CLF-C02 Cloud Technology and Services Practice Question
A company publishes a message each time a new product is added to its catalogue. Three services need to receive this message simultaneously: an email notification service, an inventory update service, and an analytics service. Which AWS service should the company use to deliver the message to all three services at the same time?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse SQS (a queue for one-to-one processing) with SNS (a pub/sub for one-to-many delivery), or they overcomplicate the solution by choosing Kinesis or EventBridge when a simple fan-out pattern is required.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Amazon SNS
Amazon SNS is the correct choice because it is a fully managed pub/sub messaging service designed to deliver messages to multiple subscribers simultaneously. When a new product is added, the company can publish a single message to an SNS topic, and SNS will fan out that message to all three subscribed endpoints (email, inventory, and analytics) in parallel, ensuring they receive it at the same time.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Amazon SQS
Why it's wrong here
SQS is a point-to-point queue — a message can be consumed by only one consumer. To deliver the same message to three services simultaneously, each service would need its own queue, requiring three separate publishes. SNS fan-out to multiple SQS queues is the standard pattern.
- ✓
Amazon SNS
Why this is correct
SNS supports the fan-out pattern where a single message published to a topic is delivered to all subscribers simultaneously. The three services can each subscribe to the SNS topic and receive every product update message at the same time.
- ✗
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
Why it's wrong here
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is unsuitable here as it provides a persistent, ordered stream for high-throughput data ingestion and real-time processing, not a publish/subscribe notification service. Consumers pull data from Kinesis, rather than being simultaneously notified by a single message. It is tempting because multiple applications can process the same data. Kinesis would be the correct choice for scenarios requiring real-time processing of large data streams, like IoT telemetry or log aggregation, where applications need to analyse or transform the data in parallel.
- ✗
AWS EventBridge
Why it's wrong here
AWS EventBridge can route events to multiple targets, so it is technically capable of fan-out; however, it is designed for event-driven architectures that filter and transform events using rules, making it a heavier and less direct choice than SNS for simple simultaneous pub/sub messaging. SNS provides a native publish/subscribe model where a message published to a topic is immediately pushed to every subscriber without requiring rule configuration or event pattern matching. While EventBridge supports SQS, Lambda, and other targets, it is typically used for complex event routing scenarios; SNS is the classic, low-latency fan-out service for notifying all three services of each product update.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CLF-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CLF-C02 exam.