AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional · Free Practice Question Hard
Question 31
A company hosts a business-critical monolithic application on an Amazon EC2 instance which is installed on an instance launched from an Amazon Linux 2 AMI. The company requires that the data on the attached EBS volumes must be backed up to a specific Amazon S3 bucket managed by the company.
The security team has mandated against owning any SSH keys for instances, so the operations team are unable to SSH into the instance.
Which solution will meet these requirements with the least impact on the critical application?
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A
Take a snapshot of the EBS volume by using Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (Amazon DLM). Use the EBS direct APIs to copy the data from the snapshot to Amazon S3.
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B
Create a new AMI image from the current EC2 instance and spin up a new EC2 instance from the image. Attach a role to the new instance with permission to write to Amazon S3. Run a command to copy data into Amazon S3.
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C
Attach an IAM role to the instance with permissions to write to Amazon S3. Use the AWS Systems Manager Session Manager to gain access to the instance and run commands to copy data into Amazon S3.
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D
Create an image of the instance with the reboot option turned on. Launch a new EC2 instance from the image. Attach a role to the new instance with permission to write to Amazon S3. Run a command to copy data into Amazon S3.
Reveal correct answer
Correct answer: A
Explanation
Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager provides an automated, policy-based lifecycle management solution for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Snapshots and EBS-backed Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). Automate the creation of point-in-time copy of your block storage data with user-defined policies that you can customize based on data protection needs. Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager requires no scripting or special training.
You can use the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) direct APIs to create EBS snapshots, write data directly to your snapshots, read data on your snapshots, and identify the differences or changes between two snapshots. These APIs can be used to read the data from the snapshot and copy the data to Amazon S3.
CORRECT: "Take a snapshot of the EBS volume by using Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (Amazon DLM). Use the EBS direct APIs to copy the data from the snapshot to Amazon S3" is the correct answer (as explained above).
INCORRECT: "Attach an IAM role to the instance with permissions to write to Amazon S3. Use the AWS Systems Manager Session Manager to gain access to the instance and run commands to copy data into Amazon S3" is incorrect.
Running manual commands on a business-critical instance isn't recommended and DLM can safely take the snapshot without needing to log in to the instance in any way.
INCORRECT: "Create an image of the instance with the reboot option turned on. Launch a new EC2 instance from the image. Attach a role to the new instance with permission to write to Amazon S3. Run a command to copy data into Amazon S3" is incorrect.
The reboot option will cause the business-critical application to be rebooted which has an impact on availability.
INCORRECT: "Create a new AMI image from the current EC2 instance and spin up a new EC2 instance from the image. Attach a role to the new instance with permission to write to Amazon S3. Run a command to copy data into Amazon S3" is incorrect.
This is unnecessary as DLM can safely take a backup of the EBS volume using a snapshot.
References:
https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/data-lifecycle-manager/
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Discussion
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