📨 Weekly AWS SAA-C03 Exam Digest
Use Case: Scan EC2 & ECR for CVEs, assign severity scores.
Key Point: Inspector = scanner; Patch Manager = patching; GuardDuty = threat detection.
Exam Trap: “Scan EC2/ECR for vulnerabilities” → always Inspector.
Command:
curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/Details: Provides instance ID, AMI, SGs, IAM role.
Exam Trap: Not accessible via 127.0.0.1 or 192.168.x.x — only 169.254.169.254.
Problem: Scale-in may terminate instances mid-request.
Solution: Increase Deregistration Delay on ALB Target Group.
Exam Trap: Don’t confuse with Cooldown — that only controls scaling frequency.
Key Metrics
IOPS: # of small read/write ops per second → best for DBs.
Throughput: MB/s data flow → best for logs & big data.
Volume Families
gp3 (SSD): Balanced, up to 16K IOPS, web apps/dev/test.
io1/io2 (SSD): Up to 64K IOPS, mission-critical DBs.
st1 (HDD): Throughput-focused, great for big data/streaming.
sc1 (HDD): Lowest cost, archival.
Exam Traps
“20K IOPS DB” → io1/io2.
“Streaming/logs” → st1.
gp3 = common distractor (great general choice but capped at 16K IOPS).
Requirement: 20K+ IOPS, low-latency database.
Solution: Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1/io2).
Exam Trap: gp3 maxes at 16K IOPS — won’t meet requirement.
Use Case: Repeated stock price lookups, microsecond latency.
Solution: DynamoDB with DAX (caching layer).
Exam Trap: Aurora = relational; ElastiCache = cache only, not a DB.
🔑 Quick Tip: Always match the scenario keywords (e.g., “scan for vulnerabilities,” “finish in-flight requests,” “20K IOPS”) to the right AWS service.
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