Amazon Web Services Updated SAA-C03 Exam Questions and Answers by theodora

The requirement has two parts: (1) continuously or regularly evaluate IAM access key age against a 90-day policy, and (2) remediate noncompliant keys by disabling and deleting them. The least operational effort generally comes from using managed compliance evaluation and lightweight serverless remediation.

AWS Config is designed to assess resource configuration compliance over time. Using an AWS Config rule to check access key age fits the governance model because Config maintains a compliance history, supports central reporting, and can evaluate keys across an account (and commonly across an organization with aggregation patterns). After detection, remediation should be automated with minimal infrastructure, and AWS Lambda is the lightest operational tool for directly calling IAM APIs (UpdateAccessKey to Inactive, then DeleteAccessKey) on a schedule.

Option C pairs these appropriately: Config performs compliance evaluation, and an EventBridge scheduled rule triggers a Lambda function to remediate keys older than 90 days. This avoids running and maintaining compute fleets or batch infrastructure. It also provides clear separation of duties: Config for detection and evidence, Lambda for corrective action.

Options A, B, and D rely on AWS Batch, which introduces additional operational overhead (compute environments, job definitions, queues, scaling, and monitoring) that is unnecessary for a simple IAM housekeeping task. Also, EventBridge by itself is not a compliance evaluation service; it can schedule a job, but it does not inherently track “key age” state or compliance posture the way Config does.

Therefore, C best meets the requirement with the least operational effort by using Config for continuous compliance visibility and a scheduled Lambda for automated key deactivation and deletion.

Amazon SQS provides durable, decoupled message storage for distributed systems. Using SQS as a job queue enables each EC2 instance to process a message independently. Scaling the Auto Scaling group based on the SQS queue length ensures parallelism and elasticity, aligning compute resources with workload volume.

AWS recommends Auto Scaling with dynamic scaling policies to handle unpredictable workload spikes. Target tracking scaling policies automatically adjust capacity based on defined metrics such as average CPU utilization or request count per target. This approach ensures applications maintain responsiveness without overprovisioning. Scheduled scaling (options B and C) is only effective when traffic patterns are predictable, which is not the case here. Reserved Instances or Spot Instances also do not address sudden demand changes effectively. Replacing the ALB with an NLB (D) does not solve latency caused by EC2 instance capacity. Therefore, using EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group with a target tracking scaling policy is the most effective and cost-efficient solution for unpredictable, short-lived traffic spikes.

For global low latency, AWS recommends using Amazon CloudFront as a content delivery network in front of both static and dynamic origins when possible.

Static content on Amazon S3 + CloudFront is the standard cost-effective pattern: S3 for low-cost durable storage, CloudFront for global edge caching.

Dynamic content exposed via Amazon API Gateway HTTP API can also be used as an origin for CloudFront, giving global users reduced latency and the ability to cache appropriate responses (when safe).

This pattern minimizes cost by:

Using S3 instead of EC2 for static hosting.

Using HTTP APIs (cheaper than REST APIs) for dynamic content.

Offloading a significant portion of requests to CloudFront cache.

Why the other options are not correct:

B: Static content is not fronted by CloudFront, so global latency is higher.

C: EC2-based web servers for the core web tier add more operational and cost overhead than needed for a mostly static + API pattern.

D: Only the static content uses CloudFront; the dynamic API still lacks a latency-optimized global entry point.