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AWS CLF-C02 and SAA-C03 - Cloud Practitioner and Solutions Architect Associate - All Domains
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Question 1
A company stores sensitive data in AWS and needs to encrypt data at rest using their own key material that they can revoke at any time. Which AWS encryption approach satisfies this?
Explanation
To fully control key material with the ability to revoke: Client-side encryption with CMK — the customer creates and manages the KMS key, controls key policy, can immediately disable/delete the key (revoking access to all encrypted data). SSE-S3 uses AWS-managed keys (no customer control). SSE-KMS with AWS-managed keys uses AWS-controlled keys. SSE-C allows providing key material but AWS decrypts server-side (you provide the key per request but don't have KMS audit trail). CMK in KMS with customer control meets all requirements: key ownership, revocability, and audit trail.
Question 2
A company's application uses DynamoDB for session storage. During flash sales, read throughput spikes 10x for 2-3 minutes. The table normally uses 100 RCUs but must handle up to 1,000 RCUs during peaks. Which DynamoDB capacity mode minimizes cost?
Explanation
DynamoDB Auto Scaling automatically adjusts provisioned throughput in response to actual traffic patterns. Configured with a minimum of 100 RCUs and maximum of 1,000 RCUs, it scales up during flash sales and back down afterward. This is more cost-effective than permanently reserving 1,000 RCUs. On-Demand mode charges per request (higher cost per RCU than provisioned but no capacity planning), which can be more expensive for predictable baseline traffic. DynamoDB Streams with Lambda adds complexity and doesn't solve the read throughput issue directly.
Question 3
A company wants to serve static website content globally with low latency. The content is stored in S3. Which configuration provides the lowest latency for global users?
Explanation
Amazon CloudFront is AWS's global CDN with 400+ edge locations worldwide. Static content (HTML, CSS, JS, images) is cached at edge locations closest to users, providing sub-10ms latency for cached responses. S3 Transfer Acceleration speeds up uploads to S3 (not content delivery to users). Replicating to all regions manually would require hundreds of buckets and complex routing. EC2 web servers with S3 sync add compute costs and complexity without the CDN edge benefits. CloudFront + S3 is the standard static website delivery architecture on AWS.
Question 4
A company uses EC2 instances to run a machine learning training job that takes 8 hours. The job can handle interruptions and restart from checkpoints. Which EC2 purchasing option provides the lowest cost?
Explanation
Spot Instances use spare AWS EC2 capacity at discounts of up to 90% vs. On-Demand. For workloads that: (1) are fault-tolerant (can handle 2-minute interruption notice), (2) can checkpoint and resume, and (3) have flexible timing — Spot is the lowest cost option. ML training with checkpoints is a canonical Spot use case. On-Demand provides no discount for transient workloads. Reserved Instances require 1-year commitment and are for steady-state workloads. Dedicated Instances (dedicated hardware) have the highest cost.
Question 5
A company's RDS MySQL database experiences read bottlenecks as reporting queries affect application performance. Which RDS feature offloads read traffic?
Explanation
RDS Read Replicas create asynchronously replicated copies of the primary DB instance. Read-heavy workloads (reporting, analytics) are directed to read replicas, offloading the primary instance. Read replicas can be in the same region, different AZ, or cross-region. Multi-AZ provides high availability (synchronous standby) but the standby doesn't serve reads — it's only for failover. RDS Proxy manages connection pooling for serverless/Lambda workloads. ElastiCache caches query results but adds application complexity and eventual consistency concerns.