New Release SAA-C03 AWS Certified Associate Questions

To break down consolidated billing costs by “product line” using tags, the company must use cost allocation tags and ensure those tags are activated for billing at the payer/management level. Because the teams have already applied user-defined tags to the compute resources across accounts, the correct approach is to (1) use those user-defined tags in the billing tools and (2) activate them so they appear in cost and usage reporting for consolidated billing.

B is required because cost reporting by product line depends on selecting the user-defined cost allocation tag key (for example, ProductLine=...) in AWS billing and cost management tooling (such as Cost Explorer reports). AWS-generated tags are not what teams typically use for chargeback by business dimension, and the scenario explicitly says teams tagged resources (i.e., user-defined).

E is required because in an AWS Organizations consolidated billing setup, cost allocation tag activation is handled centrally from the Organizations management account so that the tags can be used consistently in consolidated cost views and reporting. Activating tags centrally ensures the billing system recognizes and includes those tag dimensions in cost allocation data.

Option C is not relevant to billing breakdown; Resource Groups is for organizing and operating on resources, not for consolidated billing allocation. Option D is unnecessary in this scenario’s intended best practice because activation for consolidated billing reporting is done from the management account to standardize reporting. In short, you tag resources (already done), then activate the tag for billing and use it in billing reports to see cost by product line across accounts and Regions.

Therefore, B and E together meet the requirement with the correct billing-focused steps.

The key requirements are shared file access, NFS protocol compatibility, and no application changes. Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is a fully managed, scalable file system that natively supports the NFS protocol, making it an ideal drop-in replacement for on-premises shared file systems used by Linux applications.

Option C allows the existing web servers to mount the EFS file system using standard NFS mount commands, preserving application behavior and avoiding code changes. EFS is designed to be accessed concurrently by multiple EC2 instances across Availability Zones, providing high availability and elasticity without manual capacity management. This aligns well with typical web server architectures that rely on shared content or assets.

Option A and B use Amazon S3, which is an object storage service and does not support NFS semantics. Migrating to S3 would require application changes to use object-based APIs instead of file system operations. Option D uses Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, which supports SMB, not NFS, and is intended for Windows-based workloads.

Therefore, C is the correct solution because Amazon EFS provides NFS compatibility, shared access, high availability, and minimal operational overhead while requiring no changes to the existing Linux-based web server applications.

The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) delivers detailed, line-item billing data to Amazon S3. AWS recommends querying CUR with Amazon Athena by creating external tables over the CUR S3 location (partitioned by time) to produce daily cost aggregations such as NAT Gateway (EC2:NatGateway) usage and cost. Amazon QuickSight natively connects to Athena as a data source to build and share dashboards with visuals (tables, time series) filtered from the start of the current month. DataSync (A, C) is a file transfer service and cannot query data. CloudWatch dashboards (C, D) visualize metrics/logs, not CUR datasets. Therefore, using Athena to query CUR and QuickSight to present a daily NAT gateway cost dashboard is the most direct and operationally efficient approach.

AWS Shield Advanced provides advanced DDoS protection for AWS workloads, including EC2, CloudFront, and RDS. When integrated with CloudFront, Shield Advanced offers comprehensive detection and mitigation against large and sophisticated DDoS attacks, along with 24x7 access to the AWS DDoS Response Team (DRT). AWS WAF provides application-level protection, but for complete DDoS mitigation, Shield Advanced is the recommended solution.

Reference Extract from AWS Documentation / Study Guide:

" AWS Shield Advanced provides expanded DDoS attack protection for applications running on AWS. It offers always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency. "

Source: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Official Study Guide, Security and DDoS Protection section.