Pass the Amazon Web Services AWS Certified Associate DVA-C02 Questions and answers with ExamsMirror

AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports several deployment policies, and in this case, the requirement is to forward a specific percentage of traffic to the new version without causing downtime. The Traffic-splitting deployment policy is the most appropriate choice.

Traffic-splitting Deployment: This deployment method allows you to gradually shift a specified percentage of incoming traffic from the old environment version to the new one. During the evaluation period, if any issues are detected, the traffic can be redirected back to the old version.

No Downtime: This method ensures no downtime since both versions of the application run concurrently, and traffic is split between them.

Alternatives:

Rolling deployments (Option A): These gradually replace instances but may result in partial downtime if some instances fail during deployment.

In-place deployments (Option C): In-place deployments replace instances without creating new ones, which can lead to downtime.

Immutable deployments (Option D): While this ensures no downtime by creating entirely new instances, it doesn't provide traffic splitting during the evaluation phase.

Elastic Beanstalk Deployment Policies

The solution that will meet the requirements is to use the AWS SDK ssm PutParameter operation in the Lambda function from the existing custom resource to store the credentials as a parameter. Set the parameter value to reference the new credentials. Set the parameter type to SecureString. This way, the developer can store the API credentials with minimal operational overhead, as AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store provides secure and scalable storage for configuration data. The SecureString parameter type encrypts the parameter value with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). The other options either involve adding additional resources to the CloudFormation template, which increases complexity and cost, or do not encrypt the parameter value, which reduces security.

This solution will meet the requirements by using IAM database authentication for Aurora, which enables using IAM roles or users to authenticate with Aurora databases instead of using passwords or other secrets. The developer can use IAM database authentication for Aurora to enable secure database connections for all the Lambda functions that access Aurora DB instance. The developer can create an IAM role with permission to connect to Aurora DB instance and attach it to each Lambda function. The developer can also configure Aurora DB instance to use IAM database authentication and enable encryption in transit using SSL certificates. This way, the Lambda functions can use a single securely encrypted database connection string to access Aurora without needing any secrets or passwords. Option B is not optimal because it will store the credentials and read them from an encrypted Amazon RDS DB instance, which may introduce additional costs and complexity for managing and accessing another RDS DB instance. Option C is not optimal because it will store the credentials in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store as a secure string parameter, which may require additional steps or permissions to retrieve and decrypt the credentials from Parameter Store. Option D is not optimal because it will use Lambda environment variables with a shared AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key for encryption, which may not be secure or scalable as environment variables are stored as plain text unless encrypted with AWS KMS.

Distributed Tracing with X-Ray: X-Ray helps visualize request paths and identify bottlenecks in applications distributed across Regions.

Region Annotations (Automatic for AWS Services): X-Ray automatically adds a Region annotation to segments representing calls to AWS services. This aids in tracing cross-Region traffic.

Region Annotations (Manual for User-Defined): For segments representing calls to user-defined services in different Regions, the developer needs to add the Region annotation manually to enable comprehensive tracing.

Sensitive environment variables in Lambda should be protected using encryption helpers integrated with AWS KMS. Lambda environment variables are encrypted at rest, and when using a customer managed KMS key, teams can control the key policy, access, and rotation for their own microservices—matching the policy requirement that each team has “full control” over key rotation. AWS managed keys do not provide the same level of customer control over lifecycle and rotation decisions.

Therefore, the correct approach is to create customer managed KMS keys (one per team/service boundary or per microservice, depending on governance) and configure each Lambda function to use the relevant CMK for encrypting its environment variables. The Lambda execution role must have permission to use the key for decryption at runtime, typically requiring kms:Decrypt (and sometimes kms:DescribeKey depending on tooling). This is captured by Option B.

Option A and D use AWS managed keys, which do not satisfy the requirement for each team to control rotation. Rotation control (and policy ownership) is a key differentiator of customer managed keys.

Option C is not correct because the Lambda execution role does not need kms:CreateGrant and kms:Encrypt for decrypting environment variables at runtime. Over-permissioning increases risk. The Lambda service handles encryption of environment variables; the function runtime principally needs the ability to decrypt.

A feature branch is a branch that is created from the main branch to work on a specific feature or task1. Feature branches allow developers to isolate their work from the main branch and avoid conflicts with other changes1. Feature branches can be merged back to the main branch when the feature or task is completed and tested1.

In this scenario, the developer needs to maintain two parallel streams of work: one for fixing and updating the current version of the application that is deployed in production, and another for developing the new version of the application. The developer can use feature branches to achieve this goal.

The developer can create a feature branch from the main branch for production bug fixes. This branch will contain the code that is currently deployed in production, and any fixes or updates that need to be applied to it. The developer can push this branch to the CodeCommit repository and use it to deploy changes to the production environment.

The developer can also create a second feature branch from the main branch for development of the new version of the application. This branch will contain the code that is under development for the new version, and any changes or enhancements that are part of it. The developer can push this branch to the CodeCommit repository and use it to test and deploy the new version of the application in a separate environment.

By using feature branches, the developer can keep the main branch stable and clean, and avoid mixing code from different versions of the application. The developer can also easily switch between branches and merge them when needed.

The X-Ray daemon is a software that collects trace data from the X-Ray SDK and relays it to the X-Ray service. The X-Ray daemon can run on any platform that supports Go, including Linux, Windows, and macOS. The developer can install and run the X-Ray daemon on the on-premises servers to capture and relay the data to the X-Ray service with minimal configuration. The X-Ray SDK is used to instrument the application code, not to capture and relay data. The Lambda function solutions are more complex and require additional configuration.

DynamoDB distributes throughput across partitions based on the hash key. A hot partition (caused by high usage of a specific hash key) can result in a ProvisionedThroughputExceededException, even if overall usage is below the provisioned capacity.

Why Option B is Correct:

Partition-Level Limits: Each partition has a limit of 3,000 read capacity units or 1,000 write capacity units per second.

Hot Partition: Excessive use of a single hash key can overwhelm its partition.

Why Not Other Options:

Option A: DynamoDB storage size does not affect throughput.

Option C: Provisioned scaling operations are unrelated to throughput errors.

Option D: Sort keys do not impact partition-level throughput.

DynamoDB Partition Key Design Best Practices

AWS Lambda is a service that lets developers run code without provisioning or managing servers. Lambda layers are a distribution mechanism for libraries, custom runtimes, and other dependencies. The developer can create a Lambda layer with the required Python library and use the layer in both Lambda functions. This will reduce the size of the Lambda deployment packages and avoid reaching the quota for the maximum size of zipped deployment packages. The developer can also benefit from using layers to manage dependencies separately from function code.

This solution will meet the requirements by using AWS Secrets Manager, which is a service that helps protect secrets such as database credentials by encrypting them with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) and enabling automatic rotation of secrets. The developer can create an AWS Lambda function by using the SecretsManagerRotationTemplate template in the AWS Secrets Manager console, which provides a sample code for rotating secrets for RDS DB instances, Amazon DocumentDB clusters, and Amazon Aurora DB instances. The developer can also create secrets for the database credentials in Secrets Manager, which encrypts them at rest and provides secure access to them. The developer can set up secrets rotation on a schedule, which changes the database credentials periodically according to a specified interval or event. Option A is not optimal because it will set up IAM database authentication for token-based access, which may not be compatible with all database engines and may require additional configuration and management of IAM roles or users. Option B is not optimal because it will create parameters for the database credentials in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store, which does not support automatic rotation of secrets. Option C is not optimal because it will store the database access credentials as an encrypted Amazon S3 object in an S3 bucket, which may introduce additional costs and complexity for accessing and securing the data.

The type of keys that the developer should use to meet the requirements is symmetric customer managed keys with key material that is generated by AWS. This way, the developer can use AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to encrypt the data with a symmetric key that is managed by the developer. The developer can also enable automatic annual rotation for the key, which creates new key material for the key every year. The other options either involve using Amazon S3 managed keys, which do not support automatic annual rotation, or using asymmetric keys or imported key material, which are not supported by S3 encryption.

Amazon CloudWatch is the service that collects and stores logs from AWS Lambda functions. The developer can use CloudWatch Logs Insights to query and analyze the logs for errors and metrics. Option A is not correct because Amazon S3 is a storage service that does not store Lambda function logs. Option B is not correct because AWS CloudTrail is a service that records API calls and events for AWS services, not Lambda function logs. Option D is not correct because Amazon DynamoDB is a database service that does not store Lambda function logs.

This solution will meet the requirements by creating a Lambda function execution role, which is an IAM role that grants permissions to a Lambda function to access AWS resources such as Amazon S3 objects. The developer can attach a policy to the role that grants access to specific objects in the S3 bucket that are required by the application, following the principle of least privilege. Option A is not optimal because it will hardcode the credentials that are required to access S3 objects in the application code, which is insecure and difficult to maintain. Option B is not optimal because it will create a secret access key and access key ID with permission to access the S3 bucket, which will introduce additional security risks and complexity for storing and managing credentials. Option D is not optimal because it will store the secret access key and access key ID as environment variables in Lambda, which is also insecure and difficult to maintain.