SAA-C03 Question 381
Single answerA company is running a two-tier application on AWS. The application consists of a web tier hosted on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) and a database tier hosted on Amazon RDS. The company wants to improve the security of the application by ensuring that all traffic between the web tier and the database tier is encrypted. What is the MOST cost-effective solution to achieve this goal?
- A
Enable HTTPS on the Application Load Balancer and use SSL/TLS to encrypt traffic between the web tier and the database tier.
- B
Create a VPC endpoint for Amazon RDS and route all traffic through the VPC endpoint.
- C
Configure the database on Amazon RDS to use native SSL/TLS for encrypting connections and update the application to connect using SSL/TLS.
- D
Migrate the database tier to Amazon DynamoDB, which provides encryption by default.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C
Explanation
The most cost-effective and appropriate solution is to configure Amazon RDS to use native SSL/TLS for encrypting database connections. This ensures that all traffic between the web tier and the database tier is encrypted without requiring significant changes or additional costs. Other options either fail to address the encryption requirement or introduce unnecessary complexity.
- A. Incorrect.
Enabling HTTPS on the Application Load Balancer only encrypts traffic between the client and the load balancer, not between the web tier and the database tier.
- B. Incorrect.
VPC endpoints are used for private connectivity to AWS services and do not inherently encrypt traffic between the web tier and the database tier.
- C. Correct.
Configuring the database on Amazon RDS to use native SSL/TLS is the correct approach to encrypt connections between the web tier and the database tier. This option is cost-effective and aligns with the requirement.
- D. Incorrect.
Migrating to Amazon DynamoDB is unnecessary and not cost-effective for this scenario, as the requirement is to encrypt traffic between the existing web tier and database tier.