SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is deploying a serverless application using AWS Lambda. The application processes high-resolution images and stores them in Amazon S3. The processing time for each image is variable, but some images require more than 15 minutes to process. Lambda has a maximum execution time of 15 minutes. How can the company process these long-running image transformations?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often assume Step Functions can extend Lambda's execution time by chaining functions, but each Lambda invocation still has a hard 15-minute limit, and Step Functions does not override that service quota.
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 Batch to run the image processing as a job on EC2 or Fargate.
AWS Lambda has a hard limit of 15 minutes per invocation, so images requiring more than 15 minutes cannot be processed within a single Lambda function. AWS Batch is designed for long-running, batch-oriented compute jobs and can run on EC2 or Fargate without any time limit, making it the correct choice for processing high-resolution images that exceed Lambda's timeout.
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 Step Functions to chain multiple Lambda functions, each processing a part of the image.
Why it's wrong here
If the image processing is not easily parallelizable, this won't help; also each Lambda still limited to 15 min.
- ✓
Use AWS Batch to run the image processing as a job on EC2 or Fargate.
Why this is correct
AWS Batch can run jobs with longer execution times and can scale based on demand.
- ✗
Use Amazon SQS to queue the images and have Lambda poll the queue; the Lambda function can process one image per invocation.
Why it's wrong here
Lambda still has a 15-minute limit per invocation.
- ✗
Increase the Lambda timeout to 20 minutes.
Why it's wrong here
Lambda maximum timeout is 15 minutes.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
Go deeper
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