AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 309

A company hosts a multi-tier web application that uses an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster for storage. The application tier is hosted on Amazon EC2 instances. The company’s IT security guidelines mandate that the database credentials be encrypted and rotated every 14 days.

What should a solutions architect do to meet this requirement with the LEAST operational effort?

Answer options

• A. Create a new AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) encryption key. Use AWS Secrets Manager to create a new secret that uses the KMS key with the appropriate credentials. Associate the secret with the Aurora DB cluster. Configure a custom rotation period of 14 days.
• B. Create two parameters in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store: one for the user name as a string parameter and one that uses the SecureString type for the password. Select AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) encryption for the password parameter, and load these parameters in the application tier. Implement an AWS Lambda function that rotates the password every 14 days.
• C. Store a file that contains the credentials in an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) encrypted Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system. Mount the EFS file system in all EC2 instances of the application tier. Restrict the access to the file on the file system so that the application can read the file and that only super users can modify the file. Implement an AWS Lambda function that rotates the key in Aurora every 14 days and writes new credentials into the file.
• D. Store a file that contains the credentials in an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) encrypted Amazon S3 bucket that the application uses to load the credentials. Download the file to the application regularly to ensure that the correct credentials are used. Implement an AWS Lambda function that rotates the Aurora credentials every 14 days and uploads these credentials to the file in the S3 bucket.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

AWS Secrets Manager natively integrates with Amazon Aurora to support automatic, out-of-the-box credential rotation with minimal configuration, making Option A the choice with the least operational effort. Options B, C, and D are incorrect because they require designing, writing, and maintaining custom AWS Lambda functions to handle the rotation logic, as well as managing additional storage and access permissions. Using Secrets Manager eliminates this custom code and administrative overhead entirely.