A company runs a cron job on an Amazon EC2 instance on a schedule. The cron job invokes a bash script that encrypts a 2 KB file. A customer managed AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key and policy are configured, and the EC2 instance role has the required permissions. Which process should the bash script use to encrypt the file?

The aws kms encrypt command can directly encrypt data up to 4 KB. Since the file is 2 KB, it falls within this limit, making direct encryption the most straightforward and efficient method. The EC2 instance role already has the necessary permissions, and a customer managed key is configured. Using aws kms create-grant is incorrect because grants are for delegating permissions, not for encrypting data. Generating a data key with aws kms encrypt is not the correct command for data key generation; generate-data-key is. Using a plaintext data key to encrypt the file is insecure because the plaintext key would be exposed. Encrypting a file with an encrypted (ciphertext) data key is impossible; the data key must be decrypted first to be used for encryption. The correct process for larger files would involve generate-data-key to get a plaintext data key for local encryption and an encrypted data key for storage, but for 2KB, direct encryption is best.