Amazon Web Services DVA-C02 Dumps

This solution allows the developer to keep the dependencies of the Lambda functions up to date with the least additional complexity because it eliminates the need to update each function individually. A Lambda layer is a ZIP archive that contains libraries, custom runtimes, or other dependencies. The developer can create a layer that contains all of the shared dependencies and attach it to multiple Lambda functions. When the developer updates the layer, all of the functions that use the layer will have access to the latest version of the dependencies.

“Encryption in transit” for S3 means requiring requests to use HTTPS (TLS) rather than HTTP. AWS provides a standard policy condition key, aws:SecureTransport, that evaluates to true when the request is made over SSL/TLS and false when it is not. To enforce TLS for all cross-account GetObject requests, the most reliable control point is the S3 bucket resource-based policy, because the bucket is the resource being accessed and the bucket owner can enforce conditions regardless of which external account is calling.

Option A is the established pattern: add an explicit Deny statement in the bucket policy that denies all S3 actions (or at least s3:GetObject) when aws:SecureTransport is false. An explicit deny overrides any allows, ensuring that even if another account’s IAM policy allows access, the request will still be blocked if it is not using HTTPS.

Option B is backwards because it would allow insecure transport rather than deny it.

Option C is weaker because you cannot reliably enforce policies in other accounts (and principals could change roles or permissions). The bucket owner should enforce transport security at the bucket level.

Option D is not the right layer: the KMS key policy controls key usage, but the S3 GetObject transport requirement is best enforced by the S3 bucket policy. Also, S3 access can be denied before KMS is even involved.

Therefore, enforce HTTPS by adding a bucket policy Deny when aws:SecureTransport is false.

The requirement here is to ensure that Lambda functions are executed in a specific order. AWS Step Functions is a low-code workflow orchestration service that enables you to sequence AWS services, such as AWS Lambda, into workflows. It is purpose-built for situations like this, where different steps need to be executed in a strict sequence.

AWS Step Functions: Step Functions allows developers to design workflows as state machines, where each state corresponds to a particular function. In this case, the developer can create a Step Functions state machine where each step (order processing, inventory management, etc.) is represented by a Lambda function.

Operational Overhead: Step Functions have very low operational overhead because it natively handles retries, error handling, and function sequencing.

Alternatives:

Amazon SQS (Option A): While SQS can manage message ordering, it requires more manual handling of each step and the logic to sequentially invoke the Lambda functions.

Amazon SNS (Option B): SNS is a pub/sub service and is not designed to handle sequences of Lambda executions.

EventBridge (Option D): EventBridge Scheduler allows you to invoke Lambda functions based on scheduled times, but it doesn’t directly support sequencing based on workflow logic.Therefore, AWS Step Functions is the most appropriate solution due to its native orchestration capabilities and minimal operational complexity.

AWS Step Functions documentation

The requirement is to test a new Lambda version without impacting the production API, and to do so with the least operational overhead. In API Gateway (REST API), the simplest pattern is to create a separate stage (for example, test) and use a stage variable to control which Lambda function version (or alias) the integration invokes.

With option B, the developer creates a new stage and defines a stage variable (commonly something like lambdaAlias or lambdaVersion). The API method integration URI can reference this stage variable so that each stage points to a different Lambda alias/version. The production stage (for example, prod) continues to call the stable version, while the test stage calls the new version. This cleanly isolates testing traffic and prevents any effect on the production REST API because stages have distinct invoke URLs and deployments.

This approach is operationally efficient because it avoids duplicating the API definition (new REST API) and avoids creating extra resources/methods that must be maintained. It also provides a repeatable process: future versions can be tested by updating only stage variables or alias routing rather than restructuring the API.

Why not the others:

A adds additional resources/methods and increases API surface area and maintenance.

C duplicates the entire API, increasing overhead and configuration drift risk.

D would impact production because it changes the integration used by the existing method.

Therefore, using a new stage + stage variables to route to the updated Lambda version meets the requirements with minimal overhead.

AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store is a service that provides secure, hierarchical storage for configuration data and secrets. Parameter Store supports SecureString parameters, which are encrypted using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) keys. SecureString parameters can be used to store license keys in AWS and retrieve them securely from automation scripts that run in EC2 instances or CloudFormation stacks. Parameter Store is a cost-effective solution because it does not charge for storing parameters or API calls. Reference: Working with Systems Manager parameters

This solution will meet the requirements by using AWS Encryption SDK, which is a client-side encryption library that enables developers to encrypt and decrypt data using data encryption keys that are protected by AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). The SDK encrypts the data encryption key with a customer master key (CMK) that is managed by AWS KMS, and stores it (encrypted) as part of the returned ciphertext. The developer does not need to keep track of the data encryption keys used to encrypt data, as they are stored with the encrypted data and can be retrieved and decrypted by using AWS KMS when needed. Option A is not optimal because it will require manual tracking of the data encryption keys used for each data object, which is error-prone and inefficient. Option C is not optimal because it will store the data encryption keys automatically in Amazon S3, which is unnecessary and insecure as Amazon S3 is not designed for storing encryption keys. Option D is not optimal because it will store the data encryption key in the user data for the EC2 instance, which is also unnecessary and insecure as user data is not encrypted by default.

Amazon CloudFront field-level encryption is specifically designed to protect sensitive fields in HTTP requests. It allows CloudFront to encrypt specific request fields at the edge using asymmetric encryption, ensuring that only authorized application components that possess the private key can decrypt the data.

This approach ensures that sensitive fields remain encrypted throughout transit and processing, while non-sensitive fields can still be accessed normally. This satisfies the requirement that only specific parts of the application can decrypt the data.

Field-level encryption is a native CloudFront capability and is far more secure and scalable than implementing custom encryption logic in Lambda@Edge or Lambda functions. AWS documentation emphasizes using built-in CloudFront security features to minimize operational overhead and reduce the risk of cryptographic implementation errors.

Options A and B introduce unnecessary complexity and custom cryptographic handling, which AWS generally discourages when managed services are available. Option D only secures transport and access control and does not encrypt individual data fields.

Therefore, CloudFront field-level encryption with asymmetric keys is the AWS-recommended and correct solution.

An inline IAM policy is directly attached to a specific IAM user, group, or role and applies only to that principal. AWS documentation states that inline policies are useful when permissions should be tightly scoped and not reused.

In this scenario, the Admin group policy cannot be changed, but one specific user needs permanent delete permissions. Attaching an inline policy directly to that user grants the required permissions without impacting other Admin users.

AWS managed policies (Option A) are reusable and not suitable for user-specific access. IAM trust relationships (Option C) control role assumption, not resource permissions. AWS STS (Option D) provides temporary credentials, not permanent access.

Therefore, an inline policy is the correct solution.

A canary deployment best matches the requirement to test a new feature with a small group of users while the current version remains deployed for everyone else. In a canary approach, a new application revision is released to a limited portion of traffic/users first. This allows the team to collect real user feedback and validate behavior under production-like conditions without exposing the full user base to risk.

AWS deployment guidance for progressive delivery aligns with this concept: you start by directing a small percentage of requests to the new version, monitor results (such as error rates, latency, and business outcomes), and keep the stable version handling the majority of traffic during the evaluation period. This directly satisfies the requirement that the “current software version remains deployed” while testing occurs.

Once the feature is validated, the canary strategy supports promoting the new revision to the remaining population by shifting traffic from the old version to the new version—commonly ending with a transition to 100% of users on the new version. This satisfies the requirement to deploy to “all other users at the same time” after the small-group validation step is complete.

Why the other options are less suitable:

All-at-once exposes all users immediately, so there is no limited-user validation phase.

In-place replaces the existing version on the same infrastructure, typically without maintaining a parallel stable path for a subset of users.

Linear gradually shifts traffic in fixed increments over time, rather than validating with a small group and then moving the remainder in one step.

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.

Amazon Cognito user pools support Lambda triggers, which are custom functions that can be executed at various stages of the user pool workflow. A post authentication Lambda trigger can be used to perform custom actions after a user is authenticated, such as sending an email notification. Amazon SES is a cloud-based email sending service that can be used to send transactional or marketing emails. A Lambda function can use the Amazon SES API to send an email to the user’s email address after the user logs in successfully. Reference: Post authentication Lambda trigger

Amazon API Gateway allows you to create, deploy, and manage a RESTful API to expose backend HTTP endpoints, AWS Lambda functions, or other AWS services1. You can use API Gateway to perform basic validation of an API request before proceeding with the integration request1. When the validation fails, API Gateway immediately fails the request, returns a 400 error response to the caller, and publishes the validation results in CloudWatch Logs1.

To test changes before deploying to a production environment, you can modify the existing API to add request validation and deploy the updated API to a new API Gateway stage1. This allows you to perform tests without affecting the production environment. Once testing is complete and successful, you can then deploy the updated API to the API Gateway production stage1.

This approach has the least operational overhead as it avoids unnecessary creation of new APIs or exporting and importing of APIs. It leverages the existing infrastructure and only requires changes in the configuration of the existing API1.

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis: An in-memory data store known for extremely low latency, ideal for caching frequently accessed, complex data.

Write-Through Caching: Ensures that data is always consistent between the cache and the database. Writes go to both Redis and RDS.

Performance Gains: Redis handles reads with minimal latency, offloading the RDS database and improving the application's responsiveness.

Why Option C is Correct:SQL Server Always On availability groups require a shared storage solution. Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides the shared storage necessary to implement Always On availability groups in a highly available configuration.

Why Other Options are Incorrect:

Option A: A single EBS volume cannot provide shared storage for Always On availability groups.

Option B: RDS does not support SQL Server Always On availability groups.

Option D: S3 is not a suitable storage tier for SQL Server database operations.

AWS Documentation References:

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server

Scenario: Application needs to fetch songs and artists efficiently in a single operation.

BatchGetItem: This DynamoDB operation retrieves multiple items across different tables based on their primary keys in a single request.

Optimized for Request Batching: This approach reduces network traffic compared to performing multiple queries individually.

Data Modeling: The songs table is designed appropriately for this access pattern using artistName as the sort key.

AWS best practice is to store sensitive values like database passwords, OAuth tokens, and API keys in a dedicated secrets service rather than in source code or configuration files. AWS Secrets Manager is specifically designed for this use case: secure storage, retrieval through APIs/SDKs, fine-grained IAM access control, encryption at rest, auditing through CloudTrail, and—critically—built-in secret rotation.

AWS documentation describes Secrets Manager rotation as an automated process that uses a rotation schedule and typically invokes a Lambda function to update the secret in both Secrets Manager and the target system (for example, a database). The rotation schedule can be configured to a custom interval, including every 6 months, satisfying the requirement.

Option A is incorrect because AWS KMS manages encryption keys, not application secrets. KMS key rotation rotates KMS keys, not database credentials or API tokens.

Option B is incorrect because ACM manages TLS certificates, not arbitrary secrets like API keys and OAuth tokens.

Option C is incorrect because EventBridge can schedule events, but it is not a secrets storage service and does not provide secure secret lifecycle management and integrated rotation workflows by itself.

Therefore, storing secrets in AWS Secrets Manager and enabling automatic rotation with a 6-month schedule is the correct solution.

Problem: Large bundle size increases Lambda deployment time.

Lambda Layers: Layers let you package dependencies separately from your function code. This optimizes the deployment package, making updates faster.

Modularization: Breaking down dependencies into layers improves code organization and reusability.

Centralized logging for microservices means collecting application logs from many services into a single managed logging backend where logs can be searched, retained, and monitored. For containerized microservices on AWS, the standard approach is to send each service’s stdout/stderr logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.

Option A is the appropriate solution: create separate CloudWatch Logs streams (and typically log groups) per microservice. This scales naturally as microservices increase, supports retention policies, metric filters, alarms, and integrations with tools like CloudWatch Logs Insights for querying across services. Container orchestrators (ECS/EKS) can be configured to use the CloudWatch Logs log driver so logs are shipped automatically without custom log shipping agents.

Option B (CloudTrail) logs AWS API activity, not application logs.

Option C (VPC Flow Logs) captures network flow metadata, not application-level logs.

Option D (Cloud Map) is service discovery, not logging.

Therefore, using CloudWatch Logs streams per microservice is the correct central logging approach.

CodeDeploy Predefined Configurations: CodeDeploy offers built-in deployment configurations for common scenarios.

Canary Deployment: Canary deployments gradually shift traffic to a new version, ideal for controlled rollouts like this requirement.

CodeDeployDefault.ECSCanary10Percent15Minutes: This configuration matches the company's requirements, shifting 10% of traffic initially and then completing the rollout after 15 minutes.

Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes are designed for cost-effective archival with varying retrieval times. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval provides millisecond access, making it suitable for workloads that require immediate access but at a lower cost than S3 Standard.

For the first 90 days, instant access is required, which rules out S3 Glacier Deep Archive and S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval as primary storage because they have minutes-to-hours retrieval times. After 90 days, the requirement allows retrieval times exceeding 10 minutes, making S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval appropriate.

Option D uses Instant Retrieval initially and transitions to Flexible Retrieval, optimizing both performance and cost. EFS and EBS (Options A and C) are significantly more expensive for large objects and are not intended for massive archival workloads. Option B reverses the access requirements and is invalid.

AWS documentation explicitly recommends using S3 lifecycle policies to transition objects between Glacier storage classes based on access requirements.

Therefore, Option D is the most cost-effective and AWS-aligned solution.

Why Option B is Correct:

Amazon S3 Standard provides immediate access to files and is cost-effective for files that need to be accessed within 5 minutes.

By adding the S3 location to the SQS queue, you avoid transferring large files directly, which is both more efficient and scalable.

Why Other Options are Incorrect:

Option A: S3 Glacier Deep Archive is designed for archival storage with retrieval times ranging from minutes to hours, which does not meet the 5-minute requirement.

Option C: Amazon EBS is designed for block storage attached to EC2 instances, which adds unnecessary complexity and cost.

Option D: SQS is not designed to handle large file content directly and has message size limits (256 KB).

AWS Documentation References:

Amazon S3 Overview

Amazon SQS Best Practices

Requirement Summary:

Deploy serverless application using:

API Gateway

AWS Lambda

Need dev, test, and prod environments

Want least development effort

Evaluate Options:

Option A: API Gateway stage variables + Lambda aliases

Most efficient and scalable

API Gateway supports stage variables (like env)

Lambda supports aliases (e.g., dev, test, prod)

You can configure each stage to point to a different alias of the same function version

Enables versioning, isolation, and low effort management

Option B: Use Amazon ECS

Overkill for a serverless setup

ECS is container-based, not serverless

Introduces unnecessary complexity

Option C: Duplicate code for each environment

High operational overhead and poor maintainability

Option D: Use Elastic Beanstalk

Not applicable: Elastic Beanstalk is for traditional app hosting, not optimal for Lambda + API Gateway

Lambda Aliases:

API Gateway Stage Variables:

Comprehensive Detailed and Lengthy Step-by-Step Explanation with All AWS Developer References:

1. Understanding the Use Case:

The developer needs to export DynamoDB table data into Amazon S3 buckets using the AWS CLI, and some exports are failing. Proper credentials and permissions have already been configured.

2. Key Conditions to Check:

Region Consistency:DynamoDB exports require that the target S3 bucket and the DynamoDB table reside in the same AWS Region. If they are not in the same Region, the export process will fail.

Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR):PITR is not required for exporting data from DynamoDB to S3. Enabling PITR allows recovery of table states at specific points in time but does not directly influence export functionality.

DynamoDB Streams:Streams allow real-time capture of data modifications but are unrelated to the bulk export feature.

DAX (DynamoDB Accelerator):DAX is a caching service that speeds up read operations for DynamoDB but does not affect the export functionality.

3. Explanation of the Options:

Option A:"Ensure that point-in-time recovery is enabled on the DynamoDB tables."While PITR is useful for disaster recovery and restoring table states, it is not required for exporting data to S3. This option does not address the export failure.

Option B:"Ensure that the target S3 bucket is in the same AWS Region as the DynamoDB table."This is the correct answer. DynamoDB export functionality requires the target S3 bucket to reside in the same AWS Region as the DynamoDB table. If the S3 bucket is in a different Region, the export will fail.

Option C:"Ensure that DynamoDB streaming is enabled for the tables."Streams are useful for capturing real-time changes in DynamoDB tables but are unrelated to the export functionality. This option does not resolve the issue.

Option D:"Ensure that DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is enabled."DAX accelerates read operations but does not influence the export functionality. This option is irrelevant to the issue.

4. Resolution Steps:

To ensure successful exports:

Verify the Region of the DynamoDB tables:

Check the Region where each table is located.

Verify the Region of the target S3 buckets:

Confirm that the target S3 bucket for each export is in the same Region as the corresponding DynamoDB table.

If necessary, create new S3 buckets in the appropriate Regions.

Run the export command again with the correct setup:

aws dynamodb export-table-to-point-in-time \

--table-name \

--s3-bucket \

--s3-prefix \

--export-time \

--region

The most secure and AWS-recommended way for a Lambda function to access other AWS services is to use an IAM execution role. Lambda assumes this role at runtime and receives temporary credentials that are automatically rotated by AWS. The developer attaches the necessary permissions (the existing IAM policy) to that role, and then configures the Lambda function to use the role.

Option B follows least privilege and avoids long-term credentials. It also integrates with AWS security tooling: IAM Access Analyzer, CloudTrail, and policy boundaries can all be applied cleanly. Because the policy already exists, this requires minimal extra work: create/choose the execution role, attach the policy, and assign the role to the function.

Option A is not correct because IAM policies are attached to IAM identities (users, groups, roles) — not directly to Lambda functions as standalone entities. Lambda permissions are granted through the function’s execution role.

Option C is insecure because it uses long-term IAM user access keys embedded in environment variables. Even if encrypted, this expands the blast radius, complicates rotation, and contradicts AWS best practices for avoiding static credentials inside code/runtime.

Option D is extremely insecure and noncompliant. Root user access keys should not be used for applications and should generally not exist.

Therefore, create and attach the existing policy to a Lambda execution IAM role and assign that role to the function.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation (250–300 words):

AWS best practices for multi-tenant isolation recommend session-based access control using IAM session tags. Session tags allow temporary credentials to be scoped dynamically based on tenant context.

First, the data access role must allow sts:TagSession (Option A) so tenant identifiers can be passed securely at runtime. The Lambda function assumes this role and includes the tenant name as a session tag (Option F).

Next, IAM policies on the data access role restrict access to S3 object prefixes and DynamoDB partition keys by evaluating the session tag (Option C). This ensures that even if a bug occurs, the role cannot access data belonging to another tenant.

Resource-based DynamoDB policies and RCPs are unnecessary here and add complexity.

This approach follows AWS’s recommended attribute-based access control (ABAC) model and provides strong tenant isolation with minimal operational overhead.

The solution that will meet the requirements is to add a new stage to the pipeline. Use AWS CodeBuild as the provider. Add the new stage before the stage that deploys code revisions to the test environment. Write a buildspec that fails the CodeBuild stage if any test does not pass. Use the test reports feature of CodeBuild to integrate the report with the CodeBuild console. View the test results in CodeBuild. Resolve any issues. This way, the developer can run the unit tests automatically during the CI/CD process and catch any bugs before deploying to the test environment. The developer can also use the test reports feature of CodeBuild to view and analyze the test results in a graphical interface. The other options either involve running the tests manually, running them after deployment, or using a different provider that requires additional configuration and integration.

This solution will solve the deployment issue by deploying the new version of the application to one new EC2 instance at a time, while keeping the old version running on the existing instances. This way, there will always be at least four instances serving traffic during the deployment, and no downtime or performance degradation will occur. Option A is not optimal because it will increase the cost of running the Elastic Beanstalk environment without solving the deployment issue. Option B is not optimal because it will split the traffic between two versions of the application, which may cause inconsistency and confusion for the customers. Option D is not optimal because it will deploy the new version of the application to two existing instances at a time, which may reduce the capacity below four instances during the deployment.

Principle of Least Privilege: Granting specific permissions through an IAM role is more secure than directly attaching policies to a function or using root user credentials.

IAM Roles for Lambda: Designed to provide temporary credentials to Lambda functions, enhancing security.

Reusability: The existing IAM policy ensures the correct S3 and DynamoDB access is granted.

The requirement is specific: certain JSON fields must be encrypted at the edge (before traversing the origin path) and must remain encrypted end-to-end through CloudFront → API Gateway → Lambda → DynamoDB. The AWS feature designed for encrypting specific fields at the edge is CloudFront field-level encryption. With field-level encryption, CloudFront encrypts designated fields in an HTTPS request before forwarding the request to the origin. The origin (API Gateway/Lambda) receives the encrypted values, and only trusted components that have the private key can decrypt them—ensuring the fields remain protected throughout the stack.

Option B matches this exactly: field-level encryption uses an asymmetric key pair (public key used by CloudFront to encrypt; private key held securely by the application for decryption). This satisfies “encrypted at the edge” and “remain encrypted throughout the full stack.”

The “PII encrypted at rest in DynamoDB” requirement is also satisfied because DynamoDB supports encryption at rest by default (and can use AWS owned or customer managed KMS keys). Field-level encryption adds granular protection for only the most sensitive attributes beyond standard at-rest encryption.

Option A (Lambda@Edge encryption) could encrypt at edge, but it is more custom code, higher operational complexity, and is not as direct/standard as CloudFront field-level encryption for encrypting request fields.

Option C encrypts in Lambda, not at the edge—data would already have traversed CloudFront and API Gateway in plaintext form before Lambda encrypts it, violating the “encrypted at the edge” requirement.

Option D is not a defined mechanism for edge encryption; API Gateway methods do not provide edge field encryption with KMS in this way.

Therefore, CloudFront field-level encryption is the correct solution.

An SQS FIFO queue is a type of queue that preserves the order of messages and ensures that each message is delivered and processed only once1. This is suitable for the scenario where the developer wants to ensure that there are no out-of-order updates in the legacy system.

The visibility timeout value is the amount of time that a message is invisible in the queue after a consumer receives it2. This prevents other consumers from processing the same message simultaneously. If the consumer does not delete the message before the visibility timeout expires, the message becomes visible again and another consumer can receive it2.

In this scenario, the developer needs to configure the visibility timeout value to be longer than the maximum processing time of the legacy system, which is 5 minutes. This will ensure that the message remains invisible in the queue until the legacy system finishes processing it and deletes it. This will prevent duplicate or out-of-order processing of messages by the legacy system.

Requirement Summary:

Lambda function accesses RDS for MySQL

Credentials are currently hardcoded in code (insecure)

Must enable automated credential rotation every 30 days

Option A: Use AWS Secrets Manager + automatic rotation

Best and secure option

Secrets Manager allows:

Secure storage of secrets

Integration with RDS for automatic rotation

Scheduled rotation every X days (e.g., 30 days)

Lambda can fetch credentials via SDK (GetSecretValue)

Option B: Use SSM Parameter Store + rotation

SSM does not support automatic rotation of secrets.

You'd need to build custom rotation logic = higher operational overhead.

Option C: Encrypted S3 + Object Lambda rotation

Not intended for credential storage.

S3 is not a secrets management system, and Object Lambda does not perform rotation.

Option D: SSM + EventBridge rotation

No native integration between Parameter Store and EventBridge for secret rotation.

You’d need to build custom Lambda functions = higher maintenance.

Secrets Manager rotation for RDS:

Secure retrieval in Lambda:

Integration with RDS MySQL:

Lambda Concurrency: The 'maximum concurrency' setting in event source mappings controls the maximum number of simultaneous invocations Lambda allows for that specific source.

Prioritizing Queues: Setting a lower maximum concurrency for the 'high priority queue' ensures it's processed first while allowing more concurrent invocations from the 'low priority queue'.

Batching: Batch size settings affect the number of messages Lambda retrieves from a queue per invocation, which is less relevant to the prioritization requirement.

Store the credentials in AWS Secrets Manager and enable rotation. Configure the API to have Secrets Manager access. This is correct. This solution will meet the requirements most securely, because it uses a service that is designed to store and manage secrets such as API credentials. AWS Secrets Manager helps you protect access to your applications, services, and IT resources by enabling you to rotate, manage, and retrieve secrets throughout their lifecycle1. You can store secrets such as passwords, database strings, API keys, and license codes as encrypted values2. You can also configure automatic rotation of your secrets on a schedule that you specify3. You can use the AWS SDK or CLI to retrieve secrets from Secrets Manager when you need them4. This way, you can avoid storing credentials in plaintext files or hardcoding them in your code.

The requirements describe a real-time streaming use case where multiple processing applications must read the same stream in parallel, each must be able to resume processing after interruptions without data loss, and the system should support adding new processors with minimal duplication. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams (KDS) is purpose-built for this pattern.

With Kinesis Data Streams, producers write records to a stream that is split into shards. Multiple consumer applications can independently read from the stream using separate consumer groups (for example, using Kinesis Client Library). Each consumer maintains its own checkpoint (sequence number position), which allows it to resume from the last processed record after a restart or failure. This directly meets the “resume without losing data” requirement.

KDS also supports a configurable retention period (commonly 24 hours by default, extendable), enabling replay and recovery without forcing producers to re-send data or duplicating messages for each processor. Adding new consumers is straightforward: a new processor can begin reading the existing stream (from latest or from a trim horizon), which minimizes duplication compared to fan-out duplication patterns.

Why the others don’t fit:

SQS is a queue, not a stream. Multiple consumers typically compete for messages rather than all consuming the same messages independently, and duplication is required if multiple apps must process the same data.

Kinesis Data Firehose is primarily for delivery to destinations (S3, Redshift, OpenSearch) and not designed for multiple real-time parallel consumers with replay semantics.

EventBridge is event routing with limited replay/resume semantics compared to KDS and is not intended for high-throughput stream processing with per-consumer checkpoints.

Therefore, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams satisfies all requirements.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation (250–300 words):

Amazon SQS uses a visibility timeout to prevent other consumers from processing a message while it is being handled. If a Lambda function does not complete processing before the visibility timeout expires, the message becomes visible again and can be processed a second time.

AWS documentation states that the SQS visibility timeout should be greater than the maximum Lambda execution time. If not, messages may be delivered multiple times, even though processing is still in progress.

Increasing the Lambda timeout or memory does not directly affect message visibility. Increasing batch size can worsen the problem by increasing processing time.

Therefore, increasing the SQS visibility timeout is the correct and AWS-recommended solution.

Step-by-Step Breakdown:

Requirement Summary:

In-transit encryption (when data is moving between client and S3)

Encryption at rest using AWS KMS keys (which are rotatable on-demand)

Option A: Write an S3 bucket policy to allow only encrypted connections over HTTPS by using permissions boundary

Incorrect: Permissions boundaries are for IAM policy control, not S3 bucket policies.

Also, encryption enforcement in-transit is not achieved through permissions boundaries.

Option B: Configure an S3 bucket policy to enable client-side encryption

Incorrect: AWS does not enforce client-side encryption via S3 bucket policies.

Client-side encryption must be handled entirely by the application.

Also, KMS is for server-side encryption, not client-side.

Option C: Configure the application to encrypt the objects by using an AWS KMS customer managed key before uploading the objects

Correct: This fulfills the requirement of encrypting objects at rest using a KMS CMK, which can be rotated.

You can specify the KMS key using the SSE-KMS option when putting an object.

Option D: Write an S3 bucket policy to allow only encrypted connections over HTTPS by using the aws:SecureTransport condition

Correct: This enforces in-transit encryption, which ensures that only HTTPS connections are allowed.

This is the AWS-recommended way to enforce encryption in transit via bucket policy.

Option E: Configure S3 Block Public Access settings for the S3 bucket to allow only encrypted connections over HTTPS

Incorrect: Block Public Access is used to prevent public exposure of the bucket.

It has nothing to do with encryption enforcement, whether in transit or at rest.

Using SSE-KMS:

aws:SecureTransport condition in bucket policies:

Server-side encryption with AWS KMS:

Amazon CloudWatch is a service that monitors AWS resources and applications. The developer can publish custom metrics to CloudWatch that record the failures of the external payment processing API calls. The developer can configure a CloudWatch alarm to notify the existing SNS topic when the error rate exceeds 5% of the total number of transactions in an hour. This solution will meet the requirements in a near real-time and scalable way.

Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) designed to deliver static and streaming content with low latency and high throughput. AWS documentation explicitly recommends CloudFront for media streaming and high-request-rate workloads.

By placing CloudFront in front of Amazon S3, video content is cached at edge locations close to end users. This dramatically reduces latency, minimizes buffering, and offloads request volume from the S3 bucket. CloudFront is built to handle sudden traffic spikes and supports tens of thousands of requests per second per edge location.

Route 53 routing policies (Option A) control DNS resolution but do not cache content. Cross-Region Replication (Option B) improves regional availability but does not provide edge caching or streaming optimization. S3 Intelligent-Tiering (Option C) optimizes storage cost, not performance.

Therefore, using CloudFront with S3 as the origin provides the largest and most immediate performance improvement.

Why Option A is Correct:Creating a CloudWatch metric filter with "ERROR" as the search term ensures that occurrences of the word "ERROR" in logs are counted. An alarm can then be set to notify the SNS topic when the count exceeds 1. This is the standard approach to monitor specific patterns in CloudWatch Logs.

Why Other Options are Incorrect:

Option B: CloudWatch Logs Insights is used for querying logs manually and does not integrate directly with alarms for automated notifications.

Option C: SNS subscription filters are not a feature for filtering log patterns in CloudWatch Logs.

Option D: CloudWatch alarms do not directly include log filter patterns; a metric filter is needed to create the metric first.

AWS Documentation References:

Creating CloudWatch Metric Filters

Comprehensive Detailed Step by Step Explanation with All AWS Developer References:

The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) includes features for local testing and debugging of AWS Lambda functions. One of the most efficient ways to generate test payloads that match actual AWS event structures is by using the sam local generate-event command.

sam local generate-event: This command allows developers to create pre-configured test event payloads for various AWS services (e.g., S3, API Gateway, SNS). These generated events accurately reflect the format that the service would use in a live environment, reducing the manual work required to create these events from scratch.

Operational Overhead: This approach reduces overhead since the developer does not need to manually create or maintain test events. It ensures that the structure is correct and up-to-date with the latest AWS standards.

Alternatives:

Option A suggests using shareable test events, but manually creating or sharing these events introduces more overhead.

Option B and C both involve manually storing and maintaining test events, which adds unnecessary complexity compared to using sam local generate-event.

AWS SAM CLI documentation

This solution will meet the requirements by creating a single S3 bucket policy that denies access to the S3 bucket unless the request comes from one of the specified VPC endpoints. The aws:SourceVpce condition key is used to match the ID of the VPC endpoint that is used to access the S3 bucket. The StringNotEquals condition operator is used to negate the condition, so that only requests from the listed VPC endpoints are allowed. Option A is not optimal because it will create multiple S3 bucket policies, which is not possible as only one bucket policy can be attached to an S3 bucket. Option B is not optimal because it will use the aws:SourceVpc condition key, which matches the ID of the VPC that is used to access the S3 bucket, not the VPC endpoint. Option C is not optimal because it will use the StringNotEquals condition operator with a single value, which will deny access to the S3 bucket from all VPC endpoints except one.

The solution that will meet the requirements is to use multiple stages in API Gateway. Create a Lambda function for each environment. Configure API Gateway stage variables to route traffic to the Lambda function in different environments. This way, the company can test the code in a dedicated, monitored test environment before releasing it to the production environment. The company can also use stage variables to specify the Lambda function version or alias for each stage, and avoid hard-coding the Lambda function name in the API Gateway integration. The other options either involve using a single stage in API Gateway, which does not allow testing in different environments, or adding different code blocks for different environments in the Lambda function, which increases complexity and maintenance.

The AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) comes built-in with CodeDeploy to provide gradual AWS Lambda deployments1. The DeploymentPreference property in AWS SAM allows you to specify the type of deployment that you want. The Canary10Percent10Minutes option means that 10 percent of your customer traffic is immediately shifted to your new version. After 10 minutes, all traffic is shifted to the new version1. The AutoPublishAlias property in AWS SAM allows AWS SAM to automatically create an alias that points to the updated version of the Lambda function1. Therefore, option A is correct.

IAM instance profiles are containers for IAM roles that can be associated with EC2 instances. An IAM role is a set of permissions that grant access to AWS resources. An IAM role can be used to allow an EC2 instance to access an S3 bucket by including the appropriate permissions in the role’s policy. The S3:ListBucket permission allows listing the objects in an S3 bucket. By updating the IAM instance profile with this permission, the application on the EC2 instance can retrieve the objects from the S3 bucket and display them to the user. Reference: Using an IAM role to grant permissions to applications running on Amazon EC2 instances

Requirement Summary:

Orders are being processed more than once

Need to prevent duplicate processing

Looking for least implementation effort

Key Concept:

Lambda + Event-driven patterns can occasionally result in duplicate invocations (at-least-once delivery model)

You need idempotency (i.e., prevent repeated processing of same event)

Evaluate Options:

A. Use DynamoDB for de-duplication

Simple and widely used approach

Store a unique orderId as the primary key

Before processing, check if order exists

If yes → skip

If no → process and store the ID

Minimal code changes required

B. ECS + Step Functions

Overkill for basic de-duplication

Adds significant complexity

C. Retry logic with fixed delay

Doesn't prevent duplication — makes it worse

Retrying might trigger the same message again

D. Athena to identify duplicates

Reactive solution, not preventative

Not suitable for real-time event de-duplication

Lambda idempotency:

Using DynamoDB for idempotent design:

Why Option B is Correct:RDS Proxy manages database connections efficiently, reducing overhead on the RDS instance and mitigating "too many connections" errors.

Why Other Options are Incorrect:

Option A: DAX is for DynamoDB, not RDS.

Option C: Migration to PostgreSQL does not address the current issue.

Option D: ElastiCache is useful for caching but does not solve connection pool issues.

AWS Documentation References:

Amazon RDS Proxy

Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights is a purpose-built log analytics tool that allows developers to run interactive queries directly against CloudWatch Logs. AWS documentation highlights Logs Insights as the fastest and most efficient way to search, filter, and analyze log data without exporting it.

Logs Insights queries can filter error messages, extract timestamps, and aggregate failure counts over specific time windows. This directly satisfies the requirement to identify when intermittent failures occurred and what errors caused them.

Manual browsing (Option A) and local downloads (Option C) are time-consuming and do not scale. Exporting logs to S3 and querying with Athena (Option D) introduces unnecessary infrastructure and operational overhead.

Therefore, CloudWatch Logs Insights is the most operationally efficient solution.

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

Understand the Problem: The existing DynamoDB table has email_address as the partition key. Searching by customer_type requires a different data access pattern. We need an efficient way to query for partial matches on email_address based on customer_type.

Why Global Secondary Index (GSI):

GSIs allow you to define a different partition key and sort key from the main table, enabling new query patterns.

In this case, having customer_type as the GSI's partition key lets you group all emails with the same customer type together.

Using email_address as the sort key allows ordering within each customer type, facilitating the partial matching.

Querying the GSI:

You'll perform a query operation on the GSI, not the original table.

Use the begins_with key condition expression on the GSI's sort key (email_address) to find partial matches as the user types in the customer_type field.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that can store and retrieve any amount of data with high availability and performance. DynamoDB can handle concurrent requests from multiple IoT devices without throttling or data loss. To prevent duplicate requests from causing inconsistencies or data loss, the Lambda function can use DynamoDB conditional writes to check if the unique identifier for each request already exists in the table before processing the request. If the identifier exists, the function can skip or abort the request; otherwise, it can process the request and store the identifier in the table. Reference: Using conditional writes

The requirements describe a Git-driven workflow where each new branch automatically gets its own deployment with minimal setup and management. AWS Amplify is designed for exactly this use case for web (and supporting mobile backends): it integrates directly with Git providers and offers continuous deployment. Amplify’s feature branch deployments automatically create a separate deployment (and typically a distinct preview URL) for each connected branch, enabling developers to test and review changes per branch without manually provisioning environments.

With Amplify, the developer connects the repository once, selects the branches to deploy, and Amplify automatically builds and deploys the application whenever code changes are pushed. When a new branch is added, Amplify can be configured to deploy it as a separate environment, providing isolated testing, previewing, and validation. This dramatically reduces operational overhead because Amplify manages build settings, hosting, SSL, and branch-based environments without needing custom CI/CD wiring.

Option A (ECR + ECS + GitHub Actions) can support branch deployments, but it requires substantial operational work: container build pipelines, task/service management, networking, scaling, and environment isolation per branch. Option B (Elastic Beanstalk) can manage deployments, but branch-based automatic deployments are not as native; creating separate environments and managing application versions typically requires more manual steps or additional automation. Option C (Lambda aliases) is not a general-purpose web/mobile deployment approach and does not naturally map “new Git branch” to an isolated deployment environment without significant custom tooling.

Therefore, D is the best fit with the least operational overhead: use AWS Amplify with feature branch deployments to automatically create and manage separate deployments for Git branches.

DynamoDB already supports encryption at rest by default (with AWS owned keys or AWS managed/customer managed KMS keys). However, the requirement here is stronger and explicit: patient data must be encrypted before it is stored in DynamoDB, meaning the encryption must occur client-side / application-side so that the data remains encrypted as it traverses the stack and is still encrypted when written to the table. This is often required for highly sensitive PII/PHI where administrators or downstream systems should not see plaintext.

Option A meets this requirement by encrypting the payload inside the Lambda function before making the PutItem call to DynamoDB, using KMS-backed envelope encryption via the AWS Encryption SDK (the option names it “Database Encryption SDK,” but the intent is client-side encryption). The encrypted fields remain ciphertext in transit to DynamoDB and at rest inside DynamoDB, satisfying both “in transit” and “at rest” with encryption happening prior to storage.

Option B only ensures DynamoDB encryption at rest at the service level, but the data would still be plaintext in the item attributes as seen by the application and anyone with DynamoDB read permissions (even though stored encrypted on disk). It does not guarantee “encrypted before stored.”

Option C encrypting after the write via streams is too late: plaintext would already be stored (and potentially accessed) before post-processing.

Option D adds unnecessary workflow complexity. Encrypting in a queue still requires encryption before DynamoDB, but it does not inherently simplify compared to encrypting directly in the Lambda that writes to DynamoDB.

Therefore, client-side encryption in Lambda using KMS-backed encryption is the correct solution.

The simplest and most efficient way to avoid hardcoding configuration such as a DynamoDB table name is to use Lambda environment variables. Environment variables are designed for runtime configuration and allow changing values without updating application code logic. The developer can store the table name in an environment variable (for example, TABLE_NAME) and read it from the runtime environment using the standard language method (such as os.environ in Python, process.env in Node.js, etc.).

This approach has very low operational overhead: updating the table name becomes a configuration change (in the Lambda console, IaC templates, or CI/CD pipeline) rather than a code change. It also keeps deployment packages stable and avoids unnecessary dependencies.

Option B is not suitable because /tmp is ephemeral storage that can be cleared between invocations and is not intended for configuration management.

Option C is heavier than necessary. Lambda layers are great for shared libraries and dependencies, but using a layer to store a single changing table name is awkward and forces a layer update and function reconfiguration when the value changes.

Option D does not solve the problem because a global variable is still set in the code. If the table name changes, the code must still be modified and redeployed.

Therefore, storing the table name in a Lambda environment variable is the most efficient solution.

Amazon EFS: A network file system (NFS) providing shared, scalable storage across multiple Lambda functions and other AWS resources.

Lambda Mounting: EFS file systems can be mounted within Lambda functions to access a shared storage space.

Log Appending: EFS supports appending data to existing files, making it ideal for the log file scenario.

Why Option B is Correct:The pilot light strategy keeps a minimal version of the environment in another Region and scales up during a disaster. It achieves an RTO and RPO of hours at a low cost and complexity.

Why Other Options are Incorrect:

Option A: Warm standby is more expensive as it keeps a scaled-down, fully functioning version running in another Region.

Option C: Backup and restore has a longer RTO and RPO than hours.

Option D: Multi-site active-active is costly and more complex than required.

AWS Documentation References:

Disaster Recovery Strategies on AWS

Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are encrypted snapshots of EC2 instances that can be used to launch new instances. The developer can create new AMIs from the existing instances and specify encryption parameters. The developer can copy the encrypted AMIs to the destination Region and use them to create a new application stack. The developer can delete the unencrypted AMIs after the encryption process is complete. This solution will meet the encryption requirement and allow the developer to expand the application to run in the destination Region.

Comprehensive and Detailed Step-by-Step Explanation:

Option A: Use Amazon S3 for Shared Test Events:

Storing JSON test event files in an S3 bucket provides a centralized, cost-effective, and highly available solution.

Granular IAM policies can restrict access to specific developers or roles, ensuring security while maintaining consistency for shared test events.

This solution has minimal operational overhead and integrates easily with existing workflows.

Why Other Options Are Incorrect:

Option B: Using DynamoDB and a Lambda function introduces unnecessary complexity for a relatively simple requirement. S3 provides a simpler and more cost-efficient solution.

Option C: AWS Lambda test events are not inherently shareable across developers, making this option invalid.

Option D: Using a Git repository adds operational overhead and requires developers to clone/update repositories for access, which is more cumbersome compared to S3.

This solution allows the developer to troubleshoot the failure by capturing unprocessed events in a queue for further analysis. Dead Letter Queues (DLQs) are queues that store messages that could not be processed by a service, such as Lambda, for various reasons, such as configuration errors, throttling limits, or permissions issues. The developer can configure DLQs for Lambda functions by sending events to either an Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) queue or an Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic. The developer can then inspect the messages in the queue or topic to identify and fix the root cause of the failure. Configuring AWS CloudTrail logging will not capture invocation failures for asynchronous Lambda invocations, but only record API calls made by or on behalf of Lambda. Configuring Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF) or AWS Config will not process any direct unprocessed events, but require additional integration and configuration.

Comprehensive and Detailed Step-by-Step Explanation:

To ensure successful software deployments using AWS CodeDeploy, the application specification file (appspec.yml or appspec.json) must adhere to specific requirements:

File Format Requirement (Option B):

The appspec.yml file is a YAML-formatted file required for defining deployment actions and file locations. This is the modern and recommended format for application specification files.

It can also be a JSON-formatted file named appspec.json, but YAML is most commonly used and accepted.

File Placement Requirement (Option D):

The application specification file must reside in the root directory of the application's source code. This is necessary so that AWS CodeDeploy can detect and use the file during deployment.

Incorrect Options:

Option A: While a JSON-formatted file (appspec.json) is valid, this is not a mandatory requirement. YAML is also acceptable, and this option does not account for it.

Option C: The application specification file is not required to be stored in AWS CodeBuild; it must be included in the source code's directory structure.

Option E: The application specification file does not need to be stored in Amazon S3. S3 is commonly used for application artifacts, but the appspec.yml or appspec.json file must exist within the deployment package or source code root.

The solution that will meet the requirements is to write data to Amazon ElastiCache. This way, the application can write session data to a fast, scalable, and reliable in-memory data store that can be served reliably across multiple requests. The other options either involve writing data to persistent storage, which is slower and more expensive than in-memory storage, or writing data to the root filesystem, which is not shared among multiple EC2 instances.

Amazon EventBridge: A service that reacts to events from various AWS sources, including S3. Rules define which events trigger actions (like invoking Lambda functions).

S3 Object Created Events: EventBridge can detect these, providing seamless integration for automated CSV processing.

S3 Lifecycle Rules: Allow for actions based on object age or prefixes. These can directly trigger Lambda functions for file processing.

AWS CloudFormation is a service that enables developers to model and provision AWS resources using templates. The developer can add a CloudFormation Deletion Policy attribute with the Retain value to the database resource. This will prevent the database from being deleted when the stack is deleted or updated. The developer can also update the CloudFormation stack policy to prevent updates to the database. This will prevent accidental changes to the database configuration or properties.

If a bucket policy denies delete operations for all principals, but objects are still being removed, the most likely cause is S3 Lifecycle configuration. Lifecycle expiration is an S3-managed action that deletes objects automatically based on rules (such as “expire after N days”). These deletions occur as part of the S3 service’s lifecycle management and are not “someone calling DeleteObject” in the usual way from an IAM principal. As a result, developers often observe objects disappearing even though bucket policies deny deletes.

Therefore, to prevent additional deletions, the developer should review and remove (or modify) any Lifecycle rules that expire or transition/delete objects. This directly stops S3 from automatically deleting the log files.

Option A would not help if the policy already denies deletes and no explicit allow is causing the issue. Also, a deny overrides allow anyway.

Option C is unrelated: access points do not bypass bucket policies.

Option D is unlikely and not the primary control plane mechanism for automated S3 deletions. EventBridge can trigger workflows, but the direct, common AWS-native mechanism for periodic deletion is Lifecycle expiration.

Therefore, removing S3 Lifecycle expiration rules prevents further deletions.

API Gateway’s canary deployments allow gradual traffic shifting to a new version of a function, minimizing disruption while testing.

Why Option A is Correct:

Gradual Rollout: Reduces risk by incrementally increasing traffic.

Rollback Support: Canary deployments make it easy to revert to the previous version.

Why Not Other Options:

Option B: Redeploying the stage disrupts all users.

Option C & D: Managing new stages and weighted routing introduces unnecessary complexity.

Canary Deployments in API Gateway

This solution will meet the requirements by ensuring that all traffic between users and CloudFront, and all traffic between CloudFront and the web application, are encrypted using HTTPS protocol. The Origin Protocol Policy determines how CloudFront communicates with the origin server (the web application), and setting it to “HTTPS Only” will force CloudFront to use HTTPS for every request to the origin server. The Viewer Protocol Policy determines how CloudFront responds to HTTP or HTTPS requests from users, and setting it to “HTTPS Only” or “Redirect HTTP to HTTPS” will force CloudFront to use HTTPS for every response to users. Option A is not optimal because it will use AWS KMS to encrypt traffic between CloudFront and the web application, which is not necessary or supported by CloudFront. Option C is not optimal because it will set the origin’s HTTP port to 443, which is incorrect as port 443 is used for HTTPS protocol, not HTTP protocol. Option E is not optimal because it will enable the CloudFront option Restrict Viewer Access, which is used for controlling access to private content using signed URLs or signed cookies, not for encrypting traffic.

For a serverless web application that needs user registration and authentication with minimal configuration, the standard AWS solution is Amazon Cognito User Pools. User Pools provide managed user directories, sign-up/sign-in flows, MFA options, password reset, and token-based authentication (OAuth2/OIDC/JWT). This integrates naturally with API Gateway (Cognito authorizers) and Lambda.

Option A is best because it uses Cognito User Pools plus an app client and the Hosted UI, which provides ready-made sign-up/sign-in pages. Hosted UI minimizes custom UI and backend authentication code while still allowing branding customization and secure token issuance. The SPA can authenticate via Cognito, receive JWT tokens, and call API Gateway endpoints securely.

Option B (identity pool) is primarily for granting temporary AWS credentials to access AWS services directly (federation). It does not replace User Pools for user registration/login flows; typically identity pools are used in addition to user pools, not instead, and require more configuration.

Option C adds unnecessary infrastructure (EC2) and defeats the “minimize configuration” goal.

Option D is not appropriate for end-user authentication. IAM users/groups are for workforce/admin access, not for customer-facing apps.

Therefore, Cognito User Pool + Hosted UI is the minimal-configuration secure solution.

The most operationally efficient way to remove time-bound data from a DynamoDB table is to use Time to Live (TTL). TTL is a DynamoDB feature that lets you define an attribute (typically a Unix epoch timestamp) that represents an item’s expiration time. After the timestamp has passed, DynamoDB automatically marks the item as expired and later deletes it in the background. This directly satisfies the requirement because the telemetry is only valuable for a limited time, yet it is currently stored indefinitely.

Enabling TTL (option C) improves performance and operational efficiency by preventing the table from growing without bounds. As the item count grows, access patterns that rely on scans, large partitions, or indexes can degrade, and storage-related overhead increases. TTL helps keep the dataset “fresh” by automatically removing stale telemetry, reducing the amount of data the application must work around and decreasing overall storage footprint.

Option A is operationally heavier: scanning and deleting items with a scheduled Lambda introduces ongoing maintenance, costs, and risk of throttling (table scans can be expensive and disruptive). It also requires custom logic, error handling, and retries. Option B addresses cost optimization for archived data but does not fix the DynamoDB table size or the performance degradation caused by keeping old data in the table; archiving is useful, but you still need an efficient deletion mechanism from DynamoDB. Option D (on-demand capacity mode) changes how capacity is managed, not how much data is stored; it does not remove stale items and therefore does not address the core problem.

Therefore, the best and most operationally efficient solution is C: add a TTL attribute to each telemetry item and enable TTL on the DynamoDB table so DynamoDB automatically expires and deletes old telemetry.

The IAM policy shown in the image is a resource-based policy that grants or denies access to an S3 bucket based on certain conditions. The first statement allows access to any S3 action on any object in the “DOC-EXAMPLE-BUCKET” bucket when the request is made over HTTPS (the value of aws:SecureTransport is true). The second statement denies access to the s3:GetObject and s3:PutObject actions on any object in the “DOC-EXAMPLE-BUCKET/secrets” prefix when the request is made over HTTP (the value of aws:SecureTransport is false). Therefore, the policy allows access on all objects in the “DOC-EXAMPLE-BUCKET” bucket except on objects that start with “secrets”. Reference: Using IAM policies for Amazon S3

The error message "Task timed out after 3.01 seconds" indicates that the Lambda invocation exceeded the function’s configured timeout setting, which appears to be set to approximately 3 seconds. Larger images (>2 MB) take longer to transfer between services (due to network latency, throughput, and downstream service response time), so the runtime crosses the timeout threshold and Lambda forcibly terminates the execution. This is a configuration problem, not necessarily a code defect.

To resolve the issue without modifying the function code, the developer should increase the Lambda function’s timeout value. Lambda allows configuring the maximum runtime per invocation (up to the service limit). By increasing the timeout to a value that comfortably covers the expected transfer and processing initiation time for larger payloads, the function can complete its work successfully. This directly addresses the failure mode while keeping the existing implementation unchanged.

Option D (provisioned concurrency) reduces cold start latency by keeping execution environments initialized, but it does not extend the allowed runtime for a single invocation. If the function consistently needs more than 3 seconds for larger images, provisioned concurrency will not prevent timeouts. Option C (concurrency quota increase) increases the number of concurrent executions allowed, which can help throughput under load, but again does not affect per-invocation runtime limits. Option B avoids the problem by skipping large images, but it violates the functional need to process them and is not a general solution.

Therefore, the correct solution is A: increase the Lambda timeout so the function has sufficient time to move larger images between AWS services.

Global Secondary Index (GSI): GSIs enable alternative query patterns on a DynamoDB table by using different partition and sort keys.

Addressing Query Bottleneck: By making the slow-query attribute the GSI's partition key, you optimize queries on that attribute.

Scalability: GSIs automatically scale to handle increasing data volumes.

This solution will meet the requirements by using AWS X-Ray to analyze and debug the performance issues with the distributed Lambda applications. AWS X-Ray is a service that collects data about requests that the applications serve, and provides tools to view, filter, and gain insights into that data. The developer can use AWS X-Ray to identify the root cause of the performance issues by examining the segments and errors that show the details of each request and the components that make up the applications. Option A is not optimal because it will use logging statements and Amazon CloudWatch, which may not provide enough information or visibility into the distributed applications. Option B is not optimal because it will use AWS CloudTrail, which is a service that records API calls and events for AWS services, not application performance data. Option D is not optimal because it will use Amazon Inspector, which is a service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications on Amazon EC2 instances, not Lambda functions.

AWS Secrets Manager is purpose-built for securely storing and managing sensitive information such as API keys, tokens, and credentials. It provides automatic secret rotation, fine-grained IAM access control, encryption at rest using AWS KMS, and audit logging through AWS CloudTrail. This makes it the most secure and scalable option for managing short-lived authentication keys.

AWS Lambda extensions enable efficient secret retrieval by caching secrets locally within the execution environment. This reduces repeated calls to Secrets Manager on every invocation, improving performance and lowering costs while maintaining up-to-date credentials. AWS documentation explicitly recommends using Lambda extensions or caching logic for secrets that are frequently accessed.

Storing secrets in S3 (Option B) or environment variables (Option C) lacks built-in rotation and increases exposure risk. Parameter Store (Option D) supports encryption but does not provide native rotation for secrets without custom automation, making it less suitable for this use case.

Therefore, Secrets Manager with Lambda extensions provides the most secure, automated, and operationally efficient solution.

Comprehensive and Detailed 250 to 300 words of Explanation (AWS-doc-aligned):

To minimize widget latency for ranking and sorting, the best fit is Amazon ElastiCache for Redis OSS because Redis provides built-in in-memory data structures specifically suited for ranking use cases, such as Sorted Sets (ZSETs). Sorted sets maintain members in order by score, which enables fast retrieval of “top N” items and efficient re-ranking without repeatedly querying the primary database and sorting at the application tier. Memcached, by contrast, is a simpler key-value cache and does not provide comparable native ranking/sorting data structures.

To ensure data remains up to date, a write-through caching strategy is preferred. With write-through, updates are written to the cache at the same time as the system of record, so the cache reflects the latest values immediately after writes. This avoids stale rankings that can occur with lazy-loading (cache-aside), where the cache is only populated or refreshed on reads and can serve older data until expiration or explicit invalidation.

Combining Redis’s native sorted/ranking structures with write-through updates yields the least latency because the page widgets can fetch pre-ranked/pre-sorted results directly from Redis memory with minimal computation, while still maintaining freshness as new plays, likes, or album changes occur. Operationally, this pattern reduces database load, avoids repeated sorting work in the application, and provides consistently fast reads for a high-traffic page.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation (250–300 words):

For in-place deployments, AWS CodeDeploy updates instances directly rather than using blue/green infrastructure. AWS documentation states that when automatic rollback is enabled and a deployment fails (for example, due to failed health checks or validation scripts), CodeDeploy initiates a rollback deployment.

In an in-place rollback, CodeDeploy redeploys the last known successful application revision to the affected instances. This rollback is treated as a new deployment, complete with its own deployment ID and lifecycle events. CodeDeploy does not use snapshots, Route 53 switching, or external promotion logic for in-place deployments.

Options A and B describe mechanisms that are used in other services or blue/green strategies, not in-place deployments. Option D is incorrect because CodePipeline orchestrates stages but does not perform rollback logic for CodeDeploy.

Therefore, redeploying the previous stable version as a new deployment is the correct behavior.

This solution meets the requirements in the most secure way because it uses a service that is integrated with CloudFormation to manage sensitive data in encrypted form. AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store provides secure, hierarchical storage for configuration data management and secrets management. You can store sensitive data as secure string parameters, which are encrypted using an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key of your choice. You can also use dynamic references in your CloudFormation templates to specify template values that are stored in Parameter Store or Secrets Manager without having to include them in your templates. Dynamic references are resolved only during stack creation or update operations, which reduces exposure risks for sensitive data. Putting sensitive data into a CloudFormation parameter will not encrypt them or protect them from unauthorized access. Putting sensitive data into an Amazon S3 bucket or Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) will require additional configuration and integration with CloudFormation and may not provide fine-grained access control or encryption for sensitive data.

AWS CloudFormation parameters allow templates to be reused across multiple environments by injecting environment-specific values at deployment time. AWS documentation recommends parameters for environment names such as dev, test, and prod.

To ensure unique resource names, CloudFormation intrinsic functions can dynamically construct names. Fn::Sub allows string interpolation, and !Ref retrieves the parameter value. Together, they enable resource names like myapp-dev-bucket or myapp-prod-role.

Conditions (Option B) control whether resources are created but do not generate unique names. Rules (Option C) validate parameters but do not affect naming. Fn::GetAtt (Option E) retrieves resource attributes and is not used to build names.

Therefore, defining an environment name parameter and using Fn::Sub with !Ref is the correct and AWS-recommended approach.

AWS Secrets Manager is a service that helps securely store, rotate, and manage secrets such as API keys, passwords, and tokens. The developer can store the API credentials in AWS Secrets Manager and retrieve them at runtime by using the AWS SDK. This solution will meet the requirements of security, code management, and performance. Storing the API credentials in a local code variable or an S3 object is not secure, as it exposes the credentials to unauthorized access or leakage. Storing the API credentials in a DynamoDB table is also not secure, as it requires additional encryption and access control measures. Moreover, retrieving the credentials from S3 or DynamoDB may affect application performance due to network latency.

AWS Lambda is a service that lets developers run code without provisioning or managing servers. Lambda provides a local file system that can be used to store temporary files during invocation. The local file system is mounted under the /tmp directory and has a limit of 512 MB. The temporary files are accessible only by the Lambda function that created them and are deleted after the function execution ends. The developer can store temporary files that are less than 10 MB in the /tmp directory and access and modify them multiple times during invocation.

Why Option A is Correct:Running an AWS Lambda function within the same VPC ensures secure communication without exposing the API application to public IP addresses. The Lambda function can serve as a secure EventBridge target to send events to the API.

Why Other Options are Incorrect:

Option B & C: Internet-facing load balancers expose public IP addresses, which violates compliance requirements.

Option D: EventBridge cannot directly target an endpoint within a private VPC without intermediary services like Lambda.

AWS Documentation References:

EventBridge Targets

Comprehensive and Detailed Step-by-Step Explanation:

Option D: AWS AppConfig with CloudWatch Application Signals

AWS AppConfig is designed for managing and deploying application configurations dynamically, without redeployment.

CloudWatch Application Signals provide automatic rollback mechanisms in case of an unhealthy application state due to bad configuration changes.

This solution meets the requirements with minimal operational overhead by ensuring both dynamic updates and rollback functionality.

Why Other Options Are Incorrect:

Option A and B: AWS Secrets Manager is designed for secrets management, not dynamic application configuration. Custom Config rules add unnecessary complexity.

Option C: While CloudWatch alarms can monitor application changes, using alarms for rollback requires manual setup and lacks the automatic rollback provided by Application Signals.

The requirement is specifically to have ECS automatically restore the last known good deployment when a new deployment fails, while the service is using the rolling update deployment type. Amazon ECS supports this through the deployment circuit breaker with the option to rollback on failures.

When enabled, the deployment circuit breaker monitors the deployment and detects failure conditions such as tasks repeatedly failing health checks, not reaching steady state, or being unable to start successfully. With rollback enabled, ECS automatically stops the failing deployment and reverts the service to the most recently completed (stable) task definition, restoring service stability without manual intervention.

Option D matches exactly: keep the rolling deployment type and enable circuit breaker + rollback. This is minimal change and directly addresses the behavior observed.

Options A and B are unrelated: service autoscaling adjusts desired count based on metrics and does not roll back failed deployments.

Option C could also achieve rollback behavior, but switching to blue/green introduces additional components (AWS CodeDeploy integration, target groups, and traffic shifting), which is unnecessary when the requirement can be met within rolling deployments.

Therefore, enabling the ECS deployment circuit breaker with rollback on failures for a rolling deployment is the correct solution.

This solution will meet the requirements with the least operational overhead because it uses Amazon S3 as a scalable, secure, and durable storage service for the reports. The presigned URL will allow customers to access their reports for a limited time (8 hours) without requiring additional authentication. The S3 Lifecycle configuration rules will automatically delete the reports that are older than 2 days, reducing storage costs and complying with the data retention policy. Option A is not optimal because it will incur additional costs and complexity to store the reports as DynamoDB items, which have a size limit of 400 KB. Option B is not optimal because it will not provide customers with access to their reports within one hour, as Amazon SNS email delivery is not guaranteed. Option D is not optimal because it will require more operational overhead to manage an RDS database and a Lambda function for storing and deleting the reports.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and consistent performance with seamless scalability. DynamoDB Streams is a feature that captures data modification events in DynamoDB tables. The developer can enable DynamoDB Streams on the table and create a trigger to connect the DynamoDB stream to the Lambda function. This solution will enable the Lambda function to detect changes to the DynamoDB table in near real time.

AWS Lambda is a service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. Lambda functions can be configured to access resources in a VPC, such as an Aurora database, by specifying one or more subnets and security groups in the VPC settings of the function. A security group acts as a virtual firewall that controls inbound and outbound traffic for the resources in a VPC. To allow a Lambda function to communicate with an Aurora database, both resources need to be associated with the same security group, and the security group rules need to allow TCP traffic on Port 3306, which is the default port for MySQL databases. Reference: [Configuring a Lambda function to access resources in a VPC]

Increasing the number of shards of the Kinesis data stream will increase the throughput and parallelism of the data processing. Increasing the memory that is allocated to the Lambda function will also increase the CPU and network performance of the function, which will reduce the run duration and improve the processing speed. Option B is not correct because decreasing the timeout of the Lambda function will not affect the processing speed, but may cause some records to fail if they exceed the timeout limit. Option D is not correct because decreasing the number of shards of the Kinesis data stream will decrease the throughput and parallelism of the data processing, which will slow down the processing speed. Option E is not correct because increasing the timeout of the Lambda function will not affect the processing speed, but may increase the cost of running the function.

Requirement Summary:

Store customer orders in DynamoDB

Must encrypt data at rest

Company wants to use a key it generates (i.e., customer managed key)

Evaluate Options:

A. Set encryption to None, manually encrypt/decrypt in code

Overhead and error-prone

Also non-compliant with AWS encryption best practices

B. Use customer managed KMS key

Exactly meets the requirement: customer generates and controls the key

During table creation, you can specify a KMS CMK ARN

C. Default encryption + kms:Encrypt in SDK

Misunderstanding: DynamoDB handles encryption automatically

You don’t need to call kms:Encrypt manually in SDK

D. Use AWS managed key

Does not meet the requirement of using custom company-generated key

DynamoDB encryption:

KMS customer managed keys:

Requirement Summary:

E-commerce app using Amazon RDS for MySQL

Needs caching layer for most-viewed products

Evaluate Options:

A. Add a cache node to RDS

No such feature in RDS for MySQL

Caching must be implemented outside RDS

B. ElastiCache for Redis (OSS)

Purpose-built for caching frequently accessed data

Reduces read pressure on RDS

Fast in-memory access (microseconds)

Seamless integration into app logic

C. DynamoDB DAX

DAX is for accelerating DynamoDB, not RDS

D. RDS standby instance

Read from standby is not allowed

Standby is for failover only, not for load balancing

ElastiCache for Redis:

Caching with Redis for RDS:

Amazon CloudWatch is a service that monitors AWS resources and applications. The developer can use CloudWatch to monitor and troubleshoot all applications from one place. To do so, the developer needs to download the CloudWatch agent to the on-premises server and configure the agent to use IAM user credentials with permissions for CloudWatch. The agent will collect logs and metrics from the on-premises server and send them to CloudWatch.

To add a caching layer for frequently requested data (such as “most viewed products”), the AWS-native choice is Amazon ElastiCache, commonly using Redis for low-latency key/value caching, counters, sorted sets, and leaderboard-like patterns. Redis is particularly well-suited for ecommerce “top N” or popularity queries because it supports atomic increments and sorted sets, enabling efficient ranking updates.

Option B correctly introduces an ElastiCache (Redis OSS) cluster and updates the application to read from Redis first (cache-aside or write-through patterns) instead of hitting the RDS MySQL cluster for every request. This offloads read pressure from the database, reduces latency, and improves overall throughput.

Option A is not a valid RDS feature: you do not add a “cache node” to an RDS MySQL cluster as part of RDS itself.

Option C is incorrect because DAX is a caching layer specifically for DynamoDB, not for RDS MySQL.

Option D improves availability via Multi-AZ standby, but the standby is not for read scaling in standard RDS Multi-AZ (it’s primarily for failover). It does not provide a cache and does not solve the performance needs for hot reads.

For API Gateway REST APIs, configuration changes (new resources/methods) do not automatically become callable from a stage until a new API Gateway Deployment is created and associated with the stage. In CloudFormation, an AWS::ApiGateway::Deployment resource is immutable and effectively represents a snapshot of the API configuration at a point in time. If the Deployment resource does not change (for example, its logical ID or a property that forces replacement), CloudFormation may not create a new deployment even though the stack update succeeds—resulting in the stage still pointing to the old deployment. The symptom is exactly what’s described: new methods return 404 because they are not part of the deployed snapshot.

A common operational fix is to create a new deployment explicitly during CI/CD. Option C does this by running aws apigateway create-deployment, which creates a fresh deployment that includes the new resources/methods and makes them available on the stage.

Option D is unrelated (CloudFront invalidation).

Options A and B do not affect API Gateway deployment snapshots.

???? In pure CloudFormation, another common pattern is to force a new deployment by changing the Deployment logical ID or embedding a timestamp/hash in the deployment description. But among the options given, running create-deployment is the direct fix.

Therefore, add a pipeline step to run aws apigateway create-deployment.

The goal is near-real-time propagation of changes from one DynamoDB table (Accounts) to another service’s datastore (Payments) while keeping services decoupled. The simplest and most reliable DynamoDB-native change feed is Amazon DynamoDB Streams.

DynamoDB Streams captures item-level modifications (inserts, updates, deletes) in time order and makes them available as a stream of change records. A consumer (commonly an AWS Lambda function) can process stream records and apply the necessary updates to the Payments database/table (or publish events for downstream processing). This provides near-real-time updates with minimal operational overhead, strong integration, and a decoupled architecture because the Accounts service simply emits changes and does not need to call Payments synchronously.

Option A (Glue ETL) is batch-oriented and adds heavy operational complexity; it’s not the simplest nor near-real-time.

Option B introduces a cache as a synchronization mechanism, which complicates consistency and durability; caches are not ideal as the primary propagation channel.

Option C (Firehose) is designed for delivering streaming data to destinations like S3, Redshift, OpenSearch, etc., and is not the standard approach for DynamoDB-to-DynamoDB change replication.

Therefore, DynamoDB Streams is the best fit for near-real-time, decoupled updates between DynamoDB-backed microservices.

The issue is write throttling during peak login surges. In DynamoDB provisioned capacity mode, throttling happens when the workload exceeds the table’s configured write capacity units (WCU) (or a partition becomes “hot”). To resolve throttling and reduce latency, the table must have sufficient write capacity available when the surge occurs.

Option B directly addresses this by increasing the table’s provisioned throughput (WCU). With more write capacity, DynamoDB can accept more writes per second without returning throttling errors, which reduces retries and improves end-user latency during peak usage.

Option E is also effective: switching the table to on-demand capacity mode automatically accommodates traffic spikes without the team needing to forecast and pre-provision capacity. On-demand is designed for unpredictable workloads and can scale to handle sudden surges, reducing the risk of throttling caused by under-provisioning. For many teams, this is the fastest operational fix because it removes manual capacity planning and reactive scaling steps.

Why the other options are not the best fit:

A (DAX) improves read performance and reduces read latency, but it does not fix write throttling.

C (retries and exponential backoff) is a best practice for handling throttling gracefully, but it does not “resolve” throttling; it reduces contention and improves success rates at the cost of higher latency, and it does not increase available capacity.

D focuses on control plane operations (schema/index/table management) which are unrelated to data plane write throttling during login surges.

Therefore, the two solutions that meet the requirements to resolve write throttling and reduce latency are B (increase provisioned throughput) and E (switch to on-demand capacity mode for automatic scaling).

The solution that will meet the requirements with the least development effort is to set the image resize Lambda function as a destination of the avatar generator Lambda function for the events that fail processing. This way, the fallback mechanism is automatically triggered by the Lambda service without requiring any additional components or configuration. The other options involve creating and managing additional resources such as queues, topics, state machines, or rules, which would increase the complexity and cost of the solution.

The HTTP header that the developer should use for this analysis is the X-Forwarded-For header. This header contains the IP address of the client that made the request to the Application Load Balancer. The developer can use this header to analyze patterns for the client IP addresses that use the application. The other headers either contain information about the protocol, host, or port of the request, which are not relevant for the analysis.

This solution will meet the requirements by using AWS SAM CLI tool, which is a command line tool that lets developers locally build, test, debug, and deploy serverless applications defined by AWS SAM templates. The developer can use sam local generate-event command to generate sample events for different event sources such as API Gateway or S3. The developer can create automated test scripts that use sam local invoke command to invoke Lambda functions locally in an environment that closely simulates Lambda environment. The developer can check the response from Lambda functions and document how to run the test scripts for other developers on the team. The developer can also update CI/CD pipeline to run these test scripts before deploying with AWS CDK. Option A is not optimal because it will use cdk local invoke command, which does not exist in AWS CDK CLI tool. Option B is not optimal because it will use a unit testing framework that reproduces Lambda execution environment, which may not be accurate or consistent with Lambda environment. Option D is not optimal because it will create a Docker container from Node.js base image to invoke Lambda functions, which may introduce additional overhead and complexity for creating and running Docker containers.

This solution will meet the requirements by using a rolling with additional batch deployment method, which deploys the new version of the application to a separate group of instances and then shifts traffic to those instances in batches. This way, the application maintains full capacity and avoids service interruption during deployment, as well as minimizes the cost of additional resources that support the deployment. Option A is not optimal because it will use an all at once deployment method, which deploys the new version of the application to all instances simultaneously, which may cause service interruption or downtime during deployment. Option C is not optimal because it will use a blue/green deployment method, which deploys the new version of the application to a separate environment and then swaps URLs with the original environment, which may incur more costs for additional resources that support the deployment. Option D is not optimal because it will use an immutable deployment method, which deploys the new version of the application to a fresh group of instances and then redirects traffic to those instances, which may also incur more costs for additional resources that support the deployment.

Amazon S3 is a service that provides highly scalable, durable, and secure object storage. The developer can create an S3 bucket to host the repository and migrate the existing .xml files to the S3 bucket. The developer can update the application code to use the AWS SDK to read and write configuration files from S3. This solution will meet the requirement of high availability for the repository in a cost-effective way.

Using a dead-letter queue (DLQ) with Amazon SQS is the most operationally efficient solution for handling unprocessable messages.

Amazon SQS Dead-Letter Queue:

A DLQ is used to capture messages that fail processing after a specified number of attempts.

Allows the application to continue processing other messages without being blocked.

Messages in the DLQ can be analyzed later for debugging and resolution.

Why DLQ is the Best Option:

Operational Efficiency: Automatically defers messages with errors, ensuring the queue is not blocked.

Analysis Ready: Messages in the DLQ can be inspected to identify recurring issues.

Scalable: Works seamlessly with Lambda and SQS at scale.

Why Not Other Options:

Option A: Logs the messages but does not resolve the queue blockage issue.

Option C: FIFO queues and 0-second retention do not provide error handling or analysis capabilities.

Option D: Alerts administrators but does not handle or store the unprocessable messages.

Steps to Implement:

Create a new SQS queue to serve as the DLQ.

Attach the DLQ to the primary queue and configure the Maximum Receives setting.

Using Amazon SQS Dead-Letter Queues

Best Practices for Using Amazon SQS with AWS Lambda

The requirement emphasizes collaboration, frequent code changes, and deploying from source control with the fewest manual steps. This aligns with a CI/CD pipeline approach where commits or merges automatically trigger builds and deployments. Using AWS CodePipeline orchestrates the stages (source, build, deploy), and AWS CodeBuild performs the build/package steps for the Lambda/serverless application. When integrated with a repository (such as CodeCommit, GitHub, or another supported provider), CodePipeline can automatically start when changes are merged into specific branches, enabling consistent, repeatable deployments.

Option C provides the least operational overhead for teams: developers push code and merge pull requests; the pipeline automatically builds artifacts, runs tests (if configured), packages dependencies, and deploys updates to Lambda (often via AWS SAM/CloudFormation under the hood). This removes manual “build on my laptop” drift, prevents inconsistent deployments between developers, and supports frequent iteration safely.

Option B (SAM CLI from a local machine) requires a developer to manually run build/deploy commands and assumes each developer’s environment is configured correctly. That increases manual steps and the risk of differences across machines. Option D (uploading zip in the console) is highly manual and not suitable for frequent changes or team collaboration. Option A is also suboptimal because storing built artifacts in source control is an anti-pattern; builds should be reproducible and produced by CI, not committed binaries.

Therefore, C is the best choice: set up CodePipeline + CodeBuild so merges to controlled branches automatically trigger builds and deployments to AWS Lambda with minimal manual intervention.

AWS SAM provides built-in tooling to generate realistic event payloads that match the structure of events produced by AWS services (such as S3, SNS, SQS, API Gateway, EventBridge, and others). The command designed specifically for this purpose is sam local generate-event. It produces sample event JSON that mirrors the format AWS services deliver to Lambda, which meets the requirement that payload structures match real service events.

This approach also requires the least development effort because the developer does not need to manually craft and maintain JSON payload files. Instead, the developer can generate the appropriate event type with SAM, optionally tweak values (bucket name, object key, request parameters), and then run sam local invoke using the generated payload. This significantly reduces mistakes and saves time, especially when testing multiple event sources.

Why other options are less suitable:

A (shareable test events) is vague and typically still requires manual creation/maintenance.

B requires manually creating payloads, which is error-prone and higher effort.

C adds unnecessary operational overhead (S3 storage) and still relies on manual payload creation.

Therefore, using sam local generate-event is the quickest and lowest-effort way to generate accurate AWS-service-like test payloads for local Lambda testing.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and consistent performance with seamless scalability. The developer can store each employee’s contact information in a DynamoDB table along with the object keys for the photos stored in Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. The developer can use AWS APIs to search and retrieve the employee details and photos from DynamoDB and S3.

Requirement Summary:

WebSocket-based messaging app using API Gateway WebSocket APIs

Need to:

Identify clients repeatedly connecting/disconnecting

Be able to remove problematic clients

Evaluate Options:

A. Switch to HTTP APIs

HTTP APIs don’t support WebSocket connections

B. Switch to REST APIs

REST APIs are not compatible with WebSockets

C. Use the callback URL to disconnect clients

⚠️ Possible, but not a direct option

Callback URLs are used for sending messages to connected clients, not for disconnecting

D. Track client status in ElastiCache

Good solution: Store and update connection state (connected, disconnected, timestamps)

Helps track abuse or reconnections

E. Implement $connect and $disconnect routes

Required to capture connection lifecycle events

These can be used to log/store client behavior and decide on removal

WebSocket routes in API Gateway:

Managing WebSocket connections:

Amazon API Gateway supports mock integration responses, which are predefined responses that can be returned without sending requests to a backend service. Mock integration responses can be used for testing or prototyping purposes, or for simulating different backend responses based on certain conditions. A request mapping template can be used to select a mock integration response based on an expression that evaluates some aspects of the request, such as headers, query strings, or body content. This solution does not require any additional resources or code changes and has the least operational overhead. Reference: Set up mock integrations for an API Gateway REST API

Step 1: Understanding the Requirements

Best Practices for Security:

Minimize the use of hardcoded credentials or long-lived access keys.

Use IAM roles for EC2 instances to securely grant permissions to applications running on the instance.

Access Scope: The application needs read-only access to an S3 bucket.

Step 2: Solution Analysis

Option A:

Define an IAM policy with the required s3:GetObject permissions.

Attach this policy to an IAM role.

Assign the role to the EC2 instance profile.

This approach follows security best practices by eliminating the need for static credentials and using temporary, scoped credentials provided by the instance profile.

Correct option.

Option B:

IAM groups are used for organizing users, not for EC2 instances or instance profiles.

Not suitable.

Option C:

IAM users are associated with specific individuals or applications and require static credentials.

This violates security best practices for temporary credentials and roles.

Not suitable.

Option D:

IAM web identity federation is used for applications that authenticate users via third-party identity providers.

This is unnecessary for EC2 instances and does not align with the requirements.

Not suitable.

Step 3: Implementation Steps

Create an IAM Policy:

Grant read-only access to the S3 bucket:

json

Copy code

{

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

"Statement": [

{

"Effect": "Allow",

"Action": "s3:GetObject",

"Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::your-bucket-name/*"

}

]

}

Attach the Policy to an IAM Role:

Create an IAM role and attach the policy to the role.

Associate the Role with the EC2 Instance:

Attach the role to the instance profile used by the EC2 instance.

AWS Developer References:

IAM Roles for Amazon EC2

Amazon S3 Permissions Reference

To test an updated Lambda integration without impacting production traffic, the key is to isolate test requests from the production stage that real users call. In API Gateway, a stage represents a deployed snapshot of an API configuration, and each stage has its own invoke URL. Creating a separate test stage provides immediate traffic isolation because production users continue using the production stage URL, while the developer tests using the test stage URL.

Using stage variables is a common API Gateway pattern to parameterize integrations per stage. For Lambda backends, stage variables can reference different Lambda function ARNs, aliases, or versions (depending on the integration style), allowing the same API resources and methods to route to different backends per stage. This lets the developer deploy and validate the updated Lambda function only in the test stage while keeping the production stage pointing to the stable Lambda version. The result is operationally efficient: minimal duplicated infrastructure, clear separation, and easy rollback by switching stage variables or redeploying only the stage configuration.

Option A (canary on the existing stage) intentionally shifts a percentage of production traffic to the new version, which violates the requirement that testing must not affect any production users. Option B (private endpoint) changes network accessibility and can break production access; it also does not provide safe version testing. Option D (clone entire stack) can work but has higher operational overhead (duplicate resources, additional deployment management) than using native stage isolation.

Therefore, C best meets the requirements: create a new test stage, use stage variables to point that stage to the updated Lambda function, and test safely using the test stage URL while production remains unaffected.

To create a central logging solution for microservices, using Amazon CloudWatch Logs is a recommended and effective approach. Here's why:

Amazon CloudWatch Logs Streams allow you to centralize logs from different services, which is crucial as the number of microservices increases.

Each microservice can have its own dedicated log stream within Amazon CloudWatch Logs, providing clear segregation of logs while still allowing centralized management.

This setup enables developers to monitor, search, and analyze logs efficiently using tools like CloudWatch Insights.

Other options like CloudTrail (B) are designed for API activity monitoring, not application logs. VPC Flow Logs (C) focus on network traffic rather than application behavior. AWS Cloud Map (D) is for service discovery and routing, not logging.

Pseudo Parameters: CloudFormation provides pseudo parameters that reference runtime context, including the current AWS Region.

Operational Efficiency: The AWS::Region pseudo parameter offers the most direct and self-contained way to obtain the Region dynamically within the template.

The Deployment Preference Type property specifies how traffic should be shifted between versions of a Lambda function1. The Canary10Percent10Minutes option means that 10% of the traffic is immediately shifted to the new version, and after 10 minutes, the remaining 90% of the traffic is shifted1. This matches the requirement of shifting 10% of the traffic for the first 10 minutes, and then switching all traffic to the new version.

The AutoPublishAlias property enables AWS SAM to automatically create and update a Lambda alias that points to the latest version of the function1. This is required to use the Deployment Preference Type property1. The alias name can be specified by the developer, and it can be used to invoke the function with the latest code.

Requirement Summary:

Users experience buffering/delay when starting video stream

Architecture:

CloudFront → API Gateway → Lambda → DynamoDB

Need to identify root cause of performance issues

Evaluate Options:

A: Enable AWS X-Ray tracing

Ideal for end-to-end tracing

Visualizes latency across services (API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB)

Creates a service map for easy identification of bottlenecks or errors

Designed specifically for distributed tracing and performance monitoring

B: CloudWatch Logs Insights

⚠️ Helpful for querying logs

But lacks the visual trace linkage across services like X-Ray

Does not identify where latency accumulates

C: AWS Config

Tracks configuration changes, not runtime performance

D: CloudTrail + CloudWatch Logs

More useful for audit/logging, not tracing performance or latency issues

X-Ray overview:

Service map:

Tracing API Gateway:

Amazon EC2 instances can send the state-change notification events to Amazon EventBridge. Amazon EventBridge can send and receive events between event buses in AWS accounts.

The requirement is real-time UI updates “immediately” without refreshing the dashboard. The most operationally efficient AWS-native method is to use API Gateway WebSocket APIs to push updates from the backend to the browser.

With option A, the client establishes a WebSocket connection and receives a connection ID. The application can associate uploads (or job IDs) with that connection ID (commonly storing the mapping in DynamoDB or another datastore). When the long-running validation finishes, the backend uses the WebSocket management API to post a message to the specific connection ID, and the browser updates the UI dynamically. This eliminates polling/refresh and scales well without managing servers.

Option B requires running and maintaining an EC2-hosted WebSocket server (patching, scaling, uptime), which is more operational overhead.

Option C uses email, which is not immediate UI updating and doesn’t update the dashboard without user action.

Option D is not appropriate: SNS does not directly push notifications to a web browser in a standard way, and it adds unnecessary complexity.

Therefore, using API Gateway WebSocket to push validation results to connected clients is the most operationally efficient solution.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation (AWS Verified – 250–300 Words)

When an Amazon S3 bucket is configured with default encryption using SSE-KMS, AWS Key Management Service (KMS) plays an active role in every PutObject request. Although the IAM user already has the s3:PutObject permission, this alone is not sufficient when SSE-KMS is enabled.

According to AWS documentation, when a client uploads an object to an S3 bucket encrypted with SSE-KMS, Amazon S3 must call AWS KMS on behalf of the caller to generate a unique data encryption key. This operation requires the kms:GenerateDataKey permission on the KMS key used for encryption. If this permission is missing, the PutObject request fails with an Access Denied error—even though S3 permissions appear correct.

AWS explicitly states that IAM principals uploading objects to SSE-KMS–encrypted buckets must be allowed to use the KMS key. At a minimum, the following KMS permissions are required:

kms:GenerateDataKey

(Implicitly) access allowed by the KMS key policy

Option C correctly resolves the issue by granting the IAM user permission to generate a data key via AWS KMS, enabling successful encryption during the upload process.

Option A is invalid because s3:EncryptionConfiguration is not required for object uploads.

Option B is unnecessary because the IAM user already has s3:PutObject.

Option D is incorrect because ACLs are not used to control KMS encryption permissions and are discouraged by AWS best practices.

The correct policy condition ensures that:

The LeadingKeys condition restricts operations to the authenticated user's user_id.

The Attributes condition limits the updatable attributes to user_name.

Explanation of Choices:

Option A: Correctly enforces both the key restriction (dynamodb:LeadingKeys) and ensures only the user_name attribute can be updated.

Option B, C, D: Use incorrect conditions, such as referencing user_name in the LeadingKeys or including other attributes like user_id in updatable fields.

Secrets Management: AWS Secrets Manager is designed specifically for storing and managing sensitive credentials.

Environment Isolation: Creating separate secrets for each environment (development, staging, etc.) ensures clear separation and prevents accidental leaks.

Automatic Rotation: Secrets Manager provides built-in rotation capabilities, enhancing security posture.

Versioning: Tracking changes to secrets is essential for auditing and compliance.

This solution meets the requirements because it encrypts data at rest using AWS KMS keys and provides an audit trail of when and by whom they were used. Server-side encryption with AWS KMS managed keys (SSE-KMS) is a feature of Amazon S3 that encrypts data using keys that are managed by AWS KMS. When SSE-KMS is enabled for an S3 bucket or object, S3 requests AWS KMS to generate data keys and encrypts data using these keys. AWS KMS logs every use of its keys in AWS CloudTrail, which records all API calls to AWS KMS as events. These events include information such as who made the request, when it was made, and which key was used. The company policy can use CloudTrail logs to audit critical events related to their data encryption and access. Server-side encryption with Amazon S3 managed keys (SSE-S3) also encrypts data at rest using keys that are managed by S3, but does not provide an audit trail of key usage. Server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C) and server-side encryption with self-managed keys also encrypt data at rest using keys that are provided or managed by customers, but do not provide an audit trail of key usage and require additional overhead for key management.

Step Functions Retriers: Retriers provide a built-in way to gracefully handle transient errors within State Machines. Here's how to use them:

Directly attach a retrier to the problematic 'GetResource' task.

Configure the retrier:

ErrorEquals: Set this to ['TooManyRequestsException'] to target the specific error.

IntervalSeconds: Set to 10 for the desired retry delay.

MaxAttempts: Set to 1, as you want only one retry attempt.

Error Handling:

Upon 'TooManyRequestsException', the retrier triggers the task again after 10 seconds.

On a second failure, Step Functions moves to the next state or fails the workflow, as per your design.

'IllegalArgumentException' causes error propagation as intended.

Amazon API Gateway stages are designed to represent different deployment environments such as development, testing, and production. AWS documentation recommends using separate stages combined with stage variables to reference different backend resources without duplicating API definitions.

In this scenario, the development stage already uses a stage variable to reference the Lambda dev alias. To expose the production alias safely, the developer should deploy the API to a new stage named production and configure a stage variable that points to the Lambda prod alias. This approach allows the same API configuration and methods to be reused while cleanly separating environments.

Stage variables are resolved at runtime and are commonly used to reference Lambda aliases in integration ARNs. This enables controlled promotion of code from development to production without modifying methods or integrations.

Creating new methods (Options A and B) is unnecessary and increases operational complexity. Directly hardcoding the Lambda alias in the integration (Option D) removes flexibility and deviates from AWS best practices for environment separation.

Therefore, deploying a new API stage and using stage variables to reference the prod Lambda alias is the correct and most efficient solution.

This solution allows the developer to overcome the limit for the combined maximum of characters for environment variables in AWS CodeBuild. AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store provides secure, hierarchical storage for configuration data management and secrets management. The developer can store large numbers of environment variables as parameters in Parameter Store and reference them in the buildspec file using parameter references. Adding export LC_ALL=“en_US.utf8” command to the pre_build section will not affect the environment variables limit. Using Amazon Cognito or an Amazon S3 bucket to store key-value pairs for environment variables will require additional configuration and integration.

This solution allows easy and secure control of access to the downloads at the lowest cost because it uses a content delivery network (CDN) that can cache and distribute firmware updates to customers around the world, and uses a mechanism that can restrict access to specific files or versions. Amazon CloudFront is a CDN that can improve performance, availability, and security of web applications by delivering content from edge locations closer to customers. Amazon S3 is a storage service that can store firmware updates in buckets and objects. Signed URLs are URLs that include additional information, such as an expiration date and time, that give users temporary access to specific objects in S3 buckets. The developer can use CloudFront to serve firmware updates from S3 buckets and use signed URLs to control who can download them and for how long. Creating a dedicated CloudFront distribution for each customer will incur unnecessary costs and complexity. Using Amazon CloudFront with AWS Lambda@Edge will require additional programming overhead to implement custom logic at the edge locations. Using Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda to control access to an S3 bucket will also require additional programming overhead and may not provide optimal performance or availability.

AWS Lambda supports versions and aliases to manage deployments safely. An alias is a named pointer to a specific function version (for example, prod → version 5). Importantly, Lambda aliases can be configured with routing configuration to split incoming invocation traffic between two versions. This enables canary or linear deployments where most traffic goes to the stable version and a small percentage goes to the new version for testing. If issues occur, the developer can quickly shift traffic back by updating the alias.

Option B is the native, simplest, and recommended solution for Lambda traffic shifting.

Option A is not correct because Route 53 weighted routing can split DNS queries between endpoints, but it does not natively target Lambda versions directly for most invocation patterns, and it’s not the standard mechanism for Lambda version traffic shifting.

Option C is unnecessary and adds operational overhead. ALB can invoke Lambda targets, but splitting between Lambda versions is more naturally handled by aliases without provisioning and managing an ALB.

Option D misunderstands layers: layers are for dependencies/shared code, not for deploying new versions or traffic splitting.

Therefore, using a Lambda alias with weighted routing between versions meets the requirement.

Configuring the Lambda function to use ephemeral storage and processing data in the /tmp directory improves performance by leveraging local storage during execution.

Why Option C is Correct:

Ephemeral Storage: Lambda provides temporary storage (up to 10 GB) in the /tmp directory for each invocation, which is faster than pulling data directly from S3 multiple times.

Performance Boost: Data can be downloaded to /tmp, processed locally, and uploaded to the destination S3 bucket, minimizing S3 network calls.

Low Overhead: This approach requires only minimal changes to the function's configuration.

Why Not Other Options:

Option A: Using Amazon EFS adds complexity and is unnecessary for this use case.

Option B: Scheduling the function does not address the root cause of slow performance.

Option D: Lambda layers improve deployment efficiency, not runtime performance for this scenario.

Using Ephemeral Storage in AWS Lambda

Best Practices for S3 and Lambda Performance

To securely grant temporary access to a specific S3 object, the best option is to use an Amazon S3 presigned URL. A presigned URL is created by an IAM principal (user or role) that already has permission to access the object. The URL includes a signature and an expiration time, allowing anyone who has the URL to perform the specified operation (typically GET to download, or PUT to upload) until the URL expires. This meets the requirement for temporary access without changing the bucket to be publicly accessible.

Presigned URLs are especially useful when the developer needs to share access with people who do not have AWS credentials or are not part of the same AWS account. The developer can set an expiration that matches the business need (minutes to hours, etc.). After expiration, the URL no longer works, which reduces security exposure compared with long-lived access keys or permanently permissive bucket policies.

Option C (bucket policy with time restriction) can enforce time-based access, but it is not a practical way to securely share with a “specific group of people” unless those people authenticate with identifiable principals (IAM roles/users, federated identities) and you scope the policy to those principals. Simply providing the bucket S3 URL would not grant access unless the recipients also have valid permissions. Option D (static website hosting) is generally for public web content and does not inherently provide secure, temporary, per-object access control. Option A is unrelated to access sharing; object retention and restore operations are for retention/compliance and archival retrieval, not temporary permission grants.

Therefore, generating and sharing a presigned URL (B) is the standard, secure mechanism for time-limited access to S3 objects.

Why Option C is Correct:

Amazon ElastiCache (Memcached) provides low-latency, in-memory caching suitable for session storage. It ensures stateless web tier operations and supports the high throughput of 5000 requests per minute.

Why Other Options are Incorrect:

Option A: RDS has higher latency compared to in-memory caching solutions like ElastiCache.

Option B: Shared file systems introduce additional complexity and are not ideal for low-latency session data storage.

Option D: DynamoDB has low latency but is less performant than ElastiCache for in-memory session management.

AWS Documentation References:

Amazon ElastiCache for Session State Management

AWS Secrets Manager is a service that allows you to store and manage secrets, such as database credentials, API keys, and passwords, in a secure and centralized way. It also provides features such as automatic secret rotation, auditing, and monitoring1. By using AWS Secrets Manager, you can avoid hardcoding credentials in your code, which is a bad security practice and makes it difficult to update them. You can also replicate your secrets to another Region, which is useful for disaster recovery purposes2. To access your secrets from your application, you can use the ARN of the secret, which is a unique identifier that includes the Region name. This way, your application can use the appropriate secret based on the Region where it is deployed3.

AWS Secrets Manager

Replicating and sharing secrets

Using your own encryption keys

This solution allows the developer to create and delete branches in AWS CodeCommit by granting the codecommit:CreateBranch and codecommit:DeleteBranch permissions. These are the minimum permissions required for this task, following the principle of least privilege. Option B grants too many permissions, such as codecommit:Put*, which allows the developer to create, update, or delete any resource in CodeCommit. Option C grants too few permissions, such as codecommit:Update*, which does not allow the developer to create or delete branches. Option D grants all permissions, such as codecommit:*, which is not secure or recommended.

AWS Secrets Manager is a service that helps you protect secrets needed to access your applications, services, and IT resources. Secrets Manager enables you to store, retrieve, and rotate secrets such as database credentials, API keys, and passwords. Secrets Manager supports a secret type for RDS databases, which allows you to select an existing RDS database instance and generate credentials for it. Secrets Manager encrypts the secret using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) keys and enables automatic rotation of the secret at a specified interval. A Lambda function can use the AWS SDK or CLI to retrieve the secret from Secrets Manager and use it to connect to the database. Reference: Rotating your AWS Secrets Manager secrets