AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional — Question 3

A healthcare services company is concerned about the growing costs of software licensing for an application for monitoring patient wellness. The company wants to create an audit process to ensure that the application is running exclusively on Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts. A DevOps Engineer must create a workflow to audit the application to ensure compliance.
What steps should the Engineer take to meet this requirement with the LEAST administrative overhead?

Answer options

• A. Use AWS Systems Manager Configuration Compliance. Use calls to the put-compliance-items API action to scan and build a database of noncompliant EC2 instances based on their host placement configuration. Use an Amazon DynamoDB table to store these instance IDs for fast access. Generate a report through Systems Manager by calling the list-compliance-summaries API action.
• B. Use custom Java code running on an EC2 instance. Set up EC2 Auto Scaling for the instance depending on the number of instances to be checked. Send the list of noncompliant EC2 instance IDs to an Amazon SQS queue. Set up another worker instance to process instance IDs from the SQS queue and write them to Amazon DynamoDB. Use an AWS Lambda function to terminate noncompliant instance IDs obtained from the queue, and send them to an Amazon SNS email topic for distribution.
• C. Use AWS Config. Identify all EC2 instances to be audited by enabling Config Recording on all Amazon EC2 resources for the region. Create a custom AWS Config rule that triggers an AWS Lambda function by using the ג€config-rule-change-triggeredג€ blueprint. Modify the Lambda evaluateCompliance() function to verify host placement to return a NON_COMPLIANT result if the instance is not running on an EC2 Dedicated Host. Use the AWS Config report to address noncompliant instances.
• D. Use AWS CloudTrail. Identify all EC2 instances to be audited by analyzing all calls to the EC2 RunCommand API action. Invoke an AWS Lambda function that analyzes the host placement of the instance. Store the EC2 instance ID of noncompliant resources in an Amazon RDS MySQL DB instance. Generate a report by querying the RDS instance and exporting the query results to a CSV text file.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

The correct answer is C, as AWS Config is specifically designed for compliance monitoring and allows the creation of custom rules to enforce compliance on EC2 instances. Options A and B involve more complex implementations and administrative overhead, while option D relies on AWS CloudTrail, which is not primarily intended for compliance auditing.