SOA-C03 Exam Dumps - AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate

Per the AWS Cloud Operations, Monitoring, and Automation documentation, the correct workflow for automated operational remediation is:

Amazon CloudWatch Agent is installed on each EC2 instance (Option A) to collect local log data and push it to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.

A CloudWatch Metric Filter (Option C) is then defined to identify specific error strings or patterns within those logs (e.g., “HTTP 5xx” or “Service Unavailable”). When such an event occurs, CloudWatch Alarms are triggered.

Upon alarm activation, Amazon EventBridge rules (Option E) are configured to respond automatically by invoking an AWS Systems Manager Automation runbook, which executes an action to restart the web server process on the affected instance via SSM Agent.

This approach aligns directly with AWS’s recommended CloudOps remediation pattern, known as event-driven automation, which ensures minimal downtime and eliminates manual intervention.

Options involving CloudTrail (B) or SES notifications (D) are incorrect because they are unrelated to log-based application monitoring and automated remediation workflows.

According to the AWS Cloud Operations and Networking documentation, instances in a private subnet do not have a direct route to the internet gateway and thus require a NAT gateway for outbound internet access.

The correct configuration is to create a NAT gateway in the public subnet, associate an Elastic IP address, and then update the private subnet’s route table to send all 0.0.0.0/0 traffic to the NAT gateway. This enables instances in the private subnet to initiate outbound connections while keeping inbound traffic blocked for security.

Placing the NAT gateway inside the private subnet (Options C or D) prevents connectivity because it would not have a route to the internet gateway. Configuring routes from the public subnet to the NAT gateway (Option B) does not serve private subnet traffic.

Hence, Option A follows AWS best practices for enabling secure, managed, outbound-only internet access from private resources.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of AWS CloudOps Documents:

The requirement is that traffic from a VPC-connected Lambda to Amazon S3 must not use public IP addresses. The AWS-native way to keep traffic private is to use VPC endpoints, which provide private connectivity to supported AWS services without traversing the public internet. Among the options, creating an S3 VPC endpoint is the only approach that satisfies “no public IP addresses” while allowing access to the bucket. Option D is the best match because it explicitly configures an S3 endpoint and directs the Lambda function to use the endpoint-specific DNS name for private routing.

Option C (NAT gateway) is incorrect for this requirement because NAT provides outbound internet access from private subnets and typically uses public IP addressing at the NAT gateway. That violates the intent to avoid public IP paths for S3 traffic. Option A is not applicable because S3 buckets are not placed “inside” a VPC and do not participate in VPC sharing in a way that provides private network paths. Option B (transit gateway) connects VPCs and on-prem networks, but it does not create private service connectivity to S3 by itself; you would still need the correct service endpoint solution for S3 access.

Using a VPC endpoint also aligns with CloudOps best practices: it reduces exposure, simplifies network egress controls, and supports least-privilege access via endpoint policies (where applicable) alongside IAM policies.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of AWS CloudOps Documents:

The correct answer is A because AWS KMS symmetric customer managed keys with automatic key rotation provide encryption, access control, and compliance with minimal operational effort. AWS CloudOps documentation states that Amazon EBS encryption supports AWS KMS symmetric keys only, and customer managed keys allow administrators to define custom key policies to control access.

Automatic key rotation is supported for symmetric customer managed keys and rotates the backing key material once every year, fully satisfying the company’s rotation requirement without manual intervention. This approach minimizes operational overhead while maintaining strong security controls and auditability.

Option B is incorrect because AWS owned keys do not allow custom key policies and therefore cannot meet the access control requirement. Option C is incorrect because asymmetric KMS keys are not supported for EBS encryption. Option D is incorrect because imported key material requires manual rotation and re-import, increasing operational complexity and risk.

AWS CloudOps security best practices strongly recommend customer managed symmetric keys with automatic rotation when organizations need fine-grained access control, regulatory compliance, and low maintenance overhead.

According to the AWS Cloud Operations and Compute documentation, when workloads exhibit predictable traffic patterns, the best practice is to use scheduled scaling for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups.

With scheduled scaling, administrators can predefine the desired capacity of an Auto Scaling group to increase before anticipated demand (in this case, before the 2-hour peak) and scale back down afterward. This ensures that sufficient compute capacity is provisioned proactively, avoiding performance degradation while maintaining cost efficiency.

AWS notes: “Scheduled actions enable scaling your Auto Scaling group at predictable times, allowing you to pre-warm instances before demand spikes.”

Manual scaling (Option D) adds operational overhead. Adjusting launch templates (Option B) doesn’t affect scaling behavior, and permanently increasing minimum capacity (Option A) wastes resources outside of peak hours.

Thus, Option C provides an automated, cost-effective, and operationally efficient CloudOps solution.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of AWS CloudOps Doocuments:

VPC Flow Logs show the request arriving and being ACCEPTed on dstport 8080 and the corresponding response being REJECTed on the return path to the client’s ephemeral port (59003). AWS networking guidance states that security groups are stateful (return traffic is automatically allowed) while network ACLs are stateless and require explicit inbound and outbound rules for both directions. CloudOps operational guidance for VPC networking further notes that when you allow an inbound request (for example, TCP 8080) through a subnet’s network ACL, you must also allow the outbound ephemeral port range (typically 1024–65535) for the response traffic; otherwise, the return packets are dropped and appear as REJECT in flow logs. The observed pattern—request accepted to 8080, response rejected to 59003—matches a missing outbound ephemeral-range allow on the subnet’s NACL. Therefore, the cause is the subnet NACL, not security groups or on-premises ACLs. The remediation is to add an outbound ALLOW rule on the NACL for the appropriate ephemeral TCP port range back to the on-premises CIDR (and the corresponding inbound rule if asymmetric).

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 confirms that AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) is designed to protect web applications from application-layer threats, including SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities.

When integrated with an Application Load Balancer, AWS WAF inspects incoming traffic using rule groups. The AWS Managed Rules for SQL Injection Protection provide preconfigured, continuously updated filters that detect and block malicious SQL patterns.

AWS Shield (Standard or Advanced) defends against DDoS attacks, not application-layer SQL attacks, and vulnerability scanners (Option C) only detect, not prevent, exploitation.

Thus, Option D provides the correct, managed, and automated protection aligned with AWS best practices.