DVA-C02 Development with AWS Services Practice Question
Which TWO AWS services can be used to build a serverless event-driven application that processes data from Amazon S3 and stores results in Amazon DynamoDB? (Choose 2.)
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Amazon Kinesis Data Streams as a direct S3 event target, but Kinesis cannot be triggered directly by S3 events and requires an intermediary like Lambda, making it an incorrect choice for a simple serverless event-driven application.
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
✓
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is correct because it can be triggered directly by S3 events (e.g., ObjectCreated) to process data as soon as it arrives, and it can write the processed results to DynamoDB via the AWS SDK. This creates a fully serverless, event-driven pipeline without provisioning any servers.
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 Lambda
Why this is correct
AWS Lambda is a core serverless compute service that executes code in response to events, such as objects being uploaded to an Amazon S3 bucket. It automatically scales and manages the underlying infrastructure, making it ideal for event-driven architectures where functions are invoked only when needed. This allows developers to build highly scalable and cost-effective solutions without provisioning or managing servers, directly addressing the requirements for a serverless event-driven architecture.
- ✗
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
Why it's wrong here
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a fully managed, scalable service designed for real-time processing of large streams of data. While Kinesis is serverless and can be part of an event-driven architecture, its primary purpose is ingesting and processing continuous data streams, not directly building an event-driven architecture triggered by S3 object events. It would typically require an intermediary service to push S3 events into Kinesis, making it less direct for the specific use case implied by "serverless event-driven architecture" often starting with S3.
- ✗
Amazon EC2
Why it's wrong here
Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud, offering virtual servers for running applications. However, EC2 instances require users to provision, manage, and scale the underlying servers, including operating system patches and security updates. This fundamental requirement for server management directly contradicts the "serverless" paradigm, making it an unsuitable choice for building a serverless event-driven architecture where infrastructure management is abstracted away.
- ✓
AWS Step Functions
Why this is correct
AWS Step Functions is a serverless workflow service that allows developers to orchestrate multiple AWS services, including Lambda functions, into complex, resilient workflows. It defines state machines that manage the sequence, error handling, and retry logic for distributed applications. By coordinating various serverless components and managing their state transitions, Step Functions is instrumental in building robust, serverless event-driven architectures that require multi-step processing and reliable execution.
- ✗
Amazon EMR
Why it's wrong here
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) is a managed cluster platform that simplifies running big data frameworks like Apache Spark and Hadoop. While powerful for large-scale data processing and analytics, EMR typically involves provisioning and managing clusters of EC2 instances, which is not a serverless operational model. It is designed for batch processing or long-running analytics jobs rather than being a core component for building a reactive, serverless event-driven architecture that responds instantaneously to individual events.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
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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.