AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 78

A company is developing a two-tier web application on AWS. The company's developers have deployed the application on an Amazon EC2 instance that connects directly to a backend Amazon RDS database. The company must not hardcode database credentials in the application. The company must also implement a solution to automatically rotate the database credentials on a regular basis.
Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Store the database credentials in the instance metadata. Use Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) rules to run a scheduled AWS Lambda function that updates the RDS credentials and instance metadata at the same time.
• B. Store the database credentials in a configuration file in an encrypted Amazon S3 bucket. Use Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) rules to run a scheduled AWS Lambda function that updates the RDS credentials and the credentials in the configuration file at the same time. Use S3 Versioning to ensure the ability to fall back to previous values.
• C. Store the database credentials as a secret in AWS Secrets Manager. Turn on automatic rotation for the secret. Attach the required permission to the EC2 role to grant access to the secret.
• D. Store the database credentials as encrypted parameters in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. Turn on automatic rotation for the encrypted parameters. Attach the required permission to the EC2 role to grant access to the encrypted parameters.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Option C is correct because AWS Secrets Manager is designed for securely storing and automatically rotating credentials with minimal effort. Options A and B involve more complex setups with additional components and processes, increasing operational overhead. Option D is a valid choice but does not integrate as seamlessly with automatic credential rotation compared to AWS Secrets Manager.