Meow's AWS - Developer Exam Flash Cards

AWS Developer Exam — Flash Cards

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Overview

Concise Q&A flash cards covering AWS developer exam topics: STS, IAM, CodeCommit, CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk, and CodeDeploy.

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STS — Security Token Service

Q: When requested through an STS API call, credentials are returned with what three components?

Security Token, Access Key ID, Secret Access Key STS credentials are used to authenticate further API calls to AWS. The required components are: Security Token, Access Key ID, and Secret Access Key.

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Q: Using STS to allow end users to authenticate from third-party providers such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon — what is this type of authentication called?

Web Identity Federation

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Q: When using Web Identity Federation to allow a user to access an AWS service (such as an S3 bucket), which is the correct order of steps?

A user authenticates with Facebook first. They are then given an ID token by Facebook, which they can then trade for temporary security credentials. The full flow: 1. Authenticate with Facebook → receive a web identity token. 2. Call AWS STS and pass the web identity token as input. 3. AWS STS authorizes the call and provides temporary AWS access credentials. 4. The user assumes an IAM role and accesses AWS resources in accordance with the role's security policy.

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IAM — Identity and Access Management

Q: Which of these are necessary fields in an IAM Policy?

Actions Resources Effects

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Q: Which service can be used to securely store confidential information like credentials and license codes so that they can be accessed by EC2 instances?

Systems Manager Parameter Store AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store provides secure, hierarchical storage for configuration data management and secrets management. Data such as passwords, database strings, and license codes can be stored as parameter values.

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CodeDeploy — AppSpec File

Q: When deploying application code to an EC2/On-Premises compute platform, the AppSpec file can be written in which language?

AppSpec files on an EC2/on-premises compute platform must be a YAML-formatted file named `appspec.yml` and it must be placed in the root of the directory structure of an application's source code. Otherwise, deployments fail. AppSpec files on an AWS Lambda compute platform can be YAML-formatted or JSON-formatted.

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CodeCommit — Notifications

Q: To receive an email whenever a user pushes code to a CodeCommit repository, how can this be configured?

Configure Notifications in the console — this will create a CloudWatch Events rule to send a notification to an SNS topic which will trigger an email to be sent to the user. CodeCommit can use a trigger to send events to Amazon SNS, but Amazon SNS cannot poll for CodeCommit events.

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CloudFormation

Q: Which two things can be defined using the Transforms section of the CloudFormation template?

To re-use code located in S3 To specify the use of the Serverless Application Model for Lambda deployments

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Q: To use the output of a CloudFormation stack as input to another CloudFormation stack, which section of the CloudFormation template should be used?

Outputs The `Outputs` section enables cross-stack references — one stack exports a value, and another stack imports it as input.

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Q: How can you prevent CloudFormation from deleting an entire stack on failure?

Use the `--disable-rollback` flag with the AWS CLI Set the 'Rollback on failure' radio button to No in the CloudFormation console

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Elastic Beanstalk — Docker Deployment

Q: An application is running using Docker provisioned with Elastic Beanstalk. How should the application be upgraded to a new version?

Bundle the code into a zip file, upload and deploy it using the Elastic Beanstalk console.

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Key Takeaways

• STS credentials

  = Security Token + Access Key ID + Secret Access Key

• Web Identity Federation

  = authenticate with third-party (Facebook/Google/Amazon) → get token → trade for STS temp credentials

• IAM Policy required fields

  : Actions, Resources, Effects

• Parameter Store

  : secure hierarchical storage for secrets/config (passwords, DB strings, license codes)

• AppSpec file

  : YAML-only for EC2/on-premises (appspec.yml at root); YAML or JSON for Lambda

• CodeCommit notifications

  : CloudWatch Events → SNS topic → email

• CloudFormation Transforms

  : re-use S3 code + SAM for Lambda

• CloudFormation Outputs

  : cross-stack value passing

• Beanstalk Docker upgrade

  : zip file → upload via console

• CloudFormation rollback prevention

  : --disable-rollback or set Rollback on failure = No

References

• Linux Academy AWS Developer course notes
• AWS Developer Associate exam study material