SOA-C03 Dumps with Practice Exam Questions Answers

As described in the AWS Cloud Operations and EC2 Management documentation, changing an instance type (e.g., from T3 to C5) requires that the instance be stopped first. Once stopped, the engineer can modify the instance type through the AWS Management Console, CLI, or API, then start the instance again to apply changes.

This process preserves the root volume, networking configuration, and data, making it an operationally safe and efficient way to upgrade to a different instance family.

Changing the instance type while running (Option D) is unsupported. VM Import/Export (Option A) is for external VM migration. Hibernation (Option B) does not apply to type changes.

Thus, Option C is correct — stopping the instance, changing its type, and restarting it meets AWS best practices.

The AWS Cloud Operations and Security documentation specifies that for Amazon CloudFront, automatic certificate renewal is only supported for certificates issued by AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). When a certificate is managed by ACM and validated through DNS validation, ACM automatically renews the certificate before expiration without requiring manual intervention.

Option A ensures that the certificate is issued and managed by ACM, enabling full integration with CloudFront. Option E (DNS validation) is essential for automation; AWS performs revalidation automatically as long as the DNS validation record remains in place.

By contrast, email validation (Option D) requires manual user confirmation upon renewal, which prevents automatic renewals. Certificates issued by third-party certificate authorities (Option B) are manually managed and must be reimported into ACM after renewal. CloudFront does not have a direct feature (Option C) to renew certificates; it relies on ACM’s lifecycle management.

Thus, combining ACM-issued certificates (A) with DNS validation (E) ensures continuous, automated renewal with no downtime or human action required.

The AWS Cloud Operations and Storage documentation confirms that S3 Transfer Acceleration is designed to increase upload speed for objects transferred to S3 buckets over long distances.

It uses AWS Global Edge Network and Amazon CloudFront edge locations to route data through optimized network paths, reducing latency and achieving higher throughput compared to standard S3 uploads.

After enabling Transfer Acceleration on the bucket, users upload files to the accelerated endpoint (e.g., bucketname.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com). This feature requires no changes to application logic besides endpoint modification and provides immediate performance improvement.

CloudFront (Option A) is for content delivery, not uploads. ElastiCache (Option B) and Global Accelerator (Option C) are unrelated to S3 upload performance.

Thus, Option D is correct — enable S3 Transfer Acceleration for faster, optimized file uploads.

High availability requires removing single-AZ risk and eliminating manual recovery. The AWS Reliability best practices state to design for multi-AZ and automatic healing: Auto Scaling “helps maintain application availability and allows you to automatically add or remove EC2 instances” (AWS Auto Scaling User Guide). The Reliability Pillar recommends to “distribute workloads across multiple Availability Zones” and to “automate recovery from failure” (AWS Well-Architected Framework – Reliability Pillar). Attaching the Auto Scaling group to an ALB target group enables health-based replacement: instances failing load balancer health checks are replaced and traffic is routed only to healthy targets. Using an AMI in a launch template ensures consistent, repeatable instance configuration (AWS EC2 Launch Templates). Options A and C keep all instances in a single Availability Zone and rely on manual or ad-hoc restarts, which do not meet high-availability or resiliency goals. Option B only scales vertically and adds a restart rule; it neither removes the single-AZ failure domain nor provides automated replacement. Therefore, creating a multi-AZ EC2 Auto Scaling group with a launch template and attaching it to the ALB target group (Option D) is the CloudOps-aligned solution for resilience and business continuity.

References (AWS CloudOps Documents / Study Guide):

• AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C03) Exam Guide: Domain 2 – Reliability and Business Continuity

• AWS Well-Architected Framework – Reliability Pillar

• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling User Guide – Health checks and replacement

• Elastic Load Balancing User Guide – Target group health checks and ALB integration

• Amazon EC2 Launch Templates – Reproducible instance configuration

According to AWS Cloud Operations and VPC Networking documentation, when VPCs are peered, security groups can reference peer account security groups directly to restrict traffic between them.

This feature allows specifying the security group ID (sg-1234abcd) from the source account (111122223333) in the target database’s security group inbound rule. AWS automatically validates that the VPCs are connected through an existing VPC peering connection and that mutual permissions are properly configured.

You do not prefix the security group ID with the account or peering connection (Options A and B), and using the destination account ID (Option D) is incorrect because it represents the database side, not the source.

Hence, the correct configuration is Option C, which references the application servers’ security group directly for precise, least-privilege access control.