SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is building a serverless application using AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway. They need to authenticate users. Which TWO services can be used for authentication?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse AWS STS (which issues temporary credentials) with an authentication service, or think SQS or CloudFront can handle authentication, when in fact only IAM and Cognito directly support user authentication for API Gateway in this context.
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 IAM
AWS IAM is correct because it can be used to authenticate users by attaching IAM authorization to API Gateway, allowing the API to verify the caller's identity via AWS Signature Version 4 signing. This is commonly used for machine-to-machine or internal service calls where the caller has AWS credentials.
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 Security Token Service
Why it's wrong here
STS issues temporary credentials, not direct authentication.
- ✓
AWS IAM
Why this is correct
IAM can authenticate users via API Gateway IAM authorization.
- ✗
Amazon SQS
Why it's wrong here
SQS is a messaging queue.
- ✓
Amazon Cognito
Why this is correct
Cognito provides user pools for authentication.
- ✗
Amazon CloudFront
Why it's wrong here
CloudFront is a CDN.
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 |
Go deeper
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SAP-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 SAP-C02 exam.