AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 312

A company has an application that is backed by an Amazon DynamoDB table. The company’s compliance requirements specify that database backups must be taken every month, must be available for 6 months, and must be retained for 7 years.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create an AWS Backup plan to back up the DynamoDB table on the first day of each month. Specify a lifecycle policy that transitions the backup to cold storage after 6 months. Set the retention period for each backup to 7 years.
• B. Create a DynamoDB on-demand backup of the DynamoDB table on the first day of each month. Transition the backup to Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval after 6 months. Create an S3 Lifecycle policy to delete backups that are older than 7 years.
• C. Use the AWS SDK to develop a script that creates an on-demand backup of the DynamoDB table. Set up an Amazon EventBridge rule that runs the script on the first day of each month. Create a second script that will run on the second day of each month to transition DynamoDB backups that are older than 6 months to cold storage and to delete backups that are older than 7 years.
• D. Use the AWS CLI to create an on-demand backup of the DynamoDB table. Set up an Amazon EventBridge rule that runs the command on the first day of each month with a cron expression. Specify in the command to transition the backups to cold storage after 6 months and to delete the backups after 7 years.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

AWS Backup is a fully managed service that natively supports backup scheduling, lifecycle transitions to cold storage, and retention periods for Amazon DynamoDB. Native DynamoDB on-demand backups cannot be directly transitioned to S3 Glacier using S3 Lifecycle policies, making Option B incorrect. Options C and D introduce unnecessary complexity and custom scripting for features that AWS Backup natively handles out of the box.