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Scheduling an AWS Glue crawler to periodically update the Data Catalog automates the process of detecting new partitions and updating the catalog, which minimizes manual maintenance and operational overhead.

Option B is most cost-effective because it combines a serverless ETL service for overnight processing with a serverless warehouse for partner SQL access during business hours. The material describes AWS Glue as a “fully managed, serverless, scalable ETL service” that can extract, transform, and load data with minimal operational overhead, which fits the requirement for multiple transformations and data cleaning.

For the SQL access layer, the study material highlights the cost advantage of Amazon Redshift Serverless: it automatically provisions and scales capacity and you pay only for the compute capacity provisioned, with no compute costs when no workloads are running. That directly supports “multiple business partners” querying during business hours while avoiding the always-on cost of a provisioned cluster.

Options C and D use a provisioned Redshift cluster, which is less cost-effective because capacity must be paid for even when partners are not querying. Option A adds EMR cluster management cost and operational overhead compared to using Glue for ETL.

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You can use Lambda to create functions that perform custom logic and integrate with other AWS services, such as API Gateway. Lambda automatically scales your application by running code in response to each trigger. You pay only for the compute time you consume1.

Amazon ECS is a fully managed container orchestration service that allows you to run and scale containerized applications on AWS. You can use ECS to deploy, manage, and scale Docker containers using either Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine for containers2.

Amazon EKS is a fully managed Kubernetes service that allows you to run Kubernetes clusters on AWS without needing to install, operate, or maintain your own Kubernetes control plane. You can use EKS to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications using Kubernetes on AWS3.

The solution that meets the requirements with the least operational overhead is to create an AWS Lambda Python function with provisioned concurrency. This solution has the following advantages:

It does not require you to provision, manage, or scale any servers or clusters, as Lambda handles all the infrastructure for you. This reduces the operational complexity and cost of running your code.

It allows you to write your Python script as a Lambda function and integrate it with API Gateway using a simple configuration. API Gateway can invoke your Lambda function synchronously or asynchronously, and return the results to the frontend website.

It ensures that your Lambda function is ready to respond to API requests without any cold start delays, by using provisioned concurrency. Provisioned concurrency is a feature that keeps your function initialized and hyper-ready to respond in double-digit milliseconds. You can specify the number of concurrent executions that you want to provision for your function.

Option A is incorrect because it requires you to deploy a custom Python script on an Amazon ECS cluster. This solution has the following disadvantages:

It requires you to provision, manage, and scale your own ECS cluster, either using EC2 instances or Fargate. This increases the operational complexity and cost of running your code.

It requires you to package your Python script as a Docker container image and store it in a container registry, such as Amazon ECR or Docker Hub. This adds an extra step to your deployment process.

It requires you to configure your ECS cluster to integrate with API Gateway, either using an Application Load Balancer or a Network Load Balancer. This adds another layer of complexity to your architecture.

Option C is incorrect because it requires you to deploy a custom Python script that can integrate with API Gateway on Amazon EKS. This solution has the following disadvantages:

It requires you to provision, manage, and scale your own EKS cluster, either using EC2 instances or Fargate. This increases the operational complexity and cost of running your code.

It requires you to package your Python script as a Docker container image and store it in a container registry, such as Amazon ECR or Docker Hub. This adds an extra step to your deployment process.

It requires you to configure your EKS cluster to integrate with API Gateway, either using an Application Load Balancer, a Network Load Balancer, or a service of type LoadBalancer. This adds another layer of complexity to your architecture.

Option D is incorrect because it requires you to create an AWS Lambda function and ensure that the function is warm by scheduling an Amazon EventBridge rule to invoke the Lambda function every 5 minutes by using mock events. This solution has the following disadvantages:

It does not guarantee that your Lambda function will always be warm, as Lambda may scale down your function if it does not receive any requests for a long period of time. This may cause cold start delays when your function is invoked by API Gateway.

It incurs unnecessary costs, as you pay for the compute time of your Lambda function every time it is invoked by the EventBridge rule, even if it does not perform any useful work1.

1: AWS Lambda - Features

2: Amazon Elastic Container Service - Features

3: Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service - Features

[4]: Building API Gateway REST API with Lambda integration - Amazon API Gateway

[5]: Improving latency with Provisioned Concurrency - AWS Lambda

[6]: Integrating Amazon ECS with Amazon API Gateway - Amazon Elastic Container Service

[7]: Integrating Amazon EKS with Amazon API Gateway - Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service

[8]: Managing concurrency for a Lambda function - AWS Lambda

AWS Step Functions is a fully managed, serverless orchestration service designed to coordinate multiple AWS services into reliable workflows. Step Functions natively provide automatic retries, error handling, state-level visibility, and execution history, which directly satisfy the requirements for retry logic and monitoring individual pipeline stages.

In this solution, AWS Lambda functions are used for batch data ingestion, AWS Glue jobs handle transformation, and Amazon S3 is used for storage. Step Functions orchestrate these stages while maintaining clear separation of responsibilities. Each step can be configured with retry and catch policies, allowing the workflow to automatically recover from transient failures without manual intervention.

Chaining AWS Glue jobs alone does not provide detailed stage-level visibility or flexible retry control, and setting MaxRetries to 0 contradicts the retry requirement. EventBridge-based pipelines lack native workflow state tracking. Amazon MWAA introduces unnecessary operational overhead, including environment management and Airflow maintenance.

Therefore, using AWS Step Functions to orchestrate Lambda and Glue provides the most scalable, observable, and low-maintenance solution.