MLA-C01 Practice Question: ML Solution Monitoring, Maintenance, and Security
A team wants to automatically retrain a model whenever data drift is detected on their SageMaker endpoint. Which AWS service should they use to invoke a retraining pipeline in response to a CloudWatch Alarm?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers assume CloudWatch Alarms can directly invoke Step Functions or Lambda without an intermediary like SNS, but CloudWatch Alarms only support SNS, SQS, and Auto Scaling actions as direct targets.
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 topic triggering an AWS Lambda function
Amazon SNS can directly subscribe to a CloudWatch Alarm and, upon alarm state change, publish a message to an SNS topic. That topic can then trigger an AWS Lambda function, which invokes the retraining pipeline (e.g., SageMaker Processing or training job). This creates a fully managed, serverless event-driven workflow without needing custom polling or additional orchestration services.
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 directly from CloudWatch Alarm
Why it's wrong here
CloudWatch Alarms cannot directly invoke Step Functions; they go to SNS, Auto Scaling, or EC2 actions.
- ✗
SageMaker Processing job scheduled via EventBridge
Why it's wrong here
While EventBridge can schedule jobs, it does not directly respond to a CloudWatch Alarm; you'd need a Lambda to read the alarm state.
- ✗
Amazon SQS queue polling by a custom application
Why it's wrong here
Polling an SQS queue with a custom application introduces latency and operational overhead, as the retraining pipeline would only trigger on the application’s polling cycle rather than reacting instantly to the CloudWatch Alarm state change. It is tempting because SQS is a reliable decoupling mechanism for asynchronous job orchestration, and would be correct if the team needed to buffer retraining requests from multiple sources or handle variable processing loads without direct alarm invocation.
- ✓
Amazon SNS topic triggering an AWS Lambda function
Why this is correct
This pattern is typical: CloudWatch Alarm -> SNS -> Lambda -> start retraining pipeline.
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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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This MLA-C01 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 MLA-C01 exam.