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

The Storage Gateway service enables hybrid cloud backup by presenting local block storage that synchronizes with AWS cloud storage. For scenarios where all data must remain available locally while still backed up to AWS, the correct mode is gateway-stored volumes.

AWS documentation defines:

“Use stored volumes if you want to keep all your data locally while asynchronously backing up point-in-time snapshots to Amazon S3 for durable storage.”

These volumes expose an iSCSI interface compatible with POSIX file systems, allowing direct use by on-premises backup software.

Gateway-cached volumes (Option C) store primary data in AWS with limited local cache, violating the “all data must be available locally” requirement. Options A and B are object-based storage solutions, not compatible with POSIX or block-based backup applications.

Therefore, Option D fully satisfies CloudOps reliability and continuity best practices by ensuring local availability, cloud durability, and POSIX compatibility for backups.

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

The requirement is classic active-passive (production in us-east-1, DR in us-west-2 “only for failover”). The most operationally efficient and purpose-built solution is Route 53 failover routing combined with health checks. With failover routing, Route 53 designates one record as PRIMARY (us-east-1) and another as SECONDARY (us-west-2). Route 53 continuously evaluates the health check associated with the primary endpoint (commonly the ALB DNS name or a specific health-check path). If the primary fails, Route 53 automatically returns the secondary record, directing client DNS resolution to the DR region. This ensures us-west-2 is used only when us-east-1 is unhealthy, directly matching the requirement.

Latency routing (Option B) is designed to route users to the region with the lowest latency, which can actively send traffic to us-west-2 even when us-east-1 is healthy—violating the “DR only” constraint. Options C and D introduce custom automation (CloudWatch + Lambda + DNS record updates) that increases operational overhead, adds failure modes, and is unnecessary because Route 53 already provides managed health-check-based failover. Additionally, “EC2 instance terminated” is not a reliable proxy for full application availability, and DNS modification automation is more complex than using native Route 53 failover policies.

AWS Transit Gateway supports security group referencing across VPCs, but this feature must be explicitly enabled on each transit gateway attachment. Once enabled, security groups in one VPC can reference security groups in another VPC attached to the same transit gateway, simplifying rule management and improving security posture.

Enabling the feature on the transit gateway itself is not sufficient; it must be enabled per attachment to allow traffic evaluation based on security group IDs. This approach avoids brittle CIDR-based rules and allows dynamic scaling without rule updates.

Option A removes the transit gateway, which contradicts the existing architecture. Option B is incomplete. Option D does not address security group referencing.

Thus, enabling security group referencing on each transit gateway attachment is the correct solution.

According to AWS Cloud Operations and Systems Manager documentation, Session Manager requires that each managed instance be associated with an IAM instance profile that grants Systems Manager core permissions. The required permissions are provided by the AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore AWS-managed policy.

If this policy is missing or misconfigured, the Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) cannot communicate with the Systems Manager service, causing connection failures even if the agent is installed and running. This explains why other instances work—those instances likely have the correct IAM role attached.

Enabling port 22 (Option A) violates the company’s security policy, while configuring user names (Option C) and key pairs (Option D) are irrelevant because Session Manager operates over secure API channels, not SSH keys.

Therefore, the correct resolution is to attach or update the instance profile with the AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore policy, restoring Session Manager connectivity.

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

Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are Region-specific resources. AWS CloudOps documentation explicitly states that an AMI created in one Region cannot be used to launch instances in another Region unless it is copied to the target Region. Therefore, the SysOps administrator must copy the AMI to both us-east-1 and us-east-2.

The AMI copy process creates a new AMI in each destination Region and automatically copies the underlying snapshots. Once the AMIs exist in the target Regions, they can be referenced in launch templates, Auto Scaling groups, or AWS CloudFormation templates for consistent multi-Region deployments.

Option B is incorrect because making an AMI public does not replicate it across Regions. Option C is incorrect because sharing an AMI only grants account-level access within the same Region. Option D is incorrect because AMIs cannot be launched from Amazon S3 directly.

This approach aligns with AWS CloudOps automation practices for multi-Region application deployment and disaster recovery readiness.

Per the AWS Cloud Operations and Security Automation documentation, Security Hub integrates with Amazon EventBridge to publish findings in real time. These events can trigger automated responses using AWS Lambda functions or AWS Systems Manager Automation runbooks.

In this scenario, the correct CloudOps approach is to configure the existing EventBridge rule to invoke a Lambda function that inspects the event payload, identifies the affected security group, and removes the offending inbound rule (e.g., port 21 open to 0.0.0.0/0).

This event-driven remediation provides continuous compliance and eliminates manual intervention. Cron jobs (Options B and C) contradict event-driven design and add operational overhead. Stopping instances (Option A) doesn’t address the root cause — the insecure security group.

Thus, Option D aligns with AWS best practices for automated security remediation through EventBridge and Lambda.

AWS Organizations service control policies (SCPs) are designed to enforce permission guardrails across accounts. SCPs define the maximum available permissions for IAM principals in member accounts, regardless of the permissions granted by IAM policies. Because the requirement is to prevent EC2 instance launches without a required tag and to apply the restriction only to accounts within a specific organizational unit, SCPs are the correct control mechanism.

By creating an SCP that denies the ec2:RunInstances action when the CostCenter-Project tag is missing, the CloudOps engineer ensures that no EC2 instance can be launched without the required tag. Attaching the SCP directly to the application OU limits the scope of enforcement to only the accounts that belong to that OU, which satisfies the requirement precisely.

IAM-based solutions such as user groups or roles cannot enforce controls across multiple accounts consistently and can be bypassed by users with sufficient permissions. Attaching the SCP to the root OU would incorrectly apply the restriction to all accounts in the organization, which violates the requirement.

Therefore, attaching a tag-enforcing SCP to the application OU is the correct and least operationally complex solution.

Per the AWS Cloud Operations, Networking, and Security documentation, the best practice for serving private S3 content securely to end users is to use Amazon CloudFront with Origin Access Control (OAC).

OAC enables CloudFront to access S3 buckets privately, even when Block Public Access settings are enabled at the account level. This allows content to be delivered globally and securely without making the S3 bucket public. The bucket policy explicitly allows access only from the CloudFront distribution, ensuring that users can retrieve PDF files only via CloudFront URLs.

This configuration offers:

Automatic scalability through CloudFront caching,

Improved security via private access control,

Minimal administration effort with fully managed services.

Other options require manual handling or make the bucket public, violating AWS security best practices.

Therefore, Option B—using CloudFront with Origin Access Control and a restrictive bucket policy—provides the most secure, efficient, and low-maintenance CloudOps solution.