AWS Technical Essentials Practice 2026 – The All-in-One Guide to Mastering Your Exam Essentials!

A security group in AWS primarily serves to control traffic to EC2 instances. It acts as a virtual firewall for your instances to specify inbound and outbound traffic rules. These rules define what network traffic is allowed or denied to instances associated with the security group, enabling the management of access at the instance level.

By setting these rules, you can specify protocols (like TCP or UDP), port ranges, and source IP ranges, allowing you to enforce security policies and restrict unwanted traffic to your resources. This configuration is essential for protecting your applications and data in the cloud.

The other options do not reflect the role of a security group accurately. Monitoring application performance relates to performance assessment tools and services, storing backup data pertains to storage services like Amazon S3 or AWS Backup, and managing user access is typically handled through IAM (Identity and Access Management), which controls permissions for AWS resources rather than network traffic directly.