SAA-C03 Design High-Performing Architectures Practice Question
A media company streams live video from on-premises encoders to viewers across North America. The encoders push a single RTMP feed to AWS, and the company wants the lowest possible glass-to-glass latency for viewers while distributing to thousands of concurrent viewers. The team does not want to manage any streaming servers. Which solution BEST meets these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming that a file-based transcoding service or object storage can accept and distribute a continuous live RTMP feed.
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
✓
Use AWS Elemental MediaLive to ingest the RTMP feed and MediaPackage to package it, then deliver to viewers with Amazon CloudFront.
A fully managed live workflow needs a live ingest/transcode stage, a packaging origin, and a global delivery layer. MediaLive handles the live input and encoding, MediaPackage produces just-in-time streaming formats, and CloudFront scales the last mile to many viewers. Together they deliver low latency without any streaming servers to operate or patch.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use AWS Elemental MediaConvert to ingest the live RTMP feed and deliver it through an Amazon API Gateway WebSocket API.
Why it's wrong here
MediaConvert is a file-based video transcoding service for stored assets, not a live streaming ingest service, so it cannot accept a continuous RTMP feed. WebSocket APIs are suited to bidirectional messaging, not to distributing segmented video to thousands of viewers, so this design fails on both ingest and delivery.
- ✓
Use AWS Elemental MediaLive to ingest the RTMP feed and MediaPackage to package it, then deliver to viewers with Amazon CloudFront.
Why this is correct
MediaLive performs the real-time encoding/transcoding of the live input, MediaPackage origins the just-in-time HLS/DASH packaging, and CloudFront caches at edge locations for massive concurrent scale. This is fully managed with no streaming servers to operate, and the combination delivers low latency to a geographically dispersed audience.
- ✗
Store the RTMP feed in an Amazon S3 bucket and have viewers stream directly from S3 using presigned URLs.
Why it's wrong here
S3 is object storage and does not ingest or transcode live RTMP streams, and viewers cannot play an RTMP stream directly from an S3 object. Presigned URLs only grant time-limited access to stored objects; they provide no live packaging, no transcoding, and no low-latency live delivery, so this cannot work for a live feed.
- ✗
Run FFmpeg on a large Amazon EC2 instance to transcode the feed and serve it to viewers through an Application Load Balancer.
Why it's wrong here
This requires managing EC2 instances and a transcoding pipeline yourself, which contradicts the no-server-management requirement. A single large instance also becomes a scaling and availability bottleneck for thousands of concurrent viewers, and an Application Load Balancer is designed for HTTP/HTTPS request routing, not for large-scale video segment caching and delivery.
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Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Amazon Web Services exam blueprint
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.