therefore, the correct answer is B. You can learn more about the AWS Well-Architected Framework and its pillars

To achieve high availability in the event of a natural disaster, the company should use EC2 instances in multiple AWS Regions. AWS Regions are geographically isolated areas that consist of multiple Availability Zones. Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an AWS Region that areengineered to be isolated from failures. By using EC2 instances in multiple AWS Regions, the company can ensure that its applications can continue to run even if one Region is affected by a disaster. AWS Global InfrastructureAWS Well-Architected Framework

 AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager is a capability that allows users to automate the security updates for their operating systems and applications. It enables users to scan their instances for missing patches, define patch baselines, schedule patching windows, and monitor patch compliance. It supports Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon Lightsail instances, and on-premises servers. AWS Shield is a service that provides protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks for AWS resources and services. It does not automate the security updates for operating systems and applications. Connecting to each server by using a remote desktop connection and running an update script is a manual and time-consuming solution that requires a lot of operational effort. It is not a recommended best practice for automating the security updates for operating systems and applications. Amazon GuardDuty is a service that provides intelligent threat detection and continuous monitoring for AWS accounts and resources. It does not automate the security updates for operating systems and applications.

AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) is a tool that helps organizations understand how cloud adoption transforms the way they work, and it provides structure to identify and address gaps in skills and processes. Applying the AWS CAF in your organization results in an actionable plan that helps you prepare the cloud environment, enable your staff with new skills, and migrate your applications. AWS Pricing Calculator is a tool that helps you estimate the cost of AWS services for your use cases and compare the cost of different AWS service configurations. AWS Well-Architected Framework is a tool that helps you review and improve your cloud-based architectures and better understand the business impact of your design decisions. AWS Budgets is a tool that helps you plan your service usage, service costs, and instance reservations, and track how close your plan is to your budgeted amount.

AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that works with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). AWS Fargate allows you to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters of Amazon EC2 instances. With AWS Fargate, you only pay for the compute resources you use to run your containers, and you don’t need to worry about scaling, patching, securing, or maintaining the underlying infrastructure. AWS Fargate simplifies the deployment and management of containerized applications, and enables you to focus on building and running your applications instead of managing the infrastructure. References: AWS Fargate, What is AWS Fargate?

 AWS Lambda is a compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. AWS Lambda executes your code only when needed and scales automatically, from a few requests per day to thousands per second. You pay only for the compute time you consume - there is no charge when your code is not running. With AWS Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration. AWS Lambda runs your code on a high-availability compute infrastructure and performs all of the administration of the compute resources, including server and operating system maintenance, capacity provisioning and automatic scaling, code monitoring and logging

 The correct answer is A because an Availability Zone consists of one or more data centers in a single location. An Availability Zone is an isolated location within an AWS Region that has independent power, cooling, and networking. Each Availability Zone has one or more data centers that host the physical servers and storage devices that run the AWS services. The other options are incorrect because they are not accurate descriptions of an Availability Zone. Two or more data centers in multiple locations are not an Availability Zone, but rather multiple Availability Zones within an AWS Region. One or more physical hosts in a single data center are not an Availability Zone, butrather the components of a data center within an Availability Zone. Two or more physical hosts in multiple data centers are not an Availability Zone, but rather the components of multiple data centers within one or more Availability Zones. Reference: [Regions, Availability Zones, and Local Zones]

A network access control list (network ACL) is a feature that acts as a firewall for controlling traffic in and out of one or more subnets in a virtual private cloud (VPC). Network ACLs can be configured with rules that allow or deny traffic based on the source and destination IP addresses, ports, and protocols1. AWS Security Hub is a service that provides a comprehensive view of the security posture of AWS accounts and resources2. Security groups are features that act as firewalls for controlling traffic at the instance level3. AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect web applications from common web exploits4.

Under the AWS shared responsibility model, AWS is responsible for ensuring the security of the internal network in the AWS data centers, as well as the physical security of the hardware and facilities that run AWS services. AWS customers are responsible for configuring the security group rules that determine which ports are open on an EC2 Linux instance, patching the guest operating system with the latest security patches on EC2, and turning on server-side encryption for S3 buckets. Source: AWS Shared Responsibility Model

The correct answer to the question is D because AWS Trusted Advisor is an AWS service that can be used to accomplish the goal of identifying any security group that is allowing unrestricted incoming SSH traffic. AWS Trusted Advisor is a service that provides customers with recommendations that help them follow AWS best practices. Trusted Advisor evaluates the customer’s AWS environment and identifies ways to optimize their AWS infrastructure, improve security and performance, reduce costs, and monitor service quotas. One of the checks that Trusted Advisor performs is the Security Groups - Specific Ports Unrestricted check, which flags security groups that allow unrestricted access to specific ports, such as port 22 for SSH. Customers can use this check to review and modify their security group rules to restrict SSH access to only authorized sources. Reference: Security Groups - Specific Ports Unrestricted

 AWS Pricing Calculator can be used to estimate costs before deployment. AWS Pricing Calculator is a tool that helps the user to compare the cost of AWS services for different use cases and configurations. The user can create estimates for various AWS services, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, and more. The user can also adjust the parameters, such as region, instance type, storage size, and duration, to see how they affect the cost. AWS Pricing Calculator provides a detailed breakdown of the estimated cost, as well as a summary of the key drivers of the cost.

According to the AWS shared responsibility model, the customer is responsible for security in the cloud, which includes the tasks of configuring the AWS provided security group firewall and classifying company assets in the AWS Cloud. A security group is a virtual firewall that controls the inbound and outbound traffic for one or more EC2 instances. The customer must configure the security group rules to allow or deny traffic based on protocol, port, or source and destination IP address2 Classifying company assets in the AWS Cloud means identifying the types, categories, and sensitivity levels of the data and resources that the customer stores and processes on AWS. The customer must also determine the applicable compliance requirements and regulations that apply to their assets, and implement the appropriate security controls and measures to protect them

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is a fully managed service that delivers real-time streaming data to destinations such as Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and Splunk. You can use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to capture, transform, and load streaming data from multiple sources, such as web applications, mobile devices, IoT sensors, and social media.

The scenario represents the operational excellence pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which focuses on running and monitoring systems to deliver business value and continually improve supporting processes and procedures1. Security, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and reliability are the other four pillars of the framework1.

AWS Systems Manager gives you visibility and control of your infrastructure on AWS. Systems Manager provides a unified user interface so you can view operational data from multiple AWS services and allows you to automate operational tasks across your AWS resources. You can use Systems Manager to apply OS patches, create system images, configure Windows and Linux operating systems, and execute PowerShell commands5. Systems Manager can help you ensure that all of your Amazon EC2 instances have compliant operating system patches by using the Patch Manager feature.

AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy to prepare and load data for analytics. AWS Glue can discover data sources, transform data, and make it available for analysis by using data catalogs and workflows. Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud that enables customers to analyze data using standard SQL and existing business intelligence tools. Amazon Redshift can also integrate with other AWS services to visualize and transform data. Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides a simple, scalable, fully managed elastic NFS file system for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. Amazon QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered business intelligence service that makes it easy to deliver insights to everyone in an organization. Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB) is a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log owned by a central trusted authority.

Changing AWS Support plans is a task that must be performed by using the AWS account root user credentials. The root user is the email address that you used to sign up for AWS. It has complete access to all AWS services and resources in the account. You should use the root user only to perform a few account and service management tasks, such as changing AWS Support plans, closing the account, or changing the account name or email address. Making changes to AWS production resources, accessing AWS Cost and Usage Reports, and granting auditors access to an AWS account for a compliance audit are tasks that can be performed by using IAM users or roles, which are entities that you create in AWS to delegate permissions to access AWS services and resources.

AWS IAM Access Analyzer is an AWS service that helps customers identify and review the resources in their AWS account that are shared with an external entity, such as another AWS account, a root user, an organization, or a public entity. AWS IAM Access Analyzer uses automated reasoning, a form of mathematical logic and inference, to analyze the resource-based policies in the account and generate comprehensive findings that show the access level, the source of the access, the affected resource, and the condition under which the access applies. Customers can use AWS IAM Access Analyzer to audit their shared resources, validate their access policies, and monitor any changes to the resource sharing status. References: AWSIAM Access Analyzer, Identify and review resources shared with external entities, How AWS IAM Access Analyzer works

AWS Outposts is an AWS service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility. AWS Outposts enables you to run Amazon EC2 instances and other AWS services locally, while maintaining a consistent and seamless connection to the AWS Cloud. AWS Outposts is ideal for workloads that require low latency, local data processing, or data residency. By using AWS Outposts, the company can process personallyidentifiable information (PII) and keep data in the country where it was generated, while leveraging the benefits of AWS

Cost optimization is one of the five pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It focuses on avoiding unnecessary costs, understanding and controlling where money is being spent, selecting the most appropriate and right number of resource types, analyzing spend over time, and scaling to meet business needs without overspending.

Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is ideal for quick, ad-hoc querying but it can also handle complex analysis, including large joins, window functions, and arrays. Athena scales automatically—executing queries in parallel—so results are fast, even with large datasets and complex queries. Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service that can run complex analytic queries against structured and semi-structured data using standard SQL. However, it is not a serverless service and requires provisioning and managing clusters of nodes. AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy to prepare and load your data for analytics. However, it is not a query service and does not support standard SQL. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a service that enables you to build custom applications that process or analyze streaming data for specialized needs. However, it is not a query service and does not support standard SQL.

 B is correct because Reserved Instances are the instance purchasing option that offers the most cost-effective way to use Amazon EC2 instances for a stable production workload that will run for 1 year, as they provide significant discounts compared to On-Demand Instances in exchange for a commitment to use a specific amount of computing power for a period of time. A is incorrect because Dedicated Hosts are the instance purchasing option that allows customers to use physical servers that are fully dedicated to their use, which is more expensive and less flexible than Reserved Instances. C is incorrect because On-Demand Instances are the instance purchasing option that allows customers to pay for compute capacity by the hour or second with no long-term commitments, which is more suitable for short-term, variable, and unpredictable workloads. D is incorrect because Spot Instances are the instance purchasing option that allows customers to bid on spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity, which is more suitable for flexible, scalable, and fault-tolerant workloads that can tolerate interruptions.

A security group is a virtual firewall that can be associated with an Amazon EC2 instance to control the inbound and outbound traffic for the instance. You can specify which protocols, ports, and source or destination IP ranges are allowed or denied by the security group. A network ACL is a stateless filter that can be associated with a subnet to control the traffic to and from the subnet, but it is not associated with an EC2 instance4. AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications or APIs against common web exploits that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. VPC route tables are used to determine where network traffic is directed within a VPC or to an internet gateway, virtual private gateway, NAT device, VPC peering connection, or VPC endpoint.

Server-side encryption is an encryption option that Amazon S3 provides to encrypt data at rest in Amazon S3. With server-side encryption, Amazon S3 encrypts an object before saving it to disk in its data centers and decrypts it when you download the objects. You have three server-side encryption options to choose from: SSE-S3, SSE-C, and SSE-KMS. SSE-S3 uses keys that are managed by Amazon S3. SSE-C allows you to manage your own encryption keys. SSE-KMS uses keys that are managed by AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)5.

Agility in AWS Cloud computing means the ability to rapidly provision and deprovision AWS resources as needed, and the ability to experiment quickly with new ideas and solutions. Agility helps businesses to respond to changing customer demands, market opportunities, and competitive threats, and to innovate faster and cheaper. Agility also reduces the risk of failure, as businesses can test and validate their assumptions before committing to large-scale deployments. Some of the benefits of agility in AWS Cloud computing are:

The speed at which AWS resources are implemented: AWS provides a variety of services and tools that allow you to create, configure, and launch AWS resources in minutes, using the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), the AWS Software Development Kits (AWS SDKs), or the AWS CloudFormation templates. You can also use the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) to define your AWS resources as code using familiar programming languages, and synthesize them into AWS CloudFormation templates. You can also use the AWS Service Catalog to create and manage standardized portfolios of AWS resources that meet your organizational policies and best practices. AWS also offers on-demand, pay-as-you-go pricing models, soyou only pay for the resources you use, and you can scale them up or down as your needs change12345

The ability to experiment quickly: AWS enables you to experiment quickly with new ideas and solutions, without having to invest in upfront capital or long-term commitments. You can use AWS to create and test multiple prototypes, hypotheses, and minimum viable products (MVPs) in parallel, and measure their performance and feedback. You can also use AWS to leverage existing services and solutions, such as AWS Marketplace, AWS Solutions, and AWS Quick Starts, that can help you accelerate your innovation process. AWS also supports a culture of experimentation and learning, by providing tools and resources for continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), testing, monitoring, and analytics.

 Six advantages of cloud computing - Overview of Amazon Web Services, AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), AWS Service Catalog, AWS Pricing, AWS CloudFormation, [Experimentation and Testing - AWS Well-Architected Framework], [AWS Marketplace], [AWS Solutions], [AWS Quick Starts], [AWS Developer Tools]

The correct answer is A. Benefits management.

Benefits management is the AWS CAF governance perspective capability that helps you define and track business outcomes as part of your cloud transformation journey.Benefits management helps you align your cloud initiatives with your business objectives, measure the value and impact of your cloud investments, and communicate the benefits of cloud adoption to your stakeholders12.

Risk management is the AWS CAF governance perspective capability that helps you identify and mitigate the potential risks associated with cloud adoption, such as security, compliance, legal, and operational risks12.

Application portfolio management is the AWS CAF governance perspective capability that helps you assess and optimize your existing application portfolio for cloud migration or modernization.Application portfolio management helps you categorize your applications based on their business value and technical fit, prioritize them for cloud adoption, and select the best migration or modernization strategy for each application12.

Cloud financial management is the AWS CAF governance perspective capability that helps you manage and optimize the costs and value of your cloud resources.Cloud financial management helps you plan and budget for cloud adoption, track and allocate cloud costs, implement cost optimization strategies, and report on cloud financial performance12.

IAM access keys are long-term credentials that consist of an access key ID and a secret access key. You use access keys to sign programmatic requests that you make to AWS. If you need to access AWS services from an on-premises application, you can use IAM access keys to authenticate your requests. AWS account user name and password are used to sign in to the AWS Management Console. Amazon EC2 key pairs are used to connect to your EC2 instances using SSH. AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) keys are used to encrypt and decrypt your data using the AWS Encryption SDK or the AWS CLI.

 AWS Direct Connect is a cloud service solution that makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from a customer’s premises to AWS. AWS Direct Connect does not involve the public internet, and therefore can reduce network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than internet-based connections. AWS Snowball is a petabyte-scale data transport service that uses secure devices to transfer large amounts of data into and out of the AWS Cloud. AWS Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage service that gives customers on-premises access to virtually unlimited cloud storage. A VPN connection enables customers to establish a secure and private connection between their network and AWS.

The Envision phase of the cloud transformation journey is where the company defines its vision, business drivers, and desired outcomes for the cloud adoption. The company also identifies its capability gaps by using the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) perspectives, which are business, people, governance, platform, security, and operations2.

AWS Control Tower is the easiest way to set up and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on best practices established through AWS’s experience working with thousands of enterprises as they move to the cloud. With AWS Control Tower, builders can provision new AWS accounts in a few clicks, while you have peace of mind knowing your accounts conform to your organization’s policies. AWS Control Tower automates the setup of a baseline environment, or landing zone, that is a secure, well-architected multi-account AWS environment1. AWS Control Tower helps you apply security best practices from the AWS Well-Architected Framework to all of your AWS accounts2.

IAM roles are a way of granting temporary permissions to entities that need to access AWS resources, such as users, applications, or services. IAM roles allow customers to assign permissions to entities without having to create or manage IAM users or credentials for them. IAM roles can be assumed by different entities depending on the trust policy attached to the role. For example, IAM roles can be assumed by IAM users in the same or different AWS accounts, AWS services such as EC2 or Lambda, or external identities such as federated users or web identities. IAM roles can also be switched by IAM users to temporarily change their permissions. IAM roles are recommended for managing permissions for employees who often change teams, because they allow customers to define permissions based on job roles and responsibilities, and easily assign or revoke them as needed. IAM roles also reduce the operational overhead of creating, updating, or deleting IAM users or credentials for each employee or team change.

 Amazon Cognito is a service that provides identity management for mobile and web applications, allowing users to sign up, sign in, and access AWS resources with different identity providers. AWS Security Hub is a service that provides a comprehensive view of the security posture of AWS accounts and resources. AWS Shield is a service that provides protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect web applications from common web exploits.

Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances are the AWS service or resource that the company should use for its iOS application development and build activities, as they enable users to run macOS on AWS and access a broad and growing set of AWS services. AWS CodeCommit is a service that provides a fully managed source control service that hosts secure Git-based repositories. AWS Amplify is a set of tools and services that enable developers to build full-stack web and mobile applications using AWS. AWS App Runner is a service that makes it easy for developers to quickly deploy containerized web applications and APIs. These concepts are explained in the AWS Developer Tools page4.

Amazon Athena is a serverless, interactive analytics service that allows users to run SQL queries on data stored in Amazon S3. It is ideal for occasional queries on large datasets, as it does not require any server provisioning, configuration, or management. Users only pay for the queries they run, based on the amount of data scanned. Amazon Athena supports various data formats, such as CSV, JSON, Parquet, ORC, and Avro, and integrates with AWS Glue Data Catalog to create and manage schemas. Amazon Athena also supports querying data from other sources, such as on-premises or other cloud systems, using data connectors1.

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed data warehouse service that allows users to run complex analytical queries on petabyte-scale data. However, it requires users to provision and maintain clusters of nodes, and pay for the storage and compute capacity they use. Amazon Redshift is more suitable for frequent and consistent queries on structured or semi-structured data2.

Amazon Kinesis is a platform for streaming data on AWS, enabling users to collect, process, and analyze real-time data. It is not designed for querying data stored in Amazon S3. Amazon Kinesis consists of four services: Kinesis Data Streams, Kinesis Data Firehose, Kinesis Data Analytics, and Kinesis Video Streams3.

Amazon RDS is a relational database service that provides six database engines: Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server. It simplifies database administration tasks such as backup, patching, scaling, and replication. However, it is not optimized for querying data stored in Amazon S3. Amazon RDS is more suitable for transactional workloads that require high performance and availability4.

Auto Scaling groups are a feature that allows users to automatically scale the number of Amazon EC2 instances up or down based on demand or a predefined schedule. Auto Scaling groups can helpimprove the performance and availability of applications by adjusting the capacity in response to traffic fluctuations1. AWS Global Accelerator is a service that improves the availability and performance of applications by routing traffic through AWS edge locations2. Amazon Route 53 is a service that provides scalable and reliable domain name system (DNS) service3. An Elastic IP address is a static IPv4 address that can be associated with an Amazon EC2 instance4.

AWS Artifact is a self-service portal that provides on-demand access to AWS security and compliance reports and select online agreements. You can use AWS Artifact to download AWS service audit reports, such as ISO, PCI, and SOC, and to accept and manage agreements with AWS, such as the Business Associate Addendum (BAA).

S3 Access Points are a feature of Amazon S3 that allows you to easily manage access to specific data that is hosted in S3 buckets. S3 Access Points are unique hostnames that customers can use to access data in S3 buckets. You can create multiple access points for a single bucket, each with its own name and permissions. You can use S3 Access Points to provide different levels of access to different groups of customers, such as read-only or write-only access. You can also use S3 Access Points to enforce encryption or logging requirements for specific data. S3 Access Points help you keep control over the full datasets that you share with your customers, while simplifying the access management and improving the performance and scalability of your applications.

 Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a service that provides a scalable and elastic file system for Linux-based workloads. It can be mounted on multiple Amazon EC2 instances across different Availability Zones within a region, allowing applications to access a common set of files1. AWS Backup is a service that provides a centralized and automated way to back up data across AWS services. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is a service that provides persistent block storage volumes for Amazon EC2 instances. AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized is a device that provides a petabyte-scale data transport and edge computing solution.

AWS Organizations is an AWS service that enables you to centrally manage and govern your AWS Cloud environments across multiple business units. AWS Organizations allows you tocreate an organization that consists of AWS accounts that you create or invite to join. You can group your accounts into organizational units (OUs) and apply service control policies (SCPs) to them. SCPs are a type of policy that specify the maximum permissions for the accounts in your organization, and can help you enforce compliance and security requirements. AWS Organizations also simplifies billing processes by enabling you to consolidate and pay for all member accounts with a single payment method. You can also use AWS Organizations to automate the creation of AWS accounts by using APIs or AWS CloudFormation templates. References: What is AWS Organizations?, Policy-Based Management - AWS Organizations

AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that provides you real time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices, including security and performance. It can help you monitor for misconfigured security groups that are allowing unrestricted access to specific ports. Amazon CloudWatch is a service that monitors your AWS resources and the applications you run on AWS. Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors for maliciousactivity and unauthorized behavior. AWS Health Dashboard provides relevant and timely information to help you manage events in progress, and provides proactive notification to help you plan for scheduled activities.

The correct answer is A because Amazon CloudFront is an AWS service that provides secure delivery of data, videos, applications, and APIs to users globally with low latency and high transfer speeds. Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) that integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and AWS Shield. Amazon CloudFront delivers content through a worldwide network of edge locations that are located close to the end users. The other options are incorrect because they are not AWS services that provide secure delivery of data, videos, applications, and APIs to users globally with low latency and high transfer speeds. Elastic Load Balancing is an AWS service that distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. Amazon S3 is an AWS service that provides object storage for data of any size and type. Amazon Elastic Transcoder is an AWS service that converts media files from their original source format into different formats that will play on various devices. Reference: Amazon CloudFront FAQs

 Amazon DynamoDB is the AWS service that will meet the requirement of building an application that will receive millions of database queries each second. Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and consistent performance, scalability, and durability. Amazon DynamoDB can handle any level of request traffic and automatically scale up or down the capacity based on the demand. Amazon DynamoDB also supports in-memory caching with Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) to improve the response time and reduce the cost. For more information, see What is Amazon DynamoDB? and Amazon DynamoDB Features.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service that helps you securely control access to AWS resources for your users. You use IAM to control who can use your AWS resources (authentication) and what resources they can use and in what ways (authorization). IAM is always available free of charge to users4.

 Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment. CloudFront can cache web server content in edge locations, which are located closer to the end users, toimprove the web service’s performance globally2.

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) cloud transformation journey is a four-phase process that helps customers plan and execute their cloud migration and digital transformation. The four phases are:

Envision phase: This phase focuses on demonstrating how cloud will help accelerate the business outcomes of the customer. It involves identifying and prioritizing transformation opportunities across four domains: business, people, governance, and platform. It also involves associating the transformation initiatives with key stakeholders and measurable business outcomes1.

Align phase: This phase focuses on identifying capability gaps across six perspectives: business, people, governance, platform, security, and operations. It also involves identifying cross-organizational dependencies and surfacing stakeholder concerns and challenges. The goal of this phase is to create strategies for improving the cloud readiness, ensure stakeholder alignment, and facilitate relevant organizational change management activities1.

Launch phase: This phase focuses on delivering pilot initiatives in production and demonstrating incremental business value. Pilots should be highly impactful and influence future direction. The customer should learn from the pilots and adjust their approach before scaling to full production1.

Scale phase: This phase focuses on expanding production pilots and business value to the desired scale and ensuring that the business benefits associated with the cloud investments are realized and sustained1.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a service that provides a simple, scalable, fully managed elastic NFS file system for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. It is built to scale on demand to petabytes without disrupting applications, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, eliminating the need to provision and manage capacity to accommodate growth. You can use Amazon EFS to create a shared file system that can be available to both your on-premises data center and your AWS Cloud environment. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is a service that provides persistent block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. Each Amazon EBS volume is automatically replicated within its Availability Zone to protect you from component failure, offering high availability and durability. However, Amazon EBS volumes are not shared file systems, and they cannot be available to both your on-premises data center and your AWS Cloud environment. Amazon S3 is a service that provides object storage through a web services interface. You can use Amazon S3 to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as data lakes, websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big dataanalytics. However, Amazon S3 is not a shared file system, and it cannot be available to both your on-premises data center and your AWS Cloud environment without additional configuration. Amazon ElastiCache is a service that enables you to seamlessly set up, run, and scale popular open-source compatible in-memory data stores in the cloud. You can use Amazon ElastiCache to improve the performance of your applications by allowing you to retrieve information from fast, managed, in-memory data stores, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases. However, Amazon ElastiCache is not a shared file system, and it cannot be available to both your on-premises data center and your AWS Cloud environment.

The solution that achieves the goal of having Amazon EC2 instances share the same geographic area but use multiple independent underlying power sources is to use EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones in the same AWS Region. An Availability Zone is a physically isolated location within an AWS Region that has its own power, cooling, and network connectivity. An AWS Region is a geographical area that consists of two or more Availability Zones. By using multiple Availability Zones, users can increase the fault tolerance and resilience of their applications, as well as reduce latency for end users3. Using EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone, multiple AWS Regions, or the same edge location and the same AWS Region would not meet the requirement of having multiple independent power sources.

Service control policies (SCPs) are a type of organization policy that you can use to manage permissions in your organization. SCPs offer central control over the maximum available permissions for all accounts in your organization, allowing you to ensure your accounts stay within your organization’s access control guidelines2. SCPs are available only in an organization that has all features enabled2.

 AWS Pricing Calculator lets customers explore AWS services, and create an estimate for the cost of their use cases on AWS. AWS Pricing Calculator can also compare the costs of different AWS Regions and configurations. Cost Explorer is a tool that enables customers to visualize, understand, and manage their AWS costs and usage over time. AWS Budgets gives customers the ability to set custom budgets that alert them when their costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) their budgeted amount. AWS Purchase Order Management is a feature that allows customers to pay for their AWS invoices using purchase orders.

The AWS service that provides the ability to manage infrastructure as code is AWS CloudFormation. Infrastructure as code is a process of defining and provisioning AWS resources using code or templates, rather than manual actions or scripts. AWS CloudFormation allows you to create and update stacks of AWS resources based on predefined templates that describe the desired state and configuration of the resources. AWS CloudFormation automates and simplifies the deployment and management of AWS resources, and ensures consistency and repeatability across different environments and regions. AWS CloudFormation also supports rollback, change sets, drift detection, and nested stacks features that help you to monitor and control the changes to your infrastructure1.

 AWS Personal Health Dashboard and AWS Service Health Dashboard are two AWS services that can help the company to verify that underlying AWS services and general AWS infrastructure are operating normally. AWS Personal Health Dashboard provides a personalized view into the performance and availability of the AWS services you are using, as well as alerts that are automatically triggered by changes in the health of those services. In addition to event-based alerts, Personal Health Dashboard provides proactive notifications of scheduled activities, such as any changes to the infrastructure powering your resources, enabling you to better plan for events that may affect you. These notifications can be delivered to you via email or mobile for quick visibility, and can always be viewed from within the AWS Management Console. When you get an alert, it includes detailed information and guidance, enabling you to take immediate action to address AWS events impacting your resources3. AWS Service Health Dashboard provides a general status of AWS services, and the Service health view displays the current and historical status of all AWS services. This page shows reported service events for services across AWS Regions. You don’t need to sign in or have an AWS account to access the AWS Service Health Dashboard – Service health page. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds for specific services or regions to receive notifications about service events4. References: Gettingstarted with your AWS Health Dashboard – Your account health, Introducing AWS Personal Health Dashboard

AWS Organizations is a service that helps you centrally manage and govern your AWS environment. You can use AWS Organizations to create multiple accounts for different business units, and group them into organizational units (OUs) that reflect your organizational structure1. By doing so, you can separate and track costs for each business unit using the account ID as a cost allocation tag2. You can also use AWSOrganizations to apply policies and controls to your accounts, such as service control policies (SCPs) and tag policies1.

The other options are not suitable for meeting the requirements with the least operational overhead. Using a spreadsheet or a DynamoDB table to control and record costs for each business unit would require manual data entry and maintenance, which is prone to errors and inconsistencies. Using the AWS Billing console to assign owners to resources and track costs would also require manual tagging of each resource, which is time-consuming and inefficient.

1: What Is AWS Organizations? - AWS Organizations

2: Cost Tagging and Reporting with AWS Organizations | AWS Cloud Financial Management

This is a benefit of using an AWS managed service, such as Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, or AWS Lambda. AWS managed services are fully managed by AWS, which means that AWS handles the provisioning, scaling, patching, backup, and recovery of the underlying infrastructure and software. This reduces the operational overhead for the company’s IT staff, who can focus on their core business logic and innovation. You can learn more about the AWS managed services from this webpage or this digital course.

 AWS Secrets Manager is a service that helps you protect secrets needed to access your applications, services, and IT resources. You can use AWS Secrets Manager to store, rotate, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle. AWS Secrets Manager eliminates the need to hardcode sensitive information in plain text, and reduces the risk of unauthorized access or leakage. AWS Secrets Manager also integrates with other AWS services, such as AWS Lambda, Amazon RDS, and AWS CloudFormation, to simplify the management of secrets across your environment5

The AWS services that are supported by Savings Plans are:

Amazon EC2: Amazon EC2 is a service that provides scalable computing capacity in the AWS cloud. You can use Amazon EC2 to launch virtual servers, configure security and networking, and manage storage. Amazon EC2 is eligible for both Compute Savings Plans and EC2 Instance Savings Plans12.

Amazon SageMaker: Amazon SageMaker is a service that helps you build and deploy machine learning models. You can use Amazon SageMaker to access Jupyter notebooks, use common machine learning algorithms, train and tune models, and deploy them to a hosted environment. Amazon SageMaker is eligible for SageMaker Savings Plans13.

The other options are not supported by Savings Plans. Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DynamoDB are database services that are eligible for Reserved Instances, but not Savings Plans4.

AWS Managed Services is a service that provides operational management for AWS infrastructure and applications. It helps users migrate their workloads to AWS and provides ongoing support, security, compliance, and automation. AWS Trusted Advisor is a service that provides best practices and recommendations for cost optimization, performance, security, and fault tolerance. AWS Consulting Partners are professional services firms that help customers design, architect, build, migrate, and manage their workloads and applications on AWS. AWS Artifacts is a service that provides on-demand access to AWS compliance reports and select online agreements.

 Refine operation procedures frequently is one of the design principles of the operational excellence pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It means that users should continuously review and validate their operational processes to ensure that they are effective and that staff are familiar with them. It also means that users should identify and address any gaps or issues in their processes, and incorporate feedback and lessons learned from operational events5. Perform operations as code is another design principle of the operational excellence pillar, which means that users should automate and script their operational tasks to reduce human error and enable consistent and repeatable execution. Make frequent, small, reversible changes is a design principle of the reliability pillar, which means that users should deploy changes in small increments that can be easily tested and rolled back if necessary. Structure the company to support business outcomes is a design principle of the performance efficiency pillar, which means that users should align their organizational structure and culture with their business goals and cloud strategy.

These are two of the seven capabilities that are in the platform perspective of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF). The platform perspective helps you build an enterprise-grade, scalable, hybrid cloud platform, modernize existing workloads, and implement new cloud-native solutions1. The other five capabilities are:

Platform architecture – Establish and maintain guidelines, principles, patterns, and guardrails for your cloud environment.

Platform engineering – Build a compliant multi-account cloud environment with enhanced security features, and packaged, reusable cloud products.

Platform operations – Manage and optimize your cloud environment with automation, monitoring, and incident response.

Application development – Develop and deploy cloud-native applications using modern architectures and best practices.

Application migration – Migrate your existing applications to the cloud using proven methodologies and tools.

Performance and capacity management, infrastructure protection, and change and release management are not capabilities of the platform perspective. They are part of the operations perspective, which helps you achieve operational excellence in the cloud2. The operations perspective comprises six capabilities:

Performance and capacity management – Monitor and optimize the performance and capacity of your cloud workloads.

Infrastructure protection – Protect your cloud infrastructure from unauthorized access, malicious attacks, and data breaches.

Change and release management – Manage changes and releases to your cloud workloads using automation and governance.

Configuration management – Manage the configuration of your cloud resources and applications using automation and version control.

Incident management – Respond to incidents affecting your cloud workloads using best practices and tools.

Service continuity management – Ensure the availability and resilience of your cloud workloads using backup, recovery, and disaster recovery strategies.

Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It allows you to launch virtual servers, called instances, with different configurations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources. AWS Compute Optimizer analyzes the specifications and utilization metrics of your Amazon EC2 instances and generates recommendations for optimal instance types that can reduce costs and improve performance. You can view the recommendations on the AWS Compute Optimizer console or the Amazon EC2 console12.

Amazon RDS, Amazon Lightsail, and AWS Step Functions are not supported by AWS Compute Optimizer. Amazon RDS is a managed relational database service that lets you set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Amazon Lightsail is an easy-to-use cloud platform that offers everything you need to build an application or website, plus a cost-effective, monthly plan. AWS Step Functions lets you coordinate multiple AWS services into serverless workflows so you can build and update apps quickly3 .

 The AWS Cloud offers many benefits, such as:

Trade variable expenses for capital expenses: You can pay only for the resources you use, instead of investing in fixed costs upfront. This reduces the risk and complexity of planning and managing your IT infrastructure4

Deploy globally in minutes: You can leverage the global infrastructure of AWS to deploy your applications and data in multiple regions and availability zones. This enables you to reach your customers faster, improve performance, and increase reliability5

Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive is the lowest-cost storage class in the cloud. It is designed for long-term data archiving that is rarely accessed. It offers a retrieval time of 12 hours and a durability of 99.999999999% (11 9’s). It is ideal for data that must be retained for 7 years or longer to meet regulatory compliance requirements.

AWS Application Discovery Service is a service that helps you plan your migration to the AWS Cloud by collecting usage and configuration data about your on-premises servers and databases. This data includes information such as the hostname, IP address, and MAC address of each server, as well as the performance metrics, network connections, and processes running on them. You can use AWS Application Discovery Service to discover your on-premises inventory, map the dependencies between servers and applications, and estimate the cost and effort of migrating to AWS. You can also export the data to other AWS services, such as AWS Migration Hub and AWS Database Migration Service, to support your migration tasks. AWS Application Discovery Service offers two ways of performing discovery: agentless discovery and agent-based discovery. Agentless discovery uses a virtual appliance that you deploy on your VMware vCenter to collect data from your virtual machines and hosts. Agent-based discovery uses an agent that you install on each of your physical or virtual servers to collect data. You can choose the method that best suits your environment and needs. AWS DataSync is a service that helps you transfer data between your on-premises storage and AWS storage services, such as Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, and Amazon FSx for Windows File Server. AWS DataSync does not collect information about your on-premises infrastructure, but rather focuses on optimizing the data transfer speed, security, and reliability. AWS Application Migration Service is a service that helps you migrate your applications from your on-premises or cloud environment to AWS without making any changes to the applications, their architecture, or the migrated servers. AWS Application Migration Service does not collect information about your on-premises infrastructure, but rather uses a lightweight agent to replicate your servers as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and launch them as EC2 instances on AWS. AWS Database Migration Service is a service that helps you migrate your databases from your on-premises or cloud environment to AWS, either as a one-time migration or as a continuous replication. AWS Database MigrationService does not collect information about your on-premises infrastructure, but rather uses a source and a target endpoint to connect to your databases and transfer the data. References: AWS Application Discovery Service, AWS DataSync, AWS Application Migration Service, [AWS Database Migration Service]

This is the pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework that represents the philosophy of testing failure scenarios regularly and validating the understanding of the impact of potential failures. The operational excellence pillar covers the best practices for designing, running, monitoring, and improving systems in the AWS Cloud. Testing failure scenarios is one of the ways to improve the system’s resilience, reliability, and recovery. You can learn more about the operational excellence pillar from this whitepaper or this digital course.

Identity and access management is one of the foundational capabilities for the operations perspective of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF). It involves managing the identities, roles, permissions, and credentials of users and systems that interact with AWS resources. Performance and capacity management is a capability for the platform perspective. Application portfolio management is a capability for the business perspective. Product management is a capability for the governance perspective.

Rightsizing is the cloud concept that is demonstrated by using AWS Compute Optimizer. Rightsizing is the process of adjusting the type and size of your cloud resources to match the optimal performance and cost for your workloads. AWS Compute Optimizer is a service that analyzes the configuration and utilization metrics of your AWS resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes, AWS Lambda functions, and Amazon ECS services on AWS Fargate. It reports whether your resources are optimal, and generates optimization recommendations to reduce the cost and improve the performance of your workloads. AWS Compute Optimizer uses machine learning to analyze your historical utilization data and compare it with the most cost-effective AWS alternatives. You can use the recommendations toevaluate the trade-offs between cost and performance, and decide when to move or resize your resources to achieve the best results. References: Workload Rightsizing - AWS Compute Optimizer - AWS, What is AWS Compute Optimizer? - AWS Compute Optimizer

Amazon Neptune is a service that provides a fully managed graph database that supports property graphs and RDF graphs. It can be used to build applications that work with highly connected datasets, such as shopping recommendations, social networks, fraud detection, and knowledge graphs2. Amazon DynamoDB is a service that provides a fully managed NoSQL database that delivers fast and consistent performance at any scale. Amazon Aurora is a service that provides a fully managed relational database that is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a service that provides a fully managed document database that is compatible with MongoDB.

 D is correct because security groups are the AWS service or feature that can be used to control inbound and outbound traffic on an Amazon EC2 instance. Security groups act as a virtual firewall for the EC2 instance, allowing users to specify which protocols, ports, and source or destination IP addresses are allowed or denied. A is incorrect because internet gateways are the AWS service or feature that enable communication between instances in a VPC and the internet. They do not control the traffic on an EC2 instance. B is incorrect because AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the AWS service or feature that enables users to manage access to AWS services and resources securely. It does not control the traffic on an EC2 instance. C is incorrect because network ACLs are the AWS service or feature that provide an optional layer of security for the VPC that acts as a firewall for controlling traffic in and out of one or more subnets. They do not control the traffic on an EC2 instance.

Amazon EC2 is the AWS service that requires the customer to be fully responsible for applying operating system patches. Amazon EC2 is a service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Customers can launch virtual servers called instances and choose from various configurations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources1. Customers have full control and access to their instances, which means they are also responsible for managing and maintaining them, including applying operating system patches2. Customers can use AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager, a feature of AWS Systems Manager, to automate the process of patching their EC2 instances with both security-related updates and other types of updates3.

A company wants an AWS service to collect and process 10 TB of data locally and transfer the data to AWS. The company has intermittent connectivity.

Which AWS service will meet these requirements?

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)

AWS DataSync

AWS Backup

AWS Snowball Edge

Answer: D

The correct answer is D. AWS Snowball Edge.

AWS Snowball Edge is a physical device that can be used to collect and process data locally and then transfer it to AWS. It is designed for situations where there is limited or intermittent network connectivity, or where bandwidth costs are high.AWS Snowball Edge can store up to 80 TB of data and has compute and storage capabilities to run applications on the device1.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) is a service that helps migrate databases to AWS.It does not collect or process data locally, nor does it work offline2.

AWS DataSync is a service that helps transfer data between on-premises storage systems and AWS storage services.It does not collect or process data locally, and it requires a network connection to work3.

AWS Backup is a service that helps automate and manage backups across AWS services. It does not collect or process data locally, nor does it transfer data to AWS.It only backs up data that is already in AWS4.

The AWS service that will meet this requirement is C. AWS Backup.

AWS Backup is a service that allows you to define a central data protection policy that works across AWS services for compute, storage, and database resources. You can use AWS Backup to create backup plans that specify the frequency, retention, and lifecycle of your backups, and apply them to your AWS resources using tags or resource IDs.AWS Backup supports various AWS services, such as Amazon EC2,Amazon EBS, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EFS, Amazon FSx, and AWS Storage Gateway12.

AWS Batch is a service that allows you to run batch computing workloads on AWS.AWS Batch does not provide a central data protection policy, but rather enables you to optimize the allocation and utilization of your compute resources3.

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery is a service that allows you to prepare for and recover from disasters using AWS.AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery does not provide a central data protection policy, but rather helps you minimize downtime and data loss by replicating your applications and data to AWS4.

Amazon FSx is a service that provides fully managed file storage for Windows and Linux applications.Amazon FSx does not provide a central data protection policy, but rather offers features such as encryption, snapshots, backups, and replication to protect your file systems5.

AWS CloudTrailis a service that enables governance, compliance, and operational and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail logs provide a history of AWS API calls for your account, including those made by the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command-line tools, and other AWS services. In this case, AWS CloudTrail will help the administrator identify which user deleted the resources by reviewing the event history that records details such as which user performed the action, the time of the action, and which resources were affected.

B. Amazon Inspector: Incorrect, as it is a security assessment service that helps identify vulnerabilities and deviations from best practices, not for tracking user activity.

C. Amazon GuardDuty: Incorrect, as it is a threat detection service that monitors malicious activity and unauthorized behavior, not specifically for tracking changes made by users.

D. AWS Trusted Advisor: Incorrect, as it provides best practices and guidance for cost optimization, security, fault tolerance, and performance, not for logging user actions.

AWS Cloud References:

AWS CloudTrail

AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that makes it easy to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources for analytics, machine learning, and application development. You can use various data integration engines, such as ETL, ELT, batch, and streaming, and manage your data in a centralized data catalog. AWS Glue is designed specifically for extract, transform, and load (ETL) data, whereas the other options are not.

Economies of scale are the cost advantages that result from increasing the scale of production or operation. In cloud computing, economies of scale are achieved by pooling resources and sharing them among multiple users, which reduces the unit cost of computing and storage. One of the benefits of economies of scale in cloud computing is increased speed and agility, which means the ability to deploy applications faster and respond to changing business needs more quickly. Cloud computing allows users to access computing resources on demand, without having to invest in expensive infrastructure or wait for lengthy provisioning processes. This enables users to scale up or down as needed, experiment with new ideas, and deliver value to customers faster123. References:

Economics of Cloud Computing - GeeksforGeeks

What is Cloud Economics? | VMware Glossary

ECONOMIES OF SCALE WITH CLOUD COMPUTING & SERVICES PRACTICE - IDC-Online

AWS CloudFormation is a service that allows you to model and provision your AWS resources using templates. You can define your infrastructure as code and automate the creation and update of your resources. AWS CloudFormation also supports nested stacks, change sets, and rollback features to help you manage complex and dynamic environments34. References:

AWS CloudFormation

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Guide

Reserved Instances (RIs)offer a significant discount (up to 75%) compared to On-Demand pricing in exchange for committing to use AWS for a period of 1 or 3 years. This pricing model is ideal for applications with predictable usage patterns or long-term commitments, such as critical production systems that will be running for at least 3 years.

A. On-Demand Instances: Incorrect, as they provide flexibility without commitment but are more expensive over the long term.

C. Spot Instances: Incorrect, as they offer the lowest cost for non-critical, interruptible workloads but are not suitable for critical production systems due to their potential for sudden termination.

D. AWS Free Tier: Incorrect, as it provides limited free usage for certain AWS services for a short period (typically one year) and is not intended for long-term production workloads.

AWS Cloud References:

Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

Amazon S3 is a service that provides durable storage for static content and infinitely scalable data storage infrastructure at the lowest cost. Amazon S3 is an object storage service that allows you to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the internet. Amazon S3 offers industry-leading scalability, availability, and performance, as well as 99.999999999% (11 9s) of durability and multi-AZ resilience. Amazon S3 also provides various storage classes that offer different levels of performance and cost optimization, such as S3 Standard, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA), S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3One Zone-IA), and S3 Glacier456. Amazon S3 is ideal for storing static content, such as images, videos, documents, and web pages, as well as building data lakes, backup and archive solutions, big data analytics, and machine learning applications456. References: 4: Cloud Storage on AWS, 5: Object Storage - Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) - AWS, 6: Amazon S3 Documentation

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is a fully managed file server that supports Microsoft workloads and file systems, including the SMB protocol. It provides features such as user quotas, end-user file restore, and Microsoft Active Directory integration. Amazon EFS is a fully managed file system that supports the NFS protocol, not SMB. Amazon FSx for Lustre is a fully managed file system that supports high-performance computing workloads, not Microsoft workloads. Amazon EBS is a block storage service that does not provide a file system or SMB support. References: Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Amazon FSx for Lustre, Amazon EFS, Amazon EBS

AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, and operational and risk auditing of an AWS account. It logs, continuously monitors, and retains account activity related to actions across an AWS infrastructure.

For auditing purposes:

CloudTrail records AWS API calls made in the account, including details about who made the request, the services used, the actions performed, and the response elements returned by AWS.

This information is critical for understanding user activity, detecting anomalous behavior, and performing security analysis and compliance auditing.

Why other options are not suitable:

A. AWS Config: AWS Config provides a detailed view of the configuration of AWS resources, including how resources are related and their compliance with internal policies, but it does not provide a comprehensive audit trail of user actions.

B. Amazon Rekognition: A service for image and video analysis, not relevant to auditing AWS account activity.

D. Amazon SNS: A notification service for sending alerts and messages, not used for auditing purposes.

AWS Budgetsallows users to set custom cost and usage budgets and receive notifications when they exceed their thresholds. It provides detailed reports on cost and usage data for the past and current months, enabling the finance team to track and analyze spending.

AWS Budgets can automatically generate cost and usage reports, which can help the finance team plan ahead for each quarter based on historical data.

Why other options are not suitable:

A. Amazon Detective: A security service for analyzing and investigating AWS account activity for security purposes, not cost tracking.

B. AWS Pricing Calculator: A tool to estimate costs based on expected usage, not for tracking actual past usage.

D. AWS Savings Plans: An offering to save costs on AWS usage; it does not provide cost tracking or reporting features.

AWS CodeDeployis a fully managed deployment service that automates software deployments to a variety of compute services such as Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and on-premises servers. CodeDeploy makes it easy to release new features, helps avoid downtime during application deployment, and handles the complexity of updating applications in a scalable and reliable manner.

Why other options are not suitable:

A. Amazon AppFlow: A service to automate data flows between AWS and SaaS applications, not for application deployment.

C. AWS PrivateLink: A service to securely access AWS services from your virtual private cloud (VPC), not related to application deployments.

D. Amazon EKS Distro: A Kubernetes distribution for running Kubernetes clusters, not specifically designed for automated deployments.

Understanding Availability Zones (AZs): An Availability Zone is a distinct location within an AWS region that is engineered to be isolated from failures in other AZs.

Characteristics of Availability Zones:

Data Centers: Each AZ consists of one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity.

High Availability: AZs are designed for high availability, providing low-latency network connections to other zones in the same region.

Fault Isolation: They provide fault isolation and are used to deploy applications and services to ensure high availability and reliability.

Use Cases for Availability Zones:

Multi-AZ Deployments: For services like RDS, deploying in multiple AZs ensures fault tolerance.

Disaster Recovery: Setting up resources in multiple AZs helps in quick recovery from failures.

Load Balancing: Distributing traffic across AZs using Elastic Load Balancing ensures optimal performance and availability.

AWS Global Infrastructure

Understanding AWS Regions and Availability Zones

Understanding High Availability: High availability (HA) refers to systems that are durable and likely to operate continuously without failure for a long time. HA ensures that an architecture can withstand failures with minimal downtime.

Importance of High Availability:

Redundancy: Systems are designed with redundancy to prevent single points of failure.

Fault Tolerance: Ensures that failures do not result in significant downtime, maintaining service continuity.

Automated Recovery: Utilizes automated recovery mechanisms to quickly restore services in the event of a failure.

AWS Services for High Availability:

Multi-AZ Deployments: Services like RDS, DynamoDB, and others support Multi-AZ deployments for fault tolerance.

Elastic Load Balancing: Distributes traffic across multiple instances or availability zones to ensure no single point of failure.

Auto Scaling: Automatically adjusts the number of instances based on demand, ensuring availability even during traffic spikes.

AWS Well-Architected Framework: Reliability

Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances are ideal for unpredictable workloads that do not require a long-term commitment. This option allows users to pay for compute capacity by the hour or second, with no long-term commitments. It is suitable for short-term, spiky, or unpredictable workloads that cannot be interrupted and require flexibility. Option A is better suited for Reserved Instances, Option B is ideal for Spot Instances, and Option D is more suited for Reserved Instances due to cost optimization for long-term use.

"There is no long-term commitment required when you purchase On-Demand Instances. You pay only for the seconds that your On-Demand Instances are in the running state, with a 60-second minimum. The price per second for a running On-Demand Instance is fixed, and is listed on the Amazon EC2 Pricing, On-Demand Pricing page. We recommend that you use On-Demand Instances for applications with short-term, irregular workloads that cannot be interrupted."https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-on-demand-instances.html

Understanding AWS Compute Optimizer: AWS Compute Optimizer is a service that analyzes the configuration and utilization metrics of your AWS resources. It provides recommendations to help you select the optimal configurations for your workloads.

Why AWS Compute Optimizer for Rightsizing:

Resource Recommendations: It provides specific recommendations to rightsize your EC2 instances by suggesting instance types that match your actual usage patterns.

Cost Efficiency: By optimizing instance sizes, you can reduce costs associated with over-provisioned resources.

Performance Improvement: Ensures that you are using instances that provide the required performance without over-allocating resources.

How to Implement AWS Compute Optimizer:

Enable AWS Compute Optimizer: In the AWS Management Console, navigate to AWS Compute Optimizer and enable it for your account.

Review Recommendations: After a period of monitoring, review the recommendations provided for your EC2 instances.

Implement Changes: Follow the suggestions to resize or change instance types based on the recommendations, ensuring you balance cost savings with performance needs.

AWS Compute Optimizer

Loose coupling is a design principle that involves reducing dependencies between application components so that they can operate independently. This approach ensures that the failure of one component does not affect the availability of the others, thereby improving the application's fault tolerance and resilience. Disposable resources, automation, and rightsizing are valuable principles in cloud architecture, but they do not directly address the requirement of remaining available despite the failure of an individual component like loose coupling does.

Amazon RDS for MySQL is a fully managed, open-source cloud database service that allows you to easily operate and scale your relational database of choice, including MySQL. With Amazon RDS for MySQL, you don’t have to worry about the hardware, resiliency, and replication of your database, as Amazon RDS handles these tasks for you. Amazon RDS for MySQL also provides features such as automated backups, multi-AZ deployments, read replicas, encryption, monitoring, and more. Amazon RDS for MySQL is compatible with the MySQL Community Edition versions 5.7 and 8.0, which means that you can use the same code, applications, andtools that you already use with MySQL4567. References: 4: Hosted MySQL - Amazon RDS for MySQL - AWS, 5: Amazon RDS for MySQL - Amazon Relational Database Service, 6: Amazon RDS for MySQL —亚马逊云科技, 7: Managed SQL Database - Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) - AWS

AWS Fargateis a serverless compute engine for containers that allows users to run containers without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. Fargate eliminates the need for managing servers and reduces operational overhead, providing a fully managed, serverless approach to containerized applications. It helps avoid unplanned administration and operational costs and is ideal for companies migrating from on-premises container infrastructure.

Why other options are not suitable:

A. Amazon Connect: A service for cloud-based contact centers, not for container management.

C. Amazon Lightsail: Simplifies virtual private server (VPS) management but is not serverless or specialized for containers.

D. Amazon EC2: Provides virtual servers but requires more manual administration and is not serverless.

Understanding Cost Optimization Recommendations: In AWS, cost optimization involves identifying ways to reduce costs while maintaining or improving performance and capacity.

Top-Level KPI - Estimated Monthly Saving:

Definition: This KPI provides an estimate of how much you can save per month by following the recommended actions.

Importance: It helps you quantify the potential cost savings from rightsizing, purchasing reserved instances, or optimizing resource usage.

Decision-Making: Provides a clear financial benefit to justify changes in your resource configurations.

How to Use Estimated Monthly Saving:

Access Recommendations: Navigate to the AWS Cost Management Console to view rightsizing recommendations.

Review Savings Estimates: Look at the estimated monthly savings for each recommendation to understand the potential financial impact.

Implement Recommendations: Prioritize actions based on the savings estimates to maximize cost reduction.

AWS Cost Management

AWS Rightsizing Recommendations

AWS Secrets Manager is a service that helps you protect access to your applications, services, and IT resources. This service enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle. Users and applications retrieve secrets with a call to Secrets Manager APIs, eliminating the need to hardcode sensitive information in plain text. Secrets Manager offers secret rotation with built-in integration for Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon DocumentDB, and other AWS services1. You can also extend Secrets Manager to rotate other types of secrets, such as credentials for Oracle, SQL Server, or MongoDB databases, by using custom AWS Lambda functions2. Secrets Manager enables you to control access to secrets using fine-grained permissions and audit secret rotation centrally for resources in the AWS Cloud, third-party services, and on-premises3. Therefore, AWS Secrets Manager supports the requirement of rotating database user credentials with the least amount of operational overhead, compared to the other options. References:

What Is AWS Secrets Manager? - AWS Secrets Manager

Rotating Your AWS Secrets Manager Secrets - AWS Secrets Manager

AWS Secrets Manager Features - AWS Secrets Manager

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) and AWS Schema Conversion Tool are the primary services for migrating a commercial relational database to an Amazon-managed open-source database. AWS DMS helps migrate the data, while the AWS Schema Conversion Tool converts the database schema from the source database format to the target format, including SQL code. AWS SDKs are for software development, AWS Systems Manager is for operational management, and Amazon EMR is for big data processing, which are not relevant to this use case.

When a company moves from on-premises IT architecture to the AWS Cloud, it gains several benefits:

A. Reduced or eliminated tasks for hardware troubleshooting, capacity planning, and procurement: In an on-premises environment, companies must maintain their own hardware, which involves procuring servers, configuring them, managing capacity, and troubleshooting hardware failures. Moving to the AWS Cloud eliminates or greatly reduces these tasks since AWS is responsible for the underlying infrastructure.

E. Faster deployment of new features and applications: AWS provides scalable resources and automation tools that allow companies to deploy applications faster. Services like AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS CloudFormation, and AWS Lambda help streamline the deployment process, enabling quicker time-to-market for new features and applications.

Why other options are not suitable:

B. Elimination of the need for trained IT staff: While the cloud reduces certain operational burdens, it does not eliminate the need for skilled IT professionals to manage cloud services, ensure proper configurations, handle security, and manage applications.

C. Automatic security configuration of all applications that are migrated to the cloud: AWS provides security tools and services, but security configurations and management still require input from the customer to tailor them to specific application requirements.

D. Elimination of the need for disaster recovery planning: While AWS offers robust disaster recovery options, companies must still plan and implement disaster recovery strategies, such as backups and multi-region deployments.

According to the AWS shared responsibility model, AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, while customers are responsible for the security in the cloud. This means that AWS is responsible for the physical servers, networking, and operating system that run Lambdafunctions, while customers are responsible for the security of their code and AWS IAM to the Lambda service and within their function1. Customers need to manage the code within the Lambda function, such as writing, testing, debugging, deploying, and updating the code, as well as ensuring that the code does not contain any vulnerabilities or malicious code that could compromise the security or performance of the function23. References: 2: AWS Lambda - Amazon Web Services (AWS), 3: AWS Lambda Documentation, 1: Amazon CLF-C02: What is customer responsibility under AWS … - PUPUWEB

AWS Artifact is a self-service portal that provides on-demand access to AWS security and compliance reports and select online agreements. Users can download reports such as AWS ISO certifications, PCI reports, SOC reports, and GDPR DPA, and review and accept agreements such as BAA and NDA. AWS Artifact helps users to understand and meet compliance requirements for various standards and regulations that apply to AWS services and infrastructure. AWS Artifact is the best resource for a user to find compliance-related information and reports about AWS, whereas the other options are not

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) is a tool that helps organizations plan and execute their cloud transformation journey. The AWS CAF defines four phases of the cloud transformation journey: Envision, Align, Launch, and Scale. Each phase has a specific purpose and outcome1:

Envision: This phase helps you define your vision, goals, and expected outcomes for your cloud transformation. It also helps you identify and prioritize transformation opportunities across four domains: business, people, governance, and platform2.

Align: This phase helps you identify capability gaps across six perspectives: business, people, governance, platform, security, and operations. It also helps you create strategies for improving your cloud readiness, ensure stakeholder alignment, and facilitate relevant organizational change management activities3.

Launch: This phase helps you deliver pilot initiatives in production and demonstrate incremental business value. It also helps you learn from pilots and adjust your approach before scaling to full production4.

Scale: This phase helps you expand production pilots and business value to desired scale and ensure that the business benefits associated with your cloud investments are realized and sustained.

The options A and B are the correct AWS CAF cloud transformation journey recommendations, as they are part of the four phases defined by the AWS CAF. The options C, D, and E are not AWS CAFcloud transformation journey recommendations, as they are not part of the four phases defined by the AWS CAF

AWS Direct Connect is a service that establishes a dedicated network connection between your on-premises network and one or more AWS Regions. AWS Direct Connect can be used to create a private connection between an on-premises workload and an AWS Cloud workload, bypassing the public internet and reducing network costs, latency, and bandwidth issues. AWS Direct Connect can also provide increased security and reliability for your hybrid cloud applications and data transfers. References:

AWS Direct Connect

What is AWS Direct Connect?

AWS Direct Connect User Guide

Amazon QuickSightis a scalable, serverless, machine learning-powered business intelligence (BI) service built for the cloud. It allows users to create and publish interactive dashboards with insights powered by machine learning, such as anomaly detection and forecasting. This makes it the best option for creating interactive BI dashboards that require machine learning insights.

A. AWS Glue Studio: Incorrect, as it is an ETL (extract, transform, load) tool for preparing and transforming data, not for creating BI dashboards.

C. Amazon Redshift: Incorrect, as it is a data warehousing service that can be used with BI tools but is not specifically designed for creating and publishing dashboards.

D. Amazon Athena: Incorrect, as it is an interactive query service for analyzing data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL, not for creating BI dashboards.

AWS Cloud References:

Amazon QuickSight

On-Demand Instances are the most flexible and cost-effective pricing model for short-term, experimental, or unpredictable workloads on AWS. On-Demand Instances let you pay only for the resources you use, without any long-term commitments or upfront fees. You can easily start and stop instances as needed, and scale up or down depending on your demand.

Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and Dedicated Hosts are all pricing models that require a commitment for a certain amount of usage or capacity for a one- or three-year term. These pricing models offer lower prices than On-Demand Instances, but they are not suitable for workloads that only run for 3 to 6 months or have variable usage patterns. Savings Plans and Reserved Instances also offer flexibility to change instance types, sizes, or regions within the same family or pool, while Dedicated Hosts are physical servers that can only run specific instance types.

Best practices for using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) include:

B. Create individual IAM users: Each user should have their own IAM credentials to ensure accountability, control, and traceability. Sharing credentials can lead to security risks and difficulty in auditing.

E. Use groups to assign permissions to IAM users: Assigning permissions through IAM groups simplifies permission management. You can assign the necessary permissions to the group, and then add or remove users from the group as needed, rather than managing permissions for each user individually.

Why other options are not suitable:

A. Share access keys: Sharing access keys is a security risk and violates AWS security best practices. Each user should have their own credentials.

C. Use inline policies instead of customer-managed policies: Customer-managed policies are preferred over inline policies because they offer better control, reusability, and versioning.

D. Grant maximum privileges to IAM users: Granting the least privilege necessary is a best practice to reduce the risk of accidental or malicious actions.

 IAM roles are a secure way to grant permissions to applications running on an Amazon EC2 instance to make calls to other AWS services. IAM roles are entities that have specific permissions policies attached to them. You can create an IAM role and associate it with an EC2 instance when you launch it or later. The applications on the instance can then use the temporary credentials provided by the role to access AWS resources that the role allows. This way, you do not have tostore any long-term credentials or access keys on the instance, which reduces the risk of compromise or misuse12.

The other options are not correct, because:

Security groups are virtual firewalls that control the inbound and outbound traffic for your EC2 instances. Security groups do not grant permissions to access other AWS services, but rather filter the network traffic based on rules that you define3.

AWS Firewall Manager is a service that helps you centrally configure and manage firewall rules across your accounts and resources. AWS Firewall Manager works with AWS WAF, AWS Shield Advanced, and Amazon VPC security groups. AWS Firewall Manager does not grant permissions to access other AWS services, but rather helps you enforce consistent security policies across your AWS infrastructure4.

IAM user SSH keys are credentials that allow you to connect to your EC2 instance using SSH. SSH keys do not grant permissions to access other AWS services, but rather authenticate your identity when you log in to your instance5.

Using an IAM role to grant permissions to applications running on Amazon EC2 instances - AWS Identity and Access Management

IAM roles for Amazon EC2 - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Security groups for your VPC - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

What is AWS Firewall Manager? - AWS Firewall Manager

Connecting to your Linux instance using SSH - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

A network ACL (NACL) is an optional layer of security for your VPC that acts as a firewall for controlling traffic in and out of one or more subnets. You can create a network ACL and associate it with a subnet to apply rules that allow or deny traffic to or from the subnet. Network ACLs are stateless, meaning that they evaluate the source and destination IP addresses for both inbound and outbound traffic. You can also use network ACLs to block IP address ranges that are known to be malicious12.

The other options are not AWS services or tools that can be used to set up a firewall to control traffic going into and coming out of an Amazon VPC subnet. Security groups are another layer of security for your VPC that act as a firewall for your EC2 instances. Security groups are stateful, meaning that they automatically allow return traffic for allowed inbound traffic. Security groups can only filter traffic based on protocols, ports, and source or destination IP addresses, not on IP ranges3. AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications from common web exploits. AWS WAF can filter web requests based on rules that you define, such as IP addresses, HTTP headers, HTTP body, or URI strings. AWS WAF does not apply to non-web traffic or to traffic within a VPC4. AWS Firewall Manager is a service that helps you centrally configure and manage firewall rules across your accounts and resources in AWS Organizations. You can use Firewall Manager to apply AWS WAF rules, AWS Network Firewall policies, and Amazon VPC security groups across your AWS accounts. AWS Firewall Manager does not provide a firewall service itself, but rather helps you manage other firewall services

AWS Elastic Beanstalkis a fully managed service designed for developers who want to deploy and manage their applications without having to provision and manage the underlying infrastructure themselves. Developers can simply upload their code, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, including provisioning the necessary resources (such as EC2 instances, load balancers, and auto-scaling).

A. AWS CloudFormation: Incorrect, as it is an infrastructure-as-code service for defining and provisioning AWS resources but does not directly deploy applications.

B. AWS CodeBuild: Incorrect, as it is a service for building and testing code, not for deploying applications.

D. AWS CodeDeploy: Incorrect, as it is specifically designed for automating software deployments to a variety of compute services, including EC2, but it does not manage the underlying infrastructure.

AWS Cloud References:

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Understanding S3 Intelligent-Tiering: S3 Intelligent-Tiering is designed to optimize costs by automatically moving data to the most cost-effective access tier based on changing access patterns. It is ideal for data with unknown or unpredictable access patterns.

Why S3 Intelligent-Tiering is Cost-Effective:

Automatic Tiering: Moves data between two access tiers (frequent and infrequent access) based on changing access patterns, optimizing storage costs without performance impact.

No Retrieval Fees: Unlike other storage classes, there are no retrieval fees in Intelligent-Tiering, making it cost-effective for data with unpredictable access patterns.

Monitoring and Automation: Automatically monitors access patterns and transitions data, reducing the need for manual intervention.

When to Use S3 Intelligent-Tiering:

Unpredictable Access Patterns: Ideal for datasets where the access frequency cannot be determined or changes frequently.

Cost Optimization: For organizations looking to minimize storage costs without sacrificing performance or requiring manual intervention to move data between tiers.

Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering

Amazon S3 Storage Classes

AWS Cost Explorer provides a visualization of historical AWS spending patterns and allows users to project future costs based on past usage. It offers advanced filtering and grouping features, enabling users to analyze costs and usage at a granular level. The AWS Cost and Usage Report provides detailed AWS cost and usage data but does not offer visualization or future cost projections. AWS Budgets is used for setting custom cost and usage budgets and receiving alerts. Amazon CloudWatch is for monitoring AWS resources and applications, not for cost management.

AWS Outposts is an AWS offering that brings AWS infrastructure and services to a customer's on-premises location. It allows companies to run AWS services locally while meeting any regulatory or compliance requirements to keep data or applications on-premises. Dedicated Instances are EC2 instances that run on hardware dedicated to a single customer but are still within AWS data centers. Amazon CloudFront is a CDN service, and AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers, neither of which meets the requirement for running an application on-premises.