Question 1mediummultiple choice
Full question →mediummultiple choiceObjective-mapped
A company's security policy requires that IAM users rotate their access keys every 90 days. The SysOps administrator must automatically identify users whose access keys are older than 90 days and notify the security team. Which combination of AWS services should be used to meet this requirement with the least operational overhead?
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
Best answer
AWS Config with the 'access-keys-rotated' managed rule and Amazon SNS
AWS Config evaluates IAM access keys against the rule and sends compliance notifications to SNS, which can email the security team.
B
Distractor review
AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch Logs with metric filters and alarms
CloudTrail logs key creation events but cannot directly assess the age of existing keys. Additional custom logic would be required.
C
Distractor review
IAM Access Analyzer and AWS Lambda
IAM Access Analyzer analyzes resource-based policies for public and cross-account access, not access key rotation status.
D
Distractor review
Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon EventBridge
GuardDuty detects malicious activity, not compliance with key rotation policies.
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 SOA-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 company uses Amazon CloudFront to deliver content to a global audience. The origin is an Application Load Balancer in us-east-1. The SysOps administrator wants to reduce costs by minimizing the number of requests that reach the origin server. Which action should the administrator take?
Question 2
A company runs a batch processing application on Amazon EC2 that runs for 2 hours every night. The workload can tolerate interruptions. Which EC2 purchasing option provides the lowest cost for this use case?
Question 3
A SysOps administrator needs to monitor the CPU utilization of an Amazon RDS DB instance and receive an alarm when CPU utilization exceeds 80% for 5 consecutive minutes. Which AWS service should be used to create this alarm?
Question 4
A company runs a critical web application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application uses session stickiness (sticky sessions) to maintain user sessions. The SysOps administrator notices that when instances are replaced during a scale-in or failure event, users lose their session data. The administrator needs to preserve session data across instance failures without losing stickiness benefits. What should the administrator do?
Question 5
A company runs a production web application on a single Amazon EC2 instance. The application experiences a predictable and steady workload 24/7. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize compute costs for this instance while ensuring it remains available during the expected workload. Which EC2 purchasing option should the administrator use?
Question 6
A company has a VPC with public and private subnets. The private subnets host application servers that need to make outbound HTTPS connections to the internet. The SysOps administrator must implement a solution that provides outbound internet connectivity while preventing inbound connections from the internet. Additionally, the solution must allow the company to control which domains the application servers can access. Which solution should the administrator implement?
FAQ
Questions learners often ask
What does this SOA-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: AWS Config with the 'access-keys-rotated' managed rule and Amazon SNS — AWS Config has a managed rule called 'access-keys-rotated' that checks whether IAM access keys have been rotated within the specified number of days (90). When a non-compliant resource is detected, AWS Config can publish compliance change notifications to an Amazon SNS topic, which can then be used to email the security team. This solution requires no custom code and minimal configuration. AWS CloudTrail records API calls but does not evaluate key age. IAM Access Analyzer analyzes resource policies for external access, not key rotation. Amazon GuardDuty focuses on threat detection.
What should I do if I get this SOA-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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