Amazon Web Services DOP-C02 Exam With Confidence Using Practice Dumps

Accessing a secret from AWS Secrets Manager that is encrypted with a customer managed KMS key requires two distinct permission layers to succeed:

Secrets Manager permissions (via IAM) such as secretsmanager:GetSecretValue for the IAM role assumed by the Kubernetes service account.

KMS key usage permissions in the KMS key policy, allowing the same IAM principal to perform kms:Decrypt (and possibly kms:GenerateDataKey) on the customer managed key.

In this scenario, the service account assumes an IAM role explicitly created to access the secrets. The symptom is an HTTP 403 “Access Denied” when retrieving the secret. If the IAM role has Secrets Manager permissions but the call still fails, the typical root cause is that the KMS key policy does not trust or allow that IAM role, so the decrypt operation fails.

Option B correctly identifies that the KMS key policy must include the Kubernetes service account IAM role as a principal with the appropriate KMS actions.

Option A and C refer to the EKS cluster IAM role, which is not the principal making the call. Option D is unrelated: the role’s ability to “access the EKS cluster” does not affect its ability to call Secrets Manager or KMS. The missing KMS key policy permission is the underlying cause.

The most operationally efficient solution is to use AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store1 to store the AMI ID and reference it in the launch template2. This way, the launch template does not need to be updated every time a new AMI is created by Image Builder. Instead, the Image Builder pipeline can update the Parameter Store value with the newest AMI ID3, and the Auto Scaling group can launch instances using the latest value from Parameter Store.

The other solutions require updating the launch template or creating a new version of it every time a new AMI is created, which adds complexity and overhead. Additionally, using EventBridge rules and Lambda functions or Run Command documents introduces additional dependencies and potential points of failure.

 1: AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store 2: Using AWS Systems Manager parameters instead of AMI IDs in launch templates 3: Update an SSM parameter with Image Builder

The startup delay occurs because large container images must be pulled from Amazon ECR when pods are scheduled, especially on newly added nodes that do not have cached images. To consistently reduce pod startup time to seconds, container images must be prefetched directly onto the worker nodes that run the pods, not the EKS control plane.

Amazon EKS control plane nodes are fully managed by AWS and cannot be accessed or modified using AWS Systems Manager. Therefore, any solution that attempts to run Systems Manager commands on control plane nodes is invalid. Prefetching must target the EKS worker nodes (EC2 instances in managed node groups) where container images are actually stored and used.

Option C correctly creates an IAM role that allows Amazon EventBridge to invoke AWS Systems Manager to run commands on the EKS worker nodes. By using Systems Manager State Manager associations with node tags, the automation dynamically targets both existing nodes and newly added nodes that inherit the same tags. This ensures that container images are pulled immediately when a new image is pushed to ECR or when new nodes join the cluster.

Option B incorrectly targets nodes based on machine size, which is not reliable for lifecycle automation. Options A and D incorrectly reference control plane nodes, which cannot be managed with Systems Manager.

Therefore, Option C is the correct and AWS-aligned solution to ensure fast pod startup times across all nodes.