SAA-C03 Exam Dumps : AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03)

AWS Spot best practices recommend diversifying capacity across multiple instance types and Availability Zones and using the capacity-optimized (price-capacity-optimized) allocation strategy to choose pools with the deepest capacity for higher availability. Adding a small On-Demand base in the Auto Scaling group maintains steady, uninterrupted baseline processing while keeping costs low and absorbing Spot interruptions. Option C (lowest price) increases interruption risk. Capacity Reservations (B) target On-Demand capacity guarantees and add cost, not needed for Spot-based elasticity. Option E is redundant; diversification is already achieved with (D). This combination maximizes resiliency of Spot workloads while preserving strong cost efficiency and aligns with AWS guidance for fault-tolerant, stateless applications on Spot.

In Amazon EKS, Kubernetes stores objects such as Secrets in the cluster’s etcd key-value store. By default, Kubernetes Secrets are base64-encoded and are not automatically encrypted at the application object level unless encryption is configured. Amazon EKS provides a managed capability to encrypt Kubernetes Secrets at rest in etcd using AWS Key Management Service (KMS). The requirement explicitly states that “all secrets that are stored in Amazon EKS must be encrypted in the Kubernetes etcd key-value store,” which maps directly to enabling EKS secrets encryption with a customer-managed KMS key.

Option B is exactly this: create a KMS key and enable EKS KMS secrets encryption on the cluster. With this enabled, EKS uses envelope encryption so that Secrets are encrypted when stored in etcd, and decrypt operations are controlled through KMS permissions. This is the standard, AWS-native method that fulfills the requirement without requiring application changes or external secret stores for the encryption-at-rest requirement in etcd.

Option A (Secrets Manager) is a strong service for secret lifecycle management and rotation, but it does not by itself guarantee that Kubernetes Secrets stored in etcd are encrypted unless EKS secrets encryption is also enabled or the cluster avoids storing secrets in etcd entirely. The question specifically targets etcd encryption. Option C is unrelated: the EBS CSI driver concerns persistent volumes, not etcd secret encryption. Option D concerns EBS volume encryption and a specific AWS-managed key alias used for EBS; it also does not address etcd encryption for Kubernetes Secrets.

Therefore, B is the correct solution because it directly enables encryption of Kubernetes Secrets within etcd using KMS.