An auditor asks to see one place that shows the backup schedule and retention period for EBS volumes, RDS databases, DynamoDB tables and EFS file systems, together with evidence that the policy was actually applied. Which service provides that?
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02), objective 3. Cloud technology and services medium
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The options
Correct AWS Backup
Correct. It centralises backup plans, schedules, retention and vaults across the AWS services it supports, applies them by tag or by resource, and reports on compliance with those plans — which is the evidence the auditor is asking for.
Not correct An S3 lifecycle rule
Wrong. Lifecycle rules act on objects inside one bucket — transitioning their storage class, expiring old versions. They know nothing about EBS volumes or RDS databases.
Not correct A cron job on each instance that calls the AWS CLI
Wrong. It can create backups, but there is no central policy, no central retention and no report; and it stops silently whenever the instance it lives on stops.
Not correct Amazon CloudWatch alarms
Wrong. Alarms watch metrics and notify or trigger actions when a threshold is crossed. They neither take backups nor retain them.
Why
Three things are easy to confuse here. AWS Backup manages backups OF resources, centrally, by policy. S3 lifecycle rules manage objects INSIDE a bucket. EBS snapshots are the backup mechanism for a volume — incremental after the first, stored durably by AWS within the Region, and copyable to another Region. If the question mentions several different services and one policy, the answer is AWS Backup.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- AWS exam guide task statement 3.6
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