mediummultiple choiceObjective-mapped

A developer is deploying an application on Amazon EC2 instances that need to securely retrieve secrets from AWS Secrets Manager. What is the MOST secure way to provide the necessary permissions without hardcoding credentials?

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A developer is deploying an application on Amazon EC2 instances that need to securely retrieve secrets from AWS Secrets Manager. What is the MOST secure way to provide the necessary permissions without hardcoding credentials?

Answer choices

Why each option matters

Good practice is not just finding the correct option. The wrong answers often show the exact trap the exam wants you to fall into.

A

Distractor review

Store the secret in an environment variable.

Environment variables can be exposed and are not secure for secrets.

B

Best answer

Attach an IAM role to the EC2 instance with permission to access Secrets Manager.

IAM roles provide temporary credentials securely; the application can use the AWS SDK to fetch secrets without hardcoding.

C

Distractor review

Embed the secret in the application code.

Hardcoding secrets is insecure and violates best practices.

D

Distractor review

Use a configuration file stored in S3 with bucket policy.

Storing secrets in S3 is less secure than using Secrets Manager, and bucket policies are not designed for this purpose.

Common exam trap

Common exam trap: NAT rules depend on direction and matching traffic

NAT is not only about the public address. The inside/outside interface roles and the ACL or rule that matches traffic are just as important.

Technical deep dive

How to think about this question

NAT questions usually test address translation, overload/PAT behaviour, static mappings and whether the right traffic is being translated. Read the interface direction and address terms carefully.

KKey Concepts to Remember

  • Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
  • PAT allows many inside hosts to share one public address using ports.
  • Inside local and inside global describe the private and translated addresses.
  • NAT ACLs identify traffic for translation, not always security filtering.

TExam Day Tips

  • Identify inside and outside interfaces first.
  • Check whether the scenario needs static NAT, dynamic NAT or PAT.
  • Do not confuse NAT matching ACLs with normal packet-filtering intent.

Related practice questions

Related DVA-C02 practice-question pages

Use these pages to review the topic behind this question. This is how one missed question becomes focused revision.

More questions from this exam

Keep practising from the same exam bank, or move into a focused topic page if this question exposed a weak area.

Question 1

A developer is building a REST API using Amazon API Gateway that will serve static content from an Amazon S3 bucket. The API should cache responses for frequently accessed objects to reduce latency. Which API Gateway feature should the developer enable?

Question 2

A developer is running a web application on multiple Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application needs to store user session state that must be available across all instances. The session data is small and temporary but must survive individual instance failures. Which AWS service should the developer use to store this session state?

Question 3

A developer has an AWS Lambda function that processes messages from an Amazon SQS standard queue. The function is idempotent and currently has a batch size of 10. The developer wants to increase throughput and increases the batch size to 100. After the change, CloudWatch metrics show a significant increase in throttles and the queue backlog is growing. The function's reserved concurrency is set to 10. What is the most effective action to resolve the throttling and improve throughput?

Question 4

A developer is managing an application running on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Users report that the application becomes unresponsive after several hours, and restarting the instance temporarily fixes the issue. The developer suspects a memory leak but cannot add custom instrumentation. Which AWS service can collect memory utilization metrics and help identify the memory leak with minimal configuration?

Question 5

A developer is building a serverless web application using AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB. The application needs to perform complex aggregations on data stored in DynamoDB. Which AWS service should the developer use to perform these aggregations efficiently without reading all the data into Lambda?

Question 6

A developer has an Amazon S3 bucket containing private user documents. The application must generate a time-limited URL for users to download their own documents without requiring the users to have AWS credentials. Which solution should the developer use?

FAQ

Questions learners often ask

What does this DVA-C02 question test?

Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: Attach an IAM role to the EC2 instance with permission to access Secrets Manager. — Attaching an IAM role to the EC2 instance and granting it permission to access Secrets Manager is the most secure approach. The instance will automatically retrieve temporary credentials, eliminating the need to hardcode any secrets.

What should I do if I get this DVA-C02 question wrong?

Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.

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