SAA-C03 Design Resilient Architectures Practice Question
A inventory service uses Lambda functions that call an unreliable third-party API. Failed events must be retained for later investigation after retries are exhausted. What should be configured? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse Lambda's DLQ/failure destination with other error-handling mechanisms like SQS redrive policies or CloudFront custom error pages, which serve different purposes and operate at different layers of the architecture.
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
✓
A Lambda dead-letter queue or failure destination
A Lambda dead-letter queue (DLQ) or failure destination allows you to capture events that have exhausted all retry attempts from an asynchronous invocation. When the Lambda function fails after the maximum retries (default 3), the event is sent to the configured SQS queue or SNS topic for later investigation, without requiring custom scripts or manual polling.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Lambda reserved concurrency set to zero
Why it's wrong here
Reserved concurrency of zero stops processing and does not preserve failed events as an error-handling strategy.
- ✓
A Lambda dead-letter queue or failure destination
Why this is correct
A DLQ or asynchronous failure destination captures failed events after retry attempts.
- ✗
A larger deployment package
Why it's wrong here
Package size does not affect failed-event capture.
- ✗
CloudFront error pages
Why it's wrong here
CloudFront does not manage Lambda asynchronous retry failures.
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 SAA-C03 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 SAA-C03 exam.