Question 1hardmultiple choice
Full question →hardmultiple choiceObjective-mapped
A company uses AWS Organizations to manage multiple AWS accounts. The security team wants to restrict access to a specific AWS service (Amazon EC2) in all accounts except for the 'production' account. The SysOps administrator needs to implement this restriction centrally. Which approach should the administrator use?
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
Create an IAM policy that denies Amazon EC2 actions and attach it to all users and roles in non-production accounts.
While this could work, it requires deploying the policy in each account individually and attaching it to all principals, which is not centrally managed. It is also easy to miss new users. SCPs provide a centralized, organization-wide control.
B
Best answer
Attach a service control policy (SCP) to the organization root or to the OUs of non-production accounts that denies access to Amazon EC2.
SCPs are a centralized way to set permission boundaries for all accounts in the organization. By denying EC2 actions via SCP on non-production OUs, the restriction is enforced even for the root user of those accounts, and it applies to all IAM principals.
C
Distractor review
Use AWS Config to create a rule that detects EC2 usage in non-production accounts and automatically terminates instances.
AWS Config can detect and remediate, but it is reactive, not preventive. Resources can still be created before detection, and it does not enforce the restriction across all services consistently.
D
Distractor review
Create a resource-based policy on each EC2 instance that denies access from non-production accounts.
Resource-based policies can be attached to individual resources like S3 buckets, but not to EC2 instances. Moreover, managing them on a per-resource basis is not scalable or centrally controlled.
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: Attach a service control policy (SCP) to the organization root or to the OUs of non-production accounts that denies access to Amazon EC2. — Service control policies (SCPs) in AWS Organizations can centrally control the maximum available permissions for all accounts in the organization. By attaching an SCP to the organization root or to specific organizational units (OUs) that denies access to EC2 for all accounts except the production account (by using a 'NotAction' effect or by attaching the SCP to the appropriate OUs), administrators can enforce this restriction. IAM policies are account-specific and cannot be applied centrally across accounts. Resource-based policies are for specific resources, not for services. AWS Config rules detect non-compliance but do not prevent actions in real time.
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.
Discussion
Loading comments…
Sign in to join the discussion.