Ace Your SAA-C03 AWS Certified Associate Exam

To improve scalability and availability, EC2 Auto Scaling across multiple Availability Zones with an Application Load Balancer ensures resilient infrastructure. Migrating to Amazon Aurora MySQL with reader endpoints reduces read latency by offloading read traffic to replicas in otherAZs, while also increasing high availability.

Amazon RDS Performance Insights is a “database performance tuning and monitoring feature” that can be enabled with a few clicks and “helps you quickly assess the load on your database” and identify bottlenecks. It surfaces key metrics, including DB load, top SQL, waits, and host metrics such as CPU utilization, which are commonly used indicators for right-sizing (up or down). This provides the lowest operational effort compared to building log pipelines or querying CloudTrail (which does not capture SQL workload characteristics). AWS X-Ray traces application requests, not database internals, and CloudWatch Logs aggregation requires custom ingestion and analysis. Enabling Performance Insights directly on the RDS instance provides actionable utilization data to right-size with minimal setup.

AWS Glue jobs are designed for extract, transform, and load (ETL) operations, which are perfect for transforming clinical trial data. AWS Glue integrates with AWS Key Management Service (KMS), allowing for customer-specific encryption keys, fulfilling the encryption requirement with minimal operational effort. Client-side encryption with AWS KMS ensures that the data is encrypted before it is sent to S3, aligning with the security needs specified in the scenario.

Key aspects:

AWS Glue: This managed ETL service simplifies data transformation, reduces operational overhead, and integrates seamlessly with KMS.

CSE-KMS: Client-side encryption with KMS ensures that the data is encrypted with customer-specific keys before it is processed or stored in S3, offering robust security​​.

Minimal Operational Overhead: Compared to managing an EMR cluster, AWS Glue automates much of the process, making it a lower-effort solution.

AWS Documentation: According to the AWS Well-Architected Framework, encryption with AWS KMS offers strong security controls that meet the needs of industries requiring high levels of confidentiality​​.

AWS Budgets is the correct service because it is built to track AWS costs and usage and to take action when thresholds are reached. In this scenario, the company explicitly doesnotwant automatic resource restriction, so the right pattern is to use budget thresholds and define an action path that supportsmanual review. AWS documentation explains that AWS Budgets can monitor costs and trigger budget actions, and it also supports forecast-based alerts, which help identify likely overruns as early as possible. Daily reports alone are slower and less proactive, while automatic restrictions violate the requirement. Service control policies are not the mechanism used to define spending thresholds themselves. A Budgets-based workflow is therefore the cleanest and most appropriate solution. (AWS Documentation)

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