DVA-C02 Development with AWS Services Practice Question
A developer is building a serverless web application using AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB. The application needs to perform complex aggregations on data stored in DynamoDB. Which AWS service should the developer use to perform these aggregations efficiently without reading all the data into Lambda?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often choose AWS Glue or Amazon EMR because they associate 'complex aggregations' with big data tools, overlooking that DynamoDB Streams with Lambda provides a serverless, incremental aggregation pattern that avoids full table scans.
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
✓
DynamoDB Streams with AWS Lambda
DynamoDB Streams captures item-level changes in near real-time and can trigger a Lambda function to perform incremental aggregations without scanning the entire table. This pattern avoids reading all data into Lambda, making it efficient for continuous aggregation workloads.
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 Glue
Why it's wrong here
AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service designed for batch processing large datasets. It leverages Apache Spark for data transformation and provides a Data Catalog for metadata management. While Glue can process data from various sources, including DynamoDB, it is optimized for scheduled or on-demand batch jobs rather than immediate, real-time reactions to individual item changes from DynamoDB Streams, making it unsuitable for low-latency, event-driven aggregations.
- ✗
Amazon EMR
Why it's wrong here
Amazon EMR provides managed clusters for big data frameworks like Hadoop, Spark, and Presto, enabling complex data processing and analytics. While powerful for large-scale data transformations and machine learning, deploying and managing an EMR cluster for simple, real-time aggregations from DynamoDB Streams introduces significant operational overhead and cost. Its batch-oriented nature and inherent latency make it an inefficient choice for responding to individual item changes in a near real-time serverless application.
- ✓
DynamoDB Streams with AWS Lambda
Why this is correct
DynamoDB Streams capture a time-ordered sequence of item-level modifications (inserts, updates, and deletes) in a DynamoDB table, providing a near real-time data feed. AWS Lambda functions can subscribe to these streams, processing batches of records as they become available. This serverless pattern allows for efficient, event-driven aggregation updates, such as maintaining counters or summary tables, without requiring expensive full table scans, making it the ideal solution for responsive data insights in a serverless web application.
- ✗
Amazon Redshift
Why it's wrong here
Amazon Redshift is a petabyte-scale, fully managed data warehouse service optimized for analytical queries over large, structured datasets. It is designed for complex SQL queries, business intelligence, and reporting, typically involving periodic data loading. Redshift is not architected to ingest and process individual real-time events directly from DynamoDB Streams with low latency. Integrating real-time updates into Redshift usually involves higher-latency ETL processes, rendering it unsuitable for immediate, event-driven aggregations required by a serverless web application.
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.