DVA-C02 Development with AWS Services Practice Question
A developer is building a serverless application and wants to invoke an AWS Lambda function every hour to perform a cleanup task. Which AWS service should the developer use to schedule the invocation?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Amazon EventBridge with Amazon CloudWatch Logs or assume Step Functions is needed for any time-based workflow, but Step Functions is for stateful orchestration, not simple scheduled invocations.
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 EventBridge (CloudWatch Events)
Amazon EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events) is the correct service for scheduling AWS Lambda invocations on a recurring basis. It provides a cron or rate expression to trigger a Lambda function at a defined interval, such as every hour, without the need for managing any servers or additional infrastructure.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
AWS Step Functions
Why it's wrong here
AWS Step Functions is a serverless workflow service designed to orchestrate complex business processes and microservices as state machines. While it excels at managing long-running tasks and coordinating multiple Lambda invocations, it does not inherently provide a scheduling mechanism to initiate these workflows at specific times or intervals. An external event source, such as Amazon EventBridge or a direct API call, is required to trigger a Step Functions state machine execution.
- ✗
Amazon SNS
Why it's wrong here
Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service) is a highly available, durable, and secure publish/subscribe messaging service designed for fan-out capabilities. It allows messages to be sent to a large number of subscribers simultaneously, including Lambda functions, SQS queues, and HTTP endpoints. However, SNS itself does not offer any native functionality to schedule message publication or trigger events based on a time-based schedule; it reacts to messages published to its topics.
- ✗
Amazon SQS
Why it's wrong here
Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service) is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. It stores messages until they are processed by a consumer, providing reliability and asynchronous communication. While SQS can be configured as an event source for Lambda, it does not possess any built-in scheduling capabilities to initiate Lambda invocations at predetermined times or recurring intervals.
- ✓
Amazon EventBridge (CloudWatch Events)
Why this is correct
Amazon EventBridge, which evolved from CloudWatch Events, is a serverless event bus service that makes it easy to connect applications together using data from your own applications, integrated SaaS applications, and AWS services. It excels at creating rules that match incoming events and route them to targets, including Lambda functions. Crucially, EventBridge supports cron-like expressions and fixed-rate schedules, making it the ideal service for invoking Lambda functions at specified times or recurring intervals.
Quick reference
Cloud Service Model Comparison
| Model | You Manage | Provider Manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, apps, data | Hardware, hypervisor, networking | EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine |
| PaaS | Apps and data | OS, runtime, middleware, hardware | Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Data and settings only | Everything else | Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday |
| FaaS / Serverless | Function code only | Infra, scaling, runtime | Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run |
| CaaS | Containers and apps | Kubernetes, OS, hardware | EKS, AKS, GKE |
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DVA-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 DVA-C02 exam.