SAP-C02 Amazon Web Services Exam Lab Questions

The requirements call for an event-driven redesign that uses serverless services and provides near real-time analytics updates. The current architecture relies on weekly ETL jobs, which is incompatible with near real-time analytics.

A serverless, event-driven architecture on AWS typically uses a managed event bus for decoupling producers and consumers and enabling routing/filtering to multiple targets. The analytics requirement suggests that events (orders, returns, updates) should be streamed to an analytics store continuously rather than copied on a weekly schedule.

Option C aligns with these goals. It modernizes the application components into microservices on a serverless compute substrate (AWS Fargate) and modernizes the databases to managed serverless offerings where possible. Aurora Serverless for MySQL provides an on-demand relational database option that reduces operational overhead for the transactional store. Redshift Serverless provides a managed data warehousing service suitable for analytics without provisioning clusters. Using Amazon EventBridge provides a serverless event routing layer that can deliver events from multiple sources to multiple targets, which supports near real-time propagation of business events from the applications into analytics ingestion and processing.

Option A is not fully aligned: it retains the transactional MySQL database on EC2 (not serverless/managed for the database layer) and moves analytics to Amazon Neptune, which is a graph database, not the typical replacement for an OLAP analytics database. SQS is a queue suited for point-to-point message processing, not a flexible event bus for fan-out to multiple analytics consumers and routing based on event patterns.

Option B is not serverless because it uses EC2 Auto Scaling groups for application compute. Although SNS can distribute messages, this option keeps compute server-based and does not directly provide a near real-time analytics warehouse pattern; it also uses Aurora MySQL for analytics, which is not a typical OLAP warehouse replacement compared to Redshift.

Option D is not appropriate: Amazon AppStream 2.0 is a service for streaming desktop applications to users, not for hosting microservices. AWS IoT Core is optimized for IoT device messaging and telemetry and is not the standard integration backbone for business application event routing across microservices and analytics.

Therefore, option C best satisfies the requirement for an event-driven, serverless architecture with near real-time analytics.

The best answer is C because the workload has millions of small 64 KB uploads every hour. Sending every S3 object event through EventBridge to an ECS task creates high event and invocation overhead. Amazon Data Firehose can buffer many incoming records and deliver larger compressed objects to S3, which reduces the small-object problem and improves cost efficiency. The ECS processing takes an average of 15 minutes, so replacing it with Lambda is risky because Lambda has a maximum runtime of 900 seconds, exactly 15 minutes. For five-year retention, S3 Lifecycle rules can transition data to S3 Glacier Deep Archive for long-term low-cost archival. DynamoDB TTL is appropriate for automatically expiring 15-day results without custom cleanup jobs. (AWS Documentation)

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B is correct because it implements a fully serverless ingestion-and-streaming design that decouples request intake from processing and delivers real-time updates to clients over WebSockets. The HTTP API provides a serverless front door for REST requests. Sending requests to Amazon SQS buffers bursts and smooths spikes, preventing the backend from being overwhelmed as traffic grows. The SQS → Lambda pattern provides scalable, asynchronous processing. For the “stream data to clients through WebSockets” requirement, AWS AppSync Events (real-time publish/subscribe) allows clients to subscribe over persistent WebSocket connections and receive pushed updates with minimal latency, while producers (the Lambda function) publish events to channels that subscribers receive.

Why the other options are incorrect:

A: AWS Step Functions is an orchestration service for workflows. It does not provide a native mechanism to “set clients as targets” and push data back to arbitrary REST clients over WebSockets.

C: Amazon EventBridge rules can target AWS services (Lambda, SQS, SNS, etc.), but clients are not valid EventBridge targets for direct WebSocket streaming. This does not solve “stream to clients through WebSockets.”

D: CloudFront Functions are for lightweight request/response manipulation at the edge and cannot act as an origin or run complex business logic. Also, writing to an MQTT topic from a CloudFront Function is not a supported pattern. While AWS IoT Core can support MQTT over WebSockets for clients, the proposed CloudFront Function integration is not valid.