AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate — Question 330

A SysOps administrator wants to share a copy of a production database with a migration account. The production database is hosted on an Amazon RDS DB instance and is encrypted at rest with an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key that has an alias of production-rds-key.

What must the SysOps administrator do to meet these requirements with the LEAST administrative overhead?

Answer options

• A. Take a snapshot of the RDS DB instance in the production account. Amend the KMS key policy of the production-rds-key KMS key to give access to the migration account's root user. Share the snapshot with the migration account.
• B. Create an RDS read replica in the migration account. Configure the KMS key policy to replicate the production-rds-key KMS key to the migration account.
• C. Take a snapshot of the RDS DB instance in the production account. Share the snapshot with the migration account. In the migration account, create a new KMS key that has an identical alias.
• D. Use native database toolsets to export the RDS DB instance to Amazon S3. Create an S3 bucket and an S3 bucket policy for cross account access between the production account and the migration account. Use native database toolsets to import the database from Amazon S3 to a new RDS DB instance.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

To share an encrypted RDS snapshot with another AWS account, you must share the snapshot and grant the target account permissions to use the custom AWS KMS key that encrypted it. Updating the KMS key policy to allow access to the migration account's root user is the standard, least-overhead method for enabling cross-account decryption. Other options either involve unsupported key replication mechanisms, do not solve the decryption issue, or introduce unnecessary administrative complexity like S3 exports.