SAA-C03 AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service. Practice Question
An internal team runs a report-generation job once per day. It typically finishes in a few minutes, and even on its slowest days it still completes in under 15 minutes. The team wants to reduce operational overhead and pay primarily for actual runtime instead of keeping servers running 24/7. Which AWS approach best matches these goals?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is that candidates may overlook Lambda's 15-minute timeout limit and assume any short-duration job is suitable, or they may mistakenly think that RDS stored procedures (Option C) are a cost-effective compute alternative, when in fact they are not designed for general-purpose application logic and still require a running database instance.
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 Lambda triggered by a schedule (for example, EventBridge) to run the report at the required time.
AWS Lambda is the ideal choice because it is a serverless compute service that runs code only when triggered, aligning with the requirement to pay primarily for actual runtime. By using Amazon EventBridge (CloudWatch Events) to invoke the Lambda function on a daily schedule, the team eliminates the need to provision or manage servers, and the job's typical runtime of a few minutes (under 15 minutes, Lambda's maximum execution timeout) fits perfectly within Lambda's constraints.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Deploy the job on EC2 instances and keep them running continuously for the daily schedule.
Why it's wrong here
Always-on EC2 instances increase cost and do not minimize operational overhead for short-lived jobs.
- ✓
Use AWS Lambda triggered by a schedule (for example, EventBridge) to run the report at the required time.
Why this is correct
Lambda runs on demand and charges for execution time, aligning spend with actual job runtime and reducing ops.
- ✗
Run the job in an RDS database using stored procedures scheduled by the database engine.
Why it's wrong here
RDS is not designed for general scheduled compute workloads like daily report generation.
- ✗
Use an Auto Scaling group with a fixed minimum size of one instance and disable scaling.
Why it's wrong here
A fixed-size Auto Scaling group still requires instance management and does not fully match runtime-based billing.
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 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.