Free Practice Questions for Amazon Web Services SOA-C02 Exam

Objective:

Resolve the HTTP 403 (Access Denied) error for the public S3 static website.

Root Cause:

By default, S3 buckets are private, and public access is blocked due to the Block Public Access settings.

Additionally, a bucket policy is needed to allow public access to the objects.

Solution Implementation:

Step 1: Turn off Block Public Access:

Navigate to the Permissions tab of the S3 bucket in the AWS Management Console.

Turn off the Block Public Access settings by disabling the following:

Block public access to buckets and objects via ACLs.

Block public access to buckets and objects via bucket policies.

Step 2: Add a Bucket Policy for Public Access:

Add a policy allowing GetObject for public access:

{

"Version": "2012-10-17",

"Statement": [

{

"Effect": "Allow",

"Principal": "*",

"Action": "s3:GetObject",

"Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::/*"

}

]

}

Step 3: Test Access:

Confirm that the website is accessible via the public URL.

AWS References:

Block Public Access Settings:S3 Block Public Access

Bucket Policies for Static Websites:Bucket Policy Examples

Why Other Options Are Incorrect:

Option A: Route 53 is not required to resolve the 403 error; the issue is with S3 bucket permissions.

Option C: Editing file permissions alone will not work; bucket permissions must also allow public access.

Option D: PutObject permissions are unnecessary for serving a static website.

To meet the requirement of directing users to the Region closest to them and providing automated failover, the SysOps administrator should perform the following steps:

Create Amazon CloudWatch Alarms:

Create CloudWatch alarms that monitor the health of the ALB in each Region. This ensures that the system can detect unhealthy endpoints and trigger the failover mechanism.

Step-by-Step Explanation:

Understand the Problem:

The application on a general-purpose EC2 instance experiences performance issues during I/O intensive tasks.

High VolumeQueueLength indicates a bottleneck in I/O operations.

Analyze the Requirements:

Improve disk I/O performance to handle intensive read/write operations.

Evaluate the Options:

Option A: Modify the instance type to be storage optimized.

This could help but may not be necessary if increasing IOPS on the EBS volume resolves the issue.

Option B: Deselect Auto-Enable Volume I/O.

This option is not relevant to addressing high VolumeQueueLength.

Option C: Modify the volume properties to increase the IOPS.

Increasing IOPS directly addresses the I/O performance bottleneck.

Option D: Enable enhanced networking.

Enhanced networking improves network performance but not disk I/O performance.

Select the Best Solution:

Option C: Increasing the IOPS of the EBS volume directly addresses the high VolumeQueueLength and improves I/O performance.

Amazon EBS Volume Types

Optimizing EBS Performance

Modifying the volume properties to increase the IOPS ensures that the application can handle intensive read/write operations more effectively.

To enforce MFA for API calls using the AWS CLI, the users must use temporary security credentials obtained through the get-session-token command. Here’s how to do it:

Enable MFA for IAM Users:

Ensure that MFA is enabled and properly configured for each IAM user.

Configure IAM Policy for MFA Enforcement:

Attach an IAM policy that denies API calls unless MFA is used. This policy should be attached to all users.

Obtain Temporary Security Credentials Using MFA:

Users need to use the aws sts get-session-token command to obtain temporary credentials. This command requires the MFA token.

sh

Copy code

aws sts get-session-token --serial-number arn:aws:iam::123456789012:mfa/user --token-code 123456

Use Temporary Credentials for API Calls:

After obtaining the temporary credentials, set them as environment variables or configure them in the AWS CLI profile to make API calls.

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=...

export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=...

export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=...

Enabling MFA for IAM Users

Using Temporary Security Credentials

AWS CLI get-session-token

To maintain a documented trail of any changes made to the security groups and receive notifications, AWS Config is the best solution.

AWS Config:

AWS Config continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations and allows you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired configurations.

You can set up AWS Config to record changes to your security groups.

Setting Up AWS Config:

Open the AWS Config console and choose "Set up AWS Config."

Select the resource types you want to record (in this case, security groups).

Specify an Amazon S3 bucket to store configuration snapshots and history files.

Notifications:

Create an Amazon SNS topic for notifications about configuration changes.

Subscribe the SysOps administrator's email address to the SNS topic.

AWS Config

Setting Up AWS Config

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) provides a scalable and highly available file storage solution for use with Amazon EC2 instances. To achieve high availability and durability:

EFS Standard Storage Class: Stores data redundantly across multiple Availability Zones, ensuring data durability and availability.

Mount Targets: For optimal performance and availability, create a mount target in each Availability Zone. EC2 instances should connect to the mount target in their respective Availability Zone.

By configuring EFS in this manner, the company ensures that all EC2 instances, regardless of their Availability Zone, have reliable and efficient access to shared data.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/vpc-network-acls.html

To block traffic to the external IP address identified by Amazon GuardDuty, the SysOps administrator should create a network ACL and add an outbound deny rule for traffic to the external IP address.

Network ACL:

Network ACLs (Access Control Lists) are stateless and operate at the subnet level. They can allow or deny specific inbound and outbound traffic based on rules.

Steps to Implement:

Go to the VPC console and select the network ACL associated with the subnet containing the EC2 instance.

Add an outbound rule to deny traffic to the external IP address provided by GuardDuty.

Ensure the rule is properly placed in the rule number order to be evaluated correctly.

Network ACLs

GuardDuty Documentation

To analyze CloudWatch logs across multiple AWS Lambda functions for historical errors, the most operationally efficient way is to use AWS Glue and Amazon Athena.

AWS Glue and Amazon Athena:

AWS Glue can crawl the data in S3, creating a catalog that makes it queryable.

Amazon Athena allows you to run SQL queries on the data cataloged by AWS Glue.

Steps to Implement:

Set up an AWS Glue crawler to index the logs stored in S3.

Configure the crawler to create a table in the AWS Glue Data Catalog.

Use Amazon Athena to query the table for errors using SQL. Since errors have a common string prefix, you can use SQL queries to filter and find these errors.

AWS Glue

Amazon Athena

To reduce the cost of running the application without affecting availability or design, applying rightsizing recommendations from AWS Cost Explorer to reduce the instance size is the best approach.

Rightsizing Recommendations:

AWS Cost Explorer provides rightsizing recommendations that help you identify underutilized instances.

By resizing instances to a more appropriate size based on their utilization, you can reduce costs while maintaining performance.

Steps to Implement:

Open the AWS Cost Management console.

Navigate to "Cost Explorer" and select "Rightsizing Recommendations."

Review the recommendations and choose to resize the instances based on their actual usage.

Advantages:

Rightsizing ensures that you are not paying for unused resources while maintaining the necessary capacity and performance for your application.

AWS Cost Explorer Rightsizing Recommendations

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/custom-tags.html "User-defined tags are tags that you define, create, and apply to resources. After you have created and applied the user-defined tags, you can activate by using the Billing and Cost Management console for cost allocation tracking. "

To meet this requirement, the SysOps administrator should activate the company-defined tags as user-defined cost allocation tags. This will ensure that the tags appear on the billing report and that the resources can be tracked with the specific tags. The other options (activating the tags as AWS generated cost allocation tags, creating a new cost category and selecting the account billing dimension, and creating a new AWS Cost and Usage Report and including the resource IDs) will not meet the requirements and are not the correct solutions for this issue.