DVA-C02 Development with AWS Services Practice Question
A developer is designing a serverless application that processes streaming data from IoT devices. The application must be able to handle data from millions of devices and store the data in a durable, scalable data store. Which AWS services should the developer use? (Choose THREE.)
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Amazon SQS as a streaming ingestion service, but SQS is a message queue for decoupling, not a streaming data store with replay capabilities like Kinesis Data Streams.
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 Kinesis Data Streams
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is designed for real-time streaming of large volumes of data, such as from millions of IoT devices. It can ingest and store data durably for up to 365 days, making it ideal for the ingestion layer of this serverless application.
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 Kinesis Data Streams
Why this is correct
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is purpose-built for ingesting and processing large streams of data records in real time. It can continuously capture gigabytes of data per second from hundreds of thousands of sources, making it ideal for high-velocity IoT data ingestion. Its ability to order records within a shard and provide replayability is crucial for reliable real-time analytics and further processing by downstream services.
- ✗
Amazon RDS
Why it's wrong here
Amazon RDS is a managed relational database service designed for transactional workloads requiring structured data and SQL queries. While it offers scalability, its architecture is not optimized for the extremely high ingest rates and small, frequent writes typical of IoT device telemetry. Such workloads can overwhelm its connection limits and I/O capacity, leading to performance bottlenecks and increased operational costs.
- ✓
Amazon DynamoDB
Why this is correct
Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, serverless NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. Its ability to handle millions of requests per second with single-digit millisecond latency makes it highly suitable for storing high-volume IoT sensor data. Features like on-demand capacity mode and Time-to-Live (TTL) further enhance its cost-effectiveness for managing ephemeral IoT data.
- ✓
AWS Lambda
Why this is correct
AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that allows developers to run code without provisioning or managing servers. It can be directly invoked by Kinesis Data Streams as an event source, automatically processing batches of records as they arrive. This makes Lambda an excellent choice for real-time processing, transformation, and analysis of high-velocity streaming data from IoT devices, scaling automatically with the data volume.
- ✗
Amazon SQS
Why it's wrong here
Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service) is a distributed message queuing service primarily used for decoupling application components. While it handles high throughput, SQS is designed for point-to-point or fan-out messaging, not for ordered, real-time processing of continuous data streams from multiple sources. It lacks the inherent ordering guarantees and replayability features essential for many streaming analytics and IoT data processing use cases.
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 |
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every DVA-C02 question from scratch — 1,135 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
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.